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April 24, 2024 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
36:37
GAMBLING ADDICTION!
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Good morning everybody, hope you're doing well.
Stefan Molendy from Free Domain.
Come join the greatest philosophical community in the history of the known and unknown universe as non-verified by non-experts in a non-objective fashion.
Freedomain.locals All right.
Question, what are your thoughts on the morality of gambling and making money from gamblers?
It doesn't seem to violate UPB or the non-aggression principle.
But to me, it's always seemed scummy and manipulative.
Instead of providing any value, these businesses make money off of dumb people's inability to discern probabilities.
Well, to say that all gamblers are dumb, that gambling is a tax on mathematical illiteracy, I think is, I mean, obviously true to some degree, but it is missing the central point.
Sorry to be annoying right at the beginning, you missed the central point.
Let me make the case and, you know, maybe I'm right, maybe I'm wrong.
So UPB is, there are five categories, right, two of which are mirrors of the other.
So think of them as Good, nice, neutral, bad, and evil.
Good, nice, neutral, bad, and evil.
So the good mirrors the evil, the nice Mirrors the bad.
And neutral doesn't mirror, because, you know, zero is not the opposite of any number, right?
So, good is, say, respecting property rights.
Evil is stealing, killing, raping, you know, violations of persons and property.
So that's good versus evil.
Nice versus bad.
It's nice to be on time.
It's bad to be late.
a whole, right? It's not evil, like you can't shoot someone for being late, right? So it's nice,
this is what I refer to as aesthetically preferable actions.
So, you know, reasonably polite, you know, not yelling obscenities in front of children or
whatever it is, right? I mean, you can't shoot people for doing that, but it's not nice or
good. Being relatively diplomatic when you approach people and so on, right? A boss yelling
abuse is not a violation of the non-aggression principle, but it sure ain't nice and it's
pretty bad all around, right?
So, aesthetically preferable actions are those which can be universalized,
like it's possible for people to be on time, right?
It's possible for people all around the world to be on time, but it's not enforced on others.
Nobody's holding you at gunpoint, making you wait for someone who's late.
You can choose to leave at any time, so it doesn't violate the initiation of violence, but it's preferable to be on time.
And that's because we like it when people are on time with us, and therefore we should try to be on time with others.
So, just as a whole, right, there's good versus evil, Nice versus bad.
Bad is not the same as evil.
It's bad behavior is not evil.
And then there's neutral, morally neutral actions.
Should I go to a cat cafe today?
There's no moral question around that, right?
It's just, you know, do I like red as opposed to blue in the color spectrum?
Well, there's no moral evaluation of that.
So, good versus evil, better versus worse, or nice versus bad, polite versus rude, whatever you want to call it, right?
Aesthetically preferable, but not UPB, right?
Just this is a quick reminder of how UPB works.
Because the majority of morals that we deal with are not UPB, right?
The big questions are, how do I handle an amoral or negative moral situation in a way that is most productive, most conducive to the spread of virtue.
You know, if some woman says, I know that so-and-so's girlfriend is having an affair, I mean, those are the kind of moral things that we're more likely to deal with, or a very aggressive boss, or an employee who's withholding information that's really, really needed from the organization that pays her, whatever it is, right?
So these are the, we, like 99% of our moral decisions are in Nice versus bad in the realm of aesthetically preferable actions, not good versus evil.
We don't wake up in the morning and say, should I rob a convenience store today?
Should I assault someone?
I mean, this is not where we make most of our actual moral decisions.
And so, if I were only to have in a system of morality extremes of good and evil that 99.99% of the population, at least that would listen to my broadcast, would not ever have to make a decision about it in their life.
Well, that would be sort of pointless, right?
Again, diet books for thin people.
If you only talk about good and evil, evildoers don't care about virtue, and good people aren't tempted by evil.
So, what's the point of a moral system that only talks about rape, theft, assault, and murder?
Other than universalizing them in the face of, obviously, institutional violations to the contrary, which we can't really achieve, right?
We can't achieve that, right?
We can't stop national debts, right?
Against whatever it is, which would be theft from the unborn, right?
So, I want to create a system of morality that's actionable, which means I have to include almost all the moral challenges that almost all decent people struggle with.
Right?
Which is why people don't call in and say, I want to become a master thief.
What should I do?
Right?
That's not what people call in about.
They call in and say, well, I'm being kind of exploited, or somebody is treating me disrespectfully, or people won't let me tell the essential truth about my origin story, or my family is still putting me down, or my girlfriend is inconstant and volatile.
Because that's where our actual moral decisions are.
It would be like training a family doctor only in battlefield medicine, right?
Well, I mean, I suppose someone could stagger into the doctor's office once or twice over the course of his career with some battlefield-style wound.
He just happened to get stabbed, you know, three paces from the doctor's office and just... But that's not what... 99.9999% of his patients are not going to be dealing with battlefield injuries, so...
UPB is like the battlefield injuries of morality, but aesthetically preferable actions tell the truth.
You can't shoot someone for lying, right?
I mean, you can't use violence against people who are simply lying, but truth versus falsehood is very important in our lives.
So, it's aesthetically preferable, it's good, it's polite, it's nice, it's better to tell the truth.
And not being allowed to tell the truth, or being punished for telling the truth, or people who invite you to tell the truth and then punish you for telling the truth.
Well, that's where most of our moral decisions lie, so it is in the realm of integrity, not virtue.
Right?
If we have a value called telling the truth, and then we have core relationships, say, with destructive parents, in which we are not allowed to tell the truth, or in fact punished for telling it, we're gaslit and attacked and punished for telling the truth.
Well, that's pretty important, right?
That's pretty important.
So, I just wanted to point that out.
Now, gambling, you say, they don't provide any value.
The gambler is providing value to the casino.
We understand that's giving him the money, usually.
But the casino is also providing value to the gambler.
So the question is, what value does the casino provide to the gambler?
Right?
What value?
Now, of course, you know, the odds of winning and so on, I get that.
I get that.
But the gambler is doing something very specific.
So let's say we say the gambler wants money.
He wants money for gambling, right?
Wants to make bets and make money.
Okay, well, that's just one of the many ways that he could get money.
I mean, moral, in terms of it's not theft, right?
Assuming that the casino is not cheating and the gambler is not cheating, it's not theft, right?
So if the gambler wants $10,000, he can go to the casino and put his money on Red 29
or play the blackjack table or play a poker or spin the wheel or whatever he's gonna be doing.
He wants $10,000.
So the casino is going to give him the $10,000 if he happens to win, right?
So, the casino's just one of the places he can get the $10,000.
Of course, the other place he can get the $10,000, just for, you know, there's lots of places, but the most simple, is he can get a job, or he can work overtime, or he can create a side hustle and sell his handcrafted earrings on Etsy, or whatever, right?
So, there's ways he can get the $10,000.
He can go to his parents and say, here's what I need the money for.
He can take out a loan.
He can take out a second mortgage.
That's another kind of loan, I guess.
But he can get the $10,000 any number of ways.
But he chooses to get the $10,000 in the... And it's not even the least effort, right?
He can say, well, if you've got to work, you know, if he makes $100 an hour, he's got to work A hundred hours to make $10,000, right?
That's a lot.
But if he goes to his parents and says, you know, you guys have some assets, I really need $10,000, if you could see your way clear, whatever, blah, blah, blah, right?
Okay, well, that's actually less effort than gambling, right?
He could come up with a whole bunch of business ideas and then sell them to his entrepreneurial friends for $10,000.
That might be, if he's very creative or knows something about this, then that might be a whole lot less effort than going to a casino, which, you know, you have to put in quite a lot of hours to walk out with $10,000, right?
Because there's ups and downs and so on, right?
So then the question is, why does he want to go to the casino?
What value is the casino providing to the gambler?
Now, we can't just say gambling, because that's tautological.
What value does the gambler find in gambling?
Well, gambling, well that doesn't add anything, it's just tautological.
It's not money, because there's lots of ways you can get to 10 grand.
So, what value is the casino providing?
So, to understand addiction, and again, this is just my personal opinion, this is not science, not facts, just my opinion, maybe it's true, maybe it's false, but let me introduce you to the idea of templates.
Templates.
So, in order for something to be addictive, there has to be a template.
And I'm talking about not just a mere physical addiction, but a psychological addiction.
There has to be a template.
In other words, it has to feel both familiar and necessary prior to performing the activity that you end up addicted to.
And again, I'm not talking about purely physical addictions, I'm talking about the psychological addictions.
And gambling is more of a psychological addiction, because a physical addiction is when, you know, the opiate joy juice flows into your veins, removes all of your unhappiness, and makes you feel like a normal human being for the first time in your existence.
So that's a physical addiction.
But a psychological addiction would be something where the drug is not delivered from something external.
So, alcohol changes your chemistry.
Gambling does not.
The gambler is not injected with a substance.
A pornography addiction is not.
Your computer monitor is not injecting something into your veins, right?
So, we're talking about a psychological addiction.
And of course, you're still getting the dopamine.
I get all of that.
But for psychological addictions, there has to be a template of some kind.
So, what is the template For gambling.
Why does the gambling addict end up as a gambling addict?
There has to be something that's primed.
Because, of course, there are tons of people who really get into gambling who don't end up becoming addicts.
They enjoy gambling, they may even gamble quite a bit, but they don't become addicts.
So, the template That I believe is the case for the gambling addicts.
If you look at gambling, what is going on?
And there's many different kinds of gambling.
Some are pure chance, some are more skill, but almost always the casino, the dealer and so on has more skill.
Like if you're playing a blackjack table, the blackjack dealer has gone through all of the mathematical probabilities and been deeply and thoroughly trained on how to take money from you.
And if you consistently win, you will a lot of times be accused of stealing, or cheating,
counting cards or whatever, and you will be kicked out of the casino.
Because the casino doesn't want you to consistently win.
They don't mind, of course, occasional winners, because that's the bait that draws the gambler
in so that the casino can make a lot of money from them, from the gambler.
So, of course, occasional winnings are there, but if you consistently win... I'm no expert and I've spent very little time in casinos, but my understanding is that if you keep winning, they'll pay you.
If they suspect you of gambling, maybe you'll have a bad day, but you'll be banned from the casino if you are winning all the time or win too much.
So, let's talk about the game of medium skill.
Of medium skill.
Blackjack I would consider a game of medium skill.
It's not totally random, but it's really just mathematical odds.
But the mathematical odds in blackjack are far less complex than the mathematical odds in something like poker, which I would consider high skill.
Low skill would be, you know, dice rolling.
Low to no skill would be dice rolling or roulette wheels and so on where you... there's no skill involved.
in winning.
Ah, well, no, I work the numbers, I work the odds, and so on.
But there's no particular skill in where the ball lands in the roulette wheel.
There's no particular... if you spin the wheel, well, it's just where it lands, right?
There's no particular skill.
So we've got high skill, medium skill, and low skill.
So let's talk about the medium skill first.
So let me give you a template, see if this makes sense.
So in the template, it goes something like this.
If you grow up with a parent who is moody, Then you need to work very hard to try and keep that parent in a good mood.
Now, some parents respond better or worse to your attempts to keep them in a good mood or to get them in a good mood.
Let's say you've got an abusive father, he comes home, he's had a really bad day and he's stomping and stomping around, he's looking for problems and so on.
Now, maybe you just hide so that you don't give him an excuse, but then you give him the excuse of, you know, why are you hiding from me?
What's the matter with you?
Come and talk to me, right?
Whatever, right?
And he'll get mad at you for not being there.
Maybe you try to engage him in a way that's sort of positive.
You know, I sort of think of, it's more of a depressive story, but people like Robert Williams with a depressed mother who becomes a sort of performing dopamine delivery dance monkey fun head boy in order to try and Keep his mother from crashing into a life-destroying depression.
So, do you, as a child, have you developed any skills or do you believe that you can do something to alter The negative or dangerous mind state of your parent.
And this is a big debate my brother and I had when we were growing up.
It was an endless debate.
My brother would say, let's clean up the place so mom doesn't get mad.
And I would say, it doesn't matter what we do.
If she's in a bad mood, she'll just, doesn't matter, right?
Well, let's not give her any excuses.
Well, she doesn't need excuses.
Like, this is back and forth, right?
So, if you had a dangerous, and dangerous doesn't just mean abusive, it can mean neglectful, depressed, it can mean any variety of things.
Or even if the parent is not abusive to you directly, but if they're in a bad mood, they go to drink, and you've got to try and get them to not drink.
Because when they don't drink, They can get up and go to work and provide for the family and take care of you and all of that, right?
So, do you have, as a child, any ability to alter the destructive moods of moody parents?
It's an important question.
Now, if your parent is just going to be moody no matter what you do, Then you are in a passive position of hoping for a good outcome that you can't do anything about.
You are in the passive position of hoping for a good outcome that you can't do anything about.
And that's the low-skill games.
I hope, I hope, I hope!
That there will be a good outcome.
But there's nothing... I'm forced to play the game, in a sense, because you're forced to be with the parent.
But if the parent doesn't respond to any of your exhortations, or preferences, or protestations, or jokes, or, you know, encouragements, or entertainment, if your parent doesn't respond to any of that, then you've just got to cross your fingers and hope that your parent is in a good mood, or finds their way to a good mood, or fights off the bad mood, or something like that.
But you're kind of passive and trapped.
Well, that's you staring at a wheel that's spinning that you can't do anything about.
You're forced to play, right?
So gamblers feel this compulsion to play.
But there's nothing you can do.
You're just trapped in a situation where you have to crush your fingers and desperately hope for a good outcome.
Well, why would you have that template?
Why would you be in a situation where being trapped, in a sense, by your addiction, being trapped in a situation where you can only passively Hope and pray like hell for a good outcome.
Why would that be a template?
Well, it has to come from somewhere, and maybe it comes from a priest or a teacher or something like that, but most likely, almost certainly, it comes from being around a moody, dangerous parent, and there's nothing you can do To change that parent's mood for the better, you just have to hope that somehow there's a good outcome, that the parent shakes it off, or time passes, or, you know, they drink so much that they pass out, or something.
So, you're just, you're passive, and you're desperate for a positive outcome, but there's nothing you can do about it, but you're trapped in the situation.
Right?
So, that's low-skill gambling addictions.
That's betting on the ponies, right?
Betting on horses or greyhounds or cockfighting in the sort of immoral sense.
I mean, you desperately want the horse to win, but there's nothing you can do about it.
But you're trapped in the game, right?
So that's stuck in a house with a bad parent who does not respond in any way, shape or form to your exhortations or responds negatively to everything you try to do, in which case doing nothing is the best strategy.
So you're paralyzed, you're trapped.
And you're desperately hoping for a good outcome but you can't do anything to alter the outcome.
So that's having an addiction to no-skill gambling.
Right?
Makes sense.
Now I can do the rest of them of course much more quickly.
The more impact you can have on The outcome of a moody parent's negative moods, the more skill you're going to be drawn to, and there's a bit of an intelligence thing here for sure, the more skill you're going to be drawn to in gambling.
Because you've developed all of these skills, I really, really, I'm trapped in the game, which is the addiction, I desperately want a positive outcome and there's something I can do about it.
So you're going to be drawn to higher and higher skilled gambling games.
The more that you were able to affect the outcome of a negative parent's dangerous mood when you were little.
You're still trapped in the game, that's the addiction, but there's something you can do to affect the outcome.
And so managing a situation, applying your skill in order to produce a positive outcome, that's got to come from childhood.
It's a template.
It's a template.
I desperately need a positive outcome.
I'm helpless.
Well, that's a zero-skill game.
Like the game of war, right?
Which is the high archive.
It's not even really a game.
It's no strategy, right?
So, that's one, right?
And then all the way up to the most sophisticated games, poker or whatever it is, I don't know what the most complex gambling games are, but I assume it's something like that, where the number of variables and the amount of skill has a significant impact on the outcome.
So, you are addicted, which means you're trapped in the game, and you're desperately flexing your wits in order to produce a positive outcome.
Well, that's a dangerous parent who can be managed.
There's some skill that you can bring to bear.
Now, you can't solve the problem, you can't fix the parent, but you can at least manage or ameliorate some aspects of the negative or dangerous moods.
So, for me, I did not believe that there was anything I could do To change my mother's bad moods.
And I actually, this is a sort of a point of pride for me when I was a kid, it was a point of pride, and a sort of deep and significant point of pride for me as a kid, which was this.
Even if I could, I wouldn't.
Even if I could, I wouldn't.
I'm not going to pretend that my mother's moods are mine to manage.
Because that would be to take responsibility for her moods, and that would be to take responsibility away from her for her moods.
And it was really just a point of pride.
And I knew it was going to be tough, but frankly, I would be damned.
If I would try and fix my mother's moods.
I'm not taking ownership for that crap.
I'm not making myself responsible for that terrible behavior.
It's her job.
It's her responsibility.
And this came from basically, I mean, basically kind of an FU to the moodiness.
I find moody people quite exhausting.
And also, it was dangerous to me to take on my mother's moods.
And also, she held me responsible for my life.
When I was a kid, if I did something wrong, she would hold me responsible.
So I'm like, okay, well, if you have the direct principle of self-ownership and personal responsibility for little kids who are, you know, five, six, seven years old, then I'll be damned, damned if I withhold from you responsibility for what you're doing when you're 35.
Like, no way.
I'm not taking that on.
And so when I went to a... I did a bit of gambling.
I mean, you know, dimes and quarters at parties when I was a teenager.
But I was never drawn to the high-skilled games.
I was drawn to the low-skilled games.
I hope for a good outcome.
There's nothing I can do to affect it.
And look, please understand, I'm not saying this is proof.
I'm just saying this is where this stuff has come from.
The people I knew as kids who believed that they could do something about their parents' negative mood, if they got into gambling they tended to be drawn towards the higher skilled games.
And I felt that template click in when I was in low-skilled games.
That wanting a good outcome and not lifting a finger to changing to change, to be able to affect it, that felt terribly familiar.
And I have to, it's not like some big demon I have to battle, but I don't, I don't gamble because I can very much see how that could become a thing.
Right.
You could call it repetition compulsion.
I would call it the Simon, the boxer analogy from my book, real-time relationships, free domain.com slash books.
But there's a template.
Something clicks into place that feels terribly familiar.
Managing your emotional responses to an outcome you cannot affect has to be present in your heart, mind and soul before it clicks into place as something both familiar and desirable when you gamble.
I want a positive outcome.
I have no small, medium, or large capacity to affect that outcome, which means I'm drawn to low, small, medium, or large skilled or high skilled games.
But that is only two layers down.
We have one more layer to go.
One more layer of ze chocolate pound kick.
Chocolate pounding because my mother assaulted me.
See?
Get it?
Hey!
It's been a while.
I can joke.
So, here's the other level.
When you can't really control the outcome of someone's moodiness, all you can do is manage your own responses to that moodiness.
And you see, of course, we know this, because people who grow up with moody parents will often end up with moody boyfriends or girlfriends or husbands or wives or whatever, because you can't manage someone's moodiness.
You can give yourself the illusion that you can manage it, but you can't fundamentally manage it, because if you could manage it, you could solve it.
A successful diet ends, right?
You lose the weight, you stop dieting, at least as much.
And if you're constantly dieting, you know, gaining and losing 10, 25 pounds or whatever, if you're constantly dieting, constantly gaining and losing the weight, your diet is not successful.
And you can't do anything to manage the moods of your parents.
Because if you don't try to manage them at all, well, then you're accepting that you can't do anything to manage the moods of your parents.
The more you try to manage the moods of your parents, the more they will blame you for being in bad moods and expect you to fix their moodiness, which means they never gain any self-control, which means you are then forever and ever, amen, going to have to manage Their moodiness.
It's like a kid, you know, like when you're very little and you have chocolates around or whatever is your particular crack candy of choice.
Before you develop self-restraint, before you understand calories and eating well and all of that, before any of that, you will just eat as much candy as you can get your hands on.
Right?
So, it's up to the parents to manage the food intake of young children because they cannot manage their own food intake.
They simply go for what tastes best.
Right?
So you don't have the chocolate in the house, you put it in a place that's inaccessible, and you manage and figure out what your children are eating and have them, or guide them, steer them pretty directly towards better food choices.
And of course you model self-restraint in your food choices so that your children grow up being able to manage their own food, right?
I mean, I know this sort of direct experience.
So, the children cannot manage their own food choices, so it's up to the parents to manage those food choices for them and grow them to the point where the children will manage their own food choices so that the parents, when the parents are 60 and the children are 30, the parents aren't still telling the children what they should or shouldn't eat and the children aren't overweight.
They've internalized, you know, reasonably healthy eating habits, if that makes sense.
But parents are supposed to manage their own emotions, as adults are supposed to manage their own emotions.
If they offload that job, right, I'm in a bad mood because my kids did something bad or negative, or I'm in a bad mood, it must be because of the kids, and it's up to my kids to make my mood better.
Right?
Big hugs.
And now, I understand bad moods can be ameliorated by other people giving you, you know, comfort or whatever.
Your dog dies and puts you in a bad mood or a sad mood and then other people can give you comfort and that helps.
I'm not saying that we don't have anything to do with each other's emotions or anything like that.
But in particular, negative emotions are not to be managed by your children, right?
That's a horrible, horrible job.
That's like you going to daycare and They drive it to work for you, right?
That's just crazy, especially when they're like five, right?
So, your kids are not supposed to be managing your negative emotions, and they're not supposed to be managing your emotions at all.
And kids are drawn to manage negative emotions because they want to stay alive and they don't want to get abandoned and they don't want their children to be paralyzed or to fall apart, right?
I've got two particular examples of this children managing their parents' emotions.
One is, of course, Kay with her mother, Lady Barbara, in Just Poor, and the other is Tom with his mother.
In my novel, Almost, that they take on the burden of their mother's emotions and try to prop them up and keep them going as a form of survival or self-protection.
Or to put it another way, of course, the children who weren't successful at ameliorating the negative emotions of their parents had less of a chance of survival, so those genes would have gotten weeded out, those preferences would have gotten weeded out over the course of society.
So, you can't manage your parents' emotions.
And it never fixes, never works in the long run.
You just do it as a sort of survival mechanism in the short run.
And of course, if your parents make you responsible for their emotions, then you reject that responsibility at your peril.
So, you know, my mother would blame me for being in a bad mood, and I would kind of nod and whatever, right?
But, I mean, I never really believed it, and I always held her in great contempt for such a pathetic, cowardly move.
Yes, yes, your life is a total mess, but it's me at the age of eight who's the problem.
Yeah, yeah, the kid is the problem, not any of the choices you're making as a sovereign adult.
Yeah.
I mean, it's just, it's so contemptible.
It's just pathetic, right?
And of course you're not responsible for your parents' moods or choices or whatever.
My daughter's not responsible for my moods or choices, right?
So, you're not managing your parents because you can't do that.
You can pretend and you can play this game, but it never ends, right?
And once you accept that it never ends, you will stop doing it, right?
If you pretend that you can manage your parents' emotions, once you accept that you can't do that, Then it will end, at least you pretending you can support your parents' emotions.
If you have a sort of emotional terrorist or an emotional bully as a parent, then, you know, you'll appease them when you're younger.
And then when you get older, you probably get kind of tired of that and just tell them the truth, stop managing their emotions.
And then you realize, of course, that they've not learned anything about managing their own emotions.
In fact, it's gotten worse because they've offloaded the forcefully offloaded the job onto you.
And so that's a huge crisis for the quote relationship, right?
Managing other people is not a relationship.
It's appeasement and manipulation and survival, because it's a predator-prey relationship.
So, what you're doing, of course, is you are managing your emotions of anxiety at having pathetically immature parents.
If, you know, if these are the parents, right?
Not all parents are, blah blah blah, right?
You're managing your feelings of anxiety and fear at having extremely immature parents.
Moody, volatile, child-blaming, petty, self-righteous, whatever's going on, right?
And, you know, the day that you wake up and look at your parent and say, well, they're just a toddler with a driver's license, that's a pretty alarming moment, right?
And your life changes at that point when you can't look at your parents as authority figures but as Dangerous, volatile, immature people that you have to constantly manage because as a five or ten-year-old you're far more mature than they are.
I mean that's a pretty chilling moment if those are the kind of parents you have and a lot of parents like that.
So most people pretend that they can manage their parents' moods because their parents demand that and also because it gives them the illusion of control.
It gives them the illusion of control that actually enslaves them.
And gambling addiction is giving you the illusion of control.
You're going to get more money, but it actually enslaves you.
So it comes from trying to get a benefit through manipulation, trying to get a benefit through amoral skill.
Well, that's trying to get your parents in a better mood based upon your manipulations.
And for kids to manipulate their parents into a better mood or avoid a negative mood, I don't mean that manipulation in a bad way.
You know, that's manipulation like, you know, climbing a tree and getting some fruit is manipulating the fruit, right?
You're manipulating it with your fingers, right?
It's not a bad thing.
It's a survival thing.
And no survival thing is a bad thing.
It's tragic sometimes what you need to do to survive, but survival is in general a good thing.
Evolutionarily speaking.
Can't say it's a bad thing, that's why we're all here.
I mean, you can, but it's just kind of ridiculous.
Wishing that things were otherwise in evolution is kind of wishing for non-existence in a way.
So, gambling addicts, what are they there for?
They're there to continue the relationship with moody and abusive parents so that they can continue to normalize that relationship and not question it.
Let me say this again.
Why are gambling addicts at the casino?
Well, it's to normalize various degrees of perceived control over outcomes desperately wanted, good mood of a parent, while having no real control, and that no real control shows up in the addiction.
So, in a sense, in a very real sense, the adult children are ordered to go to the casino by the parents so that The moodiness of the parents never becomes denormalized because now the children, the adult children, are stuck in a situation where they're desperate for a good outcome that they can have little effect on the outcome.
And to have a good effect on the outcome is to end the relationship, right?
So, in other words, if you consistently win, you'll be banned from the casino, because they'll assume you're cheating.
Again, I don't know for sure.
It's a rumor.
I mean, whether that's a fact or not, but I assume that a casino would not be overly keen on somebody who keeps winning, you know, $100,000 every night.
They probably wouldn't have that person stick around for too long.
So, the relationship means that you can't win.
If you win, you end the relationship.
And so, if you win independence and you stop taking responsibility for your immature parents' emotions, the relationship would end in its current form, right?
So, you understand that the gambling relationship, the casino, and by casino I mean, you know, whatever, whoever's hosting the gambling, that's a direct mirror of The immature, manage my emotion, parental relationship.
So what is the gambler really after?
He's after continuing the illusion of having a relationship with people who exploit him and demand that he manage their emotions or inflict their moods upon him, no matter what he does.
So it's the normalization of the exploitive relationship with the parents that drives someone to the gambling, which is another way of saying that the gambling addict is so used to managing uncertain outcomes and trying to get a benefit that there's a sick familiarity, that's the template, there's a sick familiarity with regards to the gambling.
You are managing your anxiety at your own helplessness, which was inflicted on you by your parents, and then gets transferred to the dealer at the blackjack table, or the roulette guy, or the poker dealer, or whatever, right?
So, I hope that helps, and I would certainly be interested in your feedback.
We could do this for a variety of addictions, but the psychological ones are generally better, right?
So, I hope that helps and love you guys so much for giving me the opportunity to do this very important and very good work.
And thank you again so much, freedomain.com.
If you'd like to help out the show, I'd really appreciate that.
I'll talk to you soon.
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