All Episodes
Previous Next
Aug. 22, 2024 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
45:05
The Dangers of Helping
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Well, good morning everybody.
Hope you're doing well.
Question.
Could you explain the motivation behind some people's need to give other people quote shit?
There have been instances at work where I ask my peers for assistance and they flat out tell me no with a straight face.
They then agree to help me and say that they were just giving me shit.
It sometimes feels personal.
Well, That's a fine question.
It's a good question.
And in my experience, there's kind of two things that happen around this.
The first is That they're enjoying that little flash of dominance over you when they provoke confusion in you, right?
So that moment where you say, I desperately need your help, I really need your help, and somebody says no, you have a moment of fear, of anxiety, and they enjoy that.
It's like a mild little sadistic thing.
That's sort of the one thing.
I mean, what can you do about that?
Some people feel so helpless in their lives that the only way they feel any sense of power is by making other people feel helpless.
And that's sad, but just a fact.
I mean, you just have to live with that.
Most people do feel pretty helpless and most people are pretty helpless because they don't have philosophy.
So the only thing they can do is extract some sense of power.
For making other people feel discombobulated.
The other thing of course is that they're looking to see if you are robust.
So there's a shit test in male environments in particular.
The shit tests for female environments are conformity and the shit tests for male environments are security.
Are you secure?
And if you say to someone can you help me and then You say no, you know, they say no, you could say something like, all right, well, I'll just wait for a moment and then then you'll help me.
Or, you know, you can have your little no thing or whatever.
I mean, I don't know how far you want to go because sometimes you can provoke some blowback.
But I think that.
What you do want to do is not take it personally, it's not about you, they're just either enjoying a flash, a little power, or they want to make sure that you are robust, right?
Like I said, this.
In a job that I, my first professional gig, I had a coding gig and my boss kept coming in to demand to know if I was done, right?
And eventually I got up, I clapped him on the shoulders and I said, boss of mine, when I'm done, I will not pass go.
I will not collect $200.
I'll come straight to your office and tell me you don't need to waste time coming.
I will, you will be the first person I tell you.
I absolutely promise you.
And um, He laughed and then he said, turned over and called to his secretary, call up that fire dot doc or fire dot doc or something like that.
And we actually got along really well after that.
So sometimes it is just a test to see if you have some robustness to your personality.
And if you do, there's actually a kind of relief on the part of the person who's like a proto bully because then they can relax and stop with their worst instincts.
Oy, Steph, I've spoken to people in the past who clearly have delusions of grandeur, which I think feeds into their narcissism or ameliorates their shortcomings, but I admire people with a grandiose vision of their future.
How do you go about helping someone determine whether or not their life aspirations are realistic?
Thanks so much, King.
Appreciate that.
Well, you don't.
You don't.
I have always been a very ambitious person, and I would view it as a sin against my life to keep it small.
That is not what we're put here for.
But you can't give other people They're aspirations.
You simply can't do it.
You cannot make other people into what you want them to be.
You can't fill them full of your dreams and ambitions.
You can't help them that much.
Maybe a little bit of guidance here and there if they want, but don't get sucked into other people's ambitions and try to substitute your will for theirs.
You know, it's sort of like at the gym.
You can help someone work out.
You can spot them a little bit, but you can't lift the weights for them.
Learning this was a long painful process for me because I'm so enthusiastic and hardworking and positive and energetic and all of that, that I would mistake other people.
I would mistake other people and that, oh, they're like me and they just need a little, you know, when people gave me a break, I made the most of it.
And when other people are given breaks, they tend to flub it.
So other people are not you.
So the way that you know if somebody's ambitions are real, it's actually very simple.
It's very, very simple.
Are they doing it?
Right?
If somebody says, I want to be a writer, are they writing?
If somebody says, I want to be an actor, are they learning lines and scripts and taking acting classes and auditioning?
If somebody says, I want to be a painter, are they in fact painting?
If somebody says, I want to be an entrepreneur, are they coming up with business ideas?
Are they reading books on entrepreneurship?
Are they taking courses either online or just videos or anything to learn about entrepreneurship?
I mean, You can help someone who's in motion.
You cannot will someone into motion.
You cannot infuse your willpower enthusiasm into other people.
That is a trick by which they drain you and advance in no way, shape or form themselves.
So, yeah, I mean, I remember I dated a girl once who she was actually she was not young, not young, young, and I dated a woman and she wanted to be an actress.
And so through her line of work, she met a woman who was an agent in Los Angeles and said to the woman, I want to be an actress, specifically a movie actress.
And the woman said, well, you know, you're very pretty, but that's great, but you need to You need to join a theater group.
You need to see if you're good at acting.
You need to see if people like you as an actress.
You need to see if you enjoy it and so on.
So, you know, go do some theater.
It doesn't really matter what some local group, amateur group, it doesn't matter.
Just get out on stage and gave her a couple of other tips and also said that, you know, if you want to do movies, your teeth are a little crooked on this side and you should probably get those straightened at some point.
Anyway.
Did this woman join us? No, she didn't do anything of the kind. Did she ever learn monologues? Did she practice monologues
with her friends? Did she try to get feedback? Did she film?
Well, this is before you could really film yourself very easily, but there were still video cameras around you. She
could have done that.
Did she do any of that? Nope. She spent a year getting her teeth straightened and then this woman, this agent had
given her the contact info and she wanted a meeting with the agent.
She went for a meeting with the agent and she said, my teeth are straightened.
I want to be a movie star.
I mean, I'm paraphrasing, but it was something like that.
And the woman said, well, let me see your resume.
She says, well, I haven't done any theater and she's, but I have straightened my teeth.
And she said, it's not the straight teeth that makes you an actress.
Uh, it doesn't hurt, but it's not what makes you an actress.
You actually have to do some acting and find out if you're any good or like nobody's going to invest in you.
If you're in your, early middle age and you've never set foot on stage and you
want to be an actress.
So are people actually doing it?
That's really all it comes down to.
Are people doing it?
And if people aren't doing it, I mean, I don't have, and this is, you know,
this is sort of shaving people out of your life who are drags.
If you want to achieve anything, it's mostly about getting things out of the way,
And one of the things that's going to be in your way the most is people who have ambitions and don't act on them, who just talk and talk and talk and dream and dream and dream like they're going to live forever, like they can do whatever they want down the road.
No, life is short.
Life is short.
And you act now or you don't act.
And you should also be empirical with yourself.
If you have, you know, some big old dream and you find that you haven't acted on it, right?
There's a card you find someplace up in cottage country where it says, so I haven't written much lately, neither has Shakespeare.
You have to be rigid and you have to be strict with your own ambitions.
So if you say, oh, I want to write songs, OK, then, you know, give yourself six months.
If you're not writing a couple of songs a week or a day, if you're not playing your songs to people and asking for feedback, if you're not going to, you know, amateur hour at the local coffee shop and getting your songs out there, if you're not doing all of that, then who cares?
Like it's just talk.
It's just noise.
And you should not support it in yourself.
Other people should not support it in you because that dreaming is keeping you from actually creating something and actually doing something.
So that's all just vanity and nonsense.
All right.
Steph, would you say it is a rational decision for a single mom to start an OnlyFans account to support herself and her baby?
Okay, so you get welfare.
That's bad.
That's a long, long question.
Immoral to do OnlyFans instead of extracting money from taxpayers.
Okay, you clarified that nudity is not itself immoral.
What's not?
Well, it depends, right?
I mean, to me, nudity, sorry, the display of flesh, like if a woman wears a short skirt, that's maybe unwise, but it's not immoral, obviously.
Nudity is not at all good in public places.
I'm not a big fan of that at all.
Except ripping off my shirt during a live stream.
But that's more the glory of my 57-year-old frame.
And of course, nudity around children is gross and bad and all of that.
So, yeah, no, it's a rational decision.
Okay, so if you want to talk just empirical evidence, almost no woman makes money off OnlyFans, right?
It's the Pareto principle, right?
95% of the money goes to 5% of the women.
And the odds that you're one of those tiny percentage of women who has the work ethic, I mean there is work ethic, there's marketing, there's all these kinds of business savvy that you need to have to run these kinds of accounts, the odds are that you're one of these people as a single mom is very low.
It's very low.
So most women make very little from their OnlyFans account, but they do incur a permanent liability.
Because now, of course, men are aware that if you put together OnlyFans and Sugar Daddies and stripping and you name it, there are some estimates that somewhere between 10 and 20 percent of women are engaged in sex work of one kind or another.
That statistic, I've read it in a bunch of places, I haven't obviously tracked down the source.
It seems ungodly high to me, but then I'm an older generation where this stuff wasn't really a thing.
So, men are aware of this and no man of quality is going to date a woman who's published sexual pictures of herself or movies of herself on the internet.
It's too much of a liability.
Because why?
I mean, you might sleep with that woman if you're not particularly ethical, but you're not going to marry her.
I mean, it's just not going to happen, right?
Because you want to move in the higher circles of business and so on, and once that's found out, you're going to be laughed out of the room.
I mean, I remember being in a business meeting many years ago, a very high-level business meeting.
One of the guys had ordered a Russian bride, so to speak, right?
Obviously, mail-order brides.
And he was relentlessly mocked for this, and nobody took him seriously.
You just can't do it.
You can't do it.
And I don't care how much this stuff gets normalized.
Uh, it's just a, it's a bad idea.
Uh, so, you know, there, there are, it's really important in life to know when there are no solutions available, right?
That's really like, there are no good answers.
There are no good answers.
What is a good answer for a single mom?
Well, um, The only good that she can do a lot of times is to be available as an example to other women of the costs of doing things, right?
Don't carry before you marry, right?
That's don't carry before you marry.
So sometimes it's like some guy who's been a chain smoker for 40 years and he gets horrible
lung cancer and dies a painful multi-year death that costs hundreds of thousands of
dollars and destroys his finances and his family life and his happiness and the happiness
of those around him.
So once he's got this sort of terminal lung cancer, what's the solution?
There is no solution.
There is no solution.
See the problem and one of the differences between men and women is men can screw up
and skate on.
Men can screw up for the most part.
Like if you're not particularly ambitious in your early to mid-twenties, even into your
late twenties, you can hit the ground running in your late twenties, early thirties and
you can still get things going, right?
I was in academia until my mid-twenties, later 26 or so, and then I bailed into the business
I mean, I worked very hard in academia, but I worked really hard in the software world, right?
I mean, I was working 50, 60, 70, 80 hours a week, sometimes lots of travel.
Um, I was a young man without kids and, uh, it was a blast for me.
I really enjoyed it.
So.
A young man can change careers.
He can make mistakes.
He can waste time.
He can do all of that.
And then he can still hit the ground running in his late twenties, even into his early thirties, it's possible.
So men can fail in their reproductive duties of being a highly productive provider and a protector.
Men can fail in that and can recover.
Women who fail in their reproductive duties have much less time to recover and if they try to recover in their early to mid-30s, it's usually doomed.
A woman who fails, most fundamentally, her reproductive duty, which is to secure a protector and provider for her children, right, the single mom, what can she do?
What's the solution?
There is no solution.
There is no good answer.
And knowing when there's no good answer in life, what am I supposed to do?
It's like, I mean, to the guy who's, you know, it's obviously an extreme example, to the guy who's dying of lung cancer, what are you supposed to do?
Well, what am I supposed to do?
Well, you're supposed to have not smoked like a chimney for 40 years or 30 years or whatever, right?
As somebody who's really, really fat and wants a rich guy, like a woman who's really fat and wants a rich guy.
It's like, well, what am I supposed to do?
Well, I mean, you can try losing the weight, but then you can end up with that sort of, depending on your age, that sort of hanging baggy skin.
And a woman who's lost weight still has the fat cells.
I mean, unless I guess they got sucked out of her in some horrible liposuction thing.
So she still has the fat cells, and she still has the mental dysfunction that caused her to gain all of the weight, so it's still a red flag, even if you lose the weight.
I'm sorry, this is just the way that it is.
It's just the way that it is.
And so, a woman who has failed to keep herself unchilded until she finds a provider and a protector, and who keeps herself at a healthy weight.
A woman as a whole tells you what she thinks you deserve by her appearance, right?
So if she keeps herself trim and healthy and looks good and does her hair in ways that you find attractive, doesn't cut it short and stuff like that, she's saying that you deserve a woman who is attractive by your standards, right?
By your standards.
I am in, of course, a monogamous marriage and so I owe it to myself and my wife to stay physically attractive and healthy, right?
Have a little muscle and some good posture and I use face cream to make sure I don't age too fast.
So, you know, and my wife works out to keep herself healthy and attractive to me.
And that's just natural.
Once you have a monogamy, your standards should go up, not down.
Sorry, once you have a monopoly, which I guess is like monogamy, your standards should go up, not down.
If a woman is overweight, she's saying you don't deserve what you find attractive.
It is an act of hostility towards men, right?
Which is to say that I know what you find attractive, because it's very easy to know what men find attractive.
I know what men find attractive.
I'm not doing that for you.
It is a form of aggression.
My people, it's always low self-esteem and so on.
It's like, ah, for heaven's sake, this low self-esteem thing, woman.
It's like, that's just a catch-all excuse which explains virtually nothing.
But no, it's an act of, hey, man, you get what I want you to get, not what you want, right?
And so that sort of selfishness and not focusing on the needs of someone else, that means that you're going to be a bad partner in life.
A good partner focuses on your needs and you focus on her needs.
If you have to, you know, I work out six to eight hours a week, and I do that in part because I have a monogamous marriage, and I want to be attractive to my wife, because that's respect to her, right?
And so a woman who lets herself go even before she gets married, well, that's just saying, it's arrogantly saying that your needs don't matter, your preferences don't matter, and That's just, it's a giant signal for a bad partner.
You know, I mean, men don't want weird hair dyes.
Men don't want a lot of tattoos.
Men don't want an overweight woman.
Men don't want a woman who's just difficult and argumentative and all of that.
And so women who display these characteristics are saying that they don't care what men want.
Okay.
Well, if you don't care what I want, if my needs and preferences are immaterial to you, then I ain't going to wife you.
I'm not even going to girlfriend you.
I mean, thanks, but, you know, probably be bad in bed, too.
So, yeah, I mean, it's a bad idea to go the OnlyFans route.
And here's the thing, too.
It's a liability for your kids, right?
I mean, the reverse image searching and all of this, like, it's not out there forever.
And it's a massive liability for your kids.
Alright, I just got a job doing something I love.
I'm working really hard.
I'm good at it.
It turns out my boss is passive-aggressive.
Now he's getting angry while walking away when I showed him my solution to a problem we have.
It's bizarre.
I might have to quit.
What is passive-aggressive behavior all about?
I'm walking on eggshells at the moment trying to guess if I have done the good thing or a bad thing.
Yeah, I mean, you know, bosses are not gods.
They're human beings.
They have their strengths and weaknesses.
And I don't know what the big problem is with a direct conversation.
So, you talk about this guy being passive-aggressive, but you're quitting rather than talking to him directly.
If you feel confused by the boss, you sit down with him in his office and say, you know, I'm kind of confused and frustrated because I'm not sure what you want.
And it may be the problems on my end, I'm certainly happy to get coaching on that, but I find I come to work, I show you stuff, it's not what you want, I'm not sure what you want.
And obviously you're my boss.
I kind of have to please you.
But I also have to enjoy my work.
And what can we do about this?
And then you give some examples.
Now have stuff that is clear, right?
Don't have come in with a sheaf of documentation because that's kind of intimidating.
But have stuff and rehearse the conversation with friends so that you know what you're doing.
And just have an honest conversation with your boss.
I mean, you're passive-aggressive if you're upset with someone and you're just going to quit.
Why would you quit rather than have an honest conversation with your boss?
And say, I'm not sure what it is that you're looking for.
I'm confused and maybe it's on my end.
Maybe it's something between us.
Maybe you're unclear at times, but I just, you know, obviously I want to please you.
I want to have a good time working.
I love this position.
I love the company.
I love the business.
But there is, for me, you know, there's a kind of friction and I just want to try and work it out.
And just, you know, maybe the boss has got some frustrations about you.
I mean, you sound a little on the passive aggressive side, if rather than have an honest, direct conversation, you're just going to quit.
That's like, instead of saying I'm not enjoying the game, you just take your ball and go home?
Well, that's... That's not great.
So...
Your passive aggression and avoidance is probably one of the reasons why he gets annoyed.
So you see, anxiety, everybody thinks, oh, anxiety is a me problem.
No, anxiety is very often a management of others.
It's a passive aggressive manipulation of others, right?
So you get anxious and other people are supposed to change what they do, right?
rather than you just having a direct conversation with someone and saying, this is not working,
or there's a, just be honest, be honest with people who just have all of this anxiety,
and you just radiate this anxiety, and it's just a form of manipulation.
Like, other people are supposed to notice your anxiety and change everything they do
in order to accommodate your anxiety, and if they don't do that, you're gonna quit.
Man, I'd find you annoying to manage, too.
And what I, I mean, of course, as a boss, it's your job to sit down with the employee and saying,
you seem kind of high strung.
What's happening that things are getting so nerve-wracking for you?
Because I don't want you to be nervous and nerve-wracked in the job with me.
And managing employees' anxiety is part of being a boss.
But you might be a handful.
You might be more of a handful.
And rather than saying, uh, how much fun is it for my boss that I'm terrified walking on eggshells and anxious, uh, you say my boss is a bad guy and I'm going to quit.
Right?
So look at it from your boss's standpoint.
I mean, even if you disagree with your boss, even if your boss is a total jerk, look at it from his standpoint.
You may be feeding into his jerkiness.
Like most, look, most people just respond to the cues.
They don't have integrity.
They don't have morals of their own.
They just respond to cues.
That's all they're doing.
And if you're giving all of this nervous, being bullied, anxiety manipulation cues, he's going to respond to that and it might bring out the bully in him.
So, all right.
Hey Steph, I often suffer from anxiety in conversations.
Specifically, I have a fear that I'm being boring, which in my mind becomes a massive issue.
I was having a conversation with you yesterday.
You said you were finding the conversation interesting.
As I was, and no one else had wanted to ask a question.
I read through the comments afterwards and a couple of people had stated they were bored.
This made me feel just awful and my first instinct was basically to leave and never
come back.
Why does this bother me so much?
Well, the first people who need to find you interesting are your parents.
The first people who need to find you interesting are your parents.
If your parents aren't interested in you, it's their fault.
It's their job, right?
So I love chatting with my daughter.
I find her thoughts and insights just fascinating.
But part of the reason why she's developed these thoughts and insights is because I find
them fascinating.
You fish for your children being interesting like you fish for...
Fish in a lake, right?
I mean, you find them interesting and because you find them interesting, I mean, I'm sure you've had it where somebody's really fascinated by what you're saying and you get this kind of goosebump prickle in the soul about like you go deeper and it gets better and your conversation is better because of all of that.
So I would imagine that your parents were depressed or dissociative or maybe sadistic because you owe kids attention.
You owe them your interest.
in the same way that you are than food and shelter medical care and so your parents probably did not find you
interesting and then of course this is the woman i think you were talking about 30 to 40 guys.
Approach you a night at the bar so you know you're very attractive and so.
Because your parents didn't find you interesting and because you are very attractive you just didn't have to
work to be interesting like men we have to work on a conversation skills we have to learn how to be funny we
have to learn how to be engaging we have to work alone how to be charismatic we have to learn all of this stuff.
Because men don't get approached 30 to 40 times a night, right?
So a combination of parental indifference plus very high levels of sexual attractiveness has probably had you not work on your conversational skills.
Because it's funny, like we did this sort of flash live stream and I think most people were at work so they were just listening.
So I was asking people what they wanted to talk about and you stepped up to talk, which I found very interesting.
And the view of life from a very attractive young woman is very interesting, right?
Because that's very different from most men's experience.
It's kind of the opposite from most men's experience.
And so any man who says he's bored by the perspective of a very attractive young woman is lying.
I mean, he's just lying, right?
So he's A lot of men, when they meet very attractive young women, have a desire to knock them down a peg or two so that they're in the realm of what the man could possibly get.
So a very strong, confident, attractive, intelligent young woman is going to be out of reach for most men.
So what they do is they'll try and find a way, you know, it's called negging and stuff like that.
Have you lost a little bit of weight?
You know, which implies that you were overweight and a little bit implies that you're still overweight.
So it's just nagging.
It's a way of knocking girls down a peg so that you can get within their reach.
You know, it's kind of like if the, if the basketball is stuck on the hoop and you don't have a ladder, you just throw things at it to knock it down, right?
You just knock it down so that you can get the ball back.
So, um, people stating that they're bored is, um, It's interesting, right?
So, like, I'm a professional communicator.
It's kind of what I do.
And so, if I find you interesting, other people should say, well, gee, if Steph finds her interesting, maybe there's something in the conversation that I'm not aware of, rather than, well, Steph finds her really interesting, but she's boring, right?
So, that's just resentment against the attractive.
And resentment against the attractive is the foundation of just about everything.
Like, those tall, Afghani-style dogs are rare, because they were a Russian breed, and after the 1917 communist coup, the communists associated these absolutely beautiful dogs with the aristocracy, herded the dogs out in fields and shot them.
That's this resentment of the beautiful, this resentment of the attractive, this resentment of the successful.
I mean, I really go into this in great detail in my ten-hour presentation on the French Revolution, which you can get in the premium section at FreeDomain.com slash Subscribestar.
Sorry, I'm not even close to that.
Sorry, I was short-circuiting.
You can go to FreeDomain.locals.com.
You can go to Subscribestar.com slash FreeDomain.
Sign up for a subscription.
You get this.
I go into this.
So this, the Communist Revolution, is just a bunch of ugly, bitter people shooting beautiful dogs in a field.
Because a beauty is a predator to ugliness, right?
Because ugliness can't compete.
I've almost never, I've almost never ever seen comments saying, I'm finding this boring.
Well, it's coming from resentment against the attractive.
And resentment against the attractive is tough because you want, it's sour grapes, like you want somebody who's attractive, but if you can't attract someone who's attractive, then you just get resentful, right?
They're just boring, right?
So don't take it with any particular seriousness.
And I would look more into the childhood stuff.
All right.
Hey, Steph.
I recently sold two beloved horses I've had for 15 years.
I no longer can ride them due to back issues, and I've been holding on to them just because I felt terrible for selling them.
Being fearful they will be abused or mistreated.
I know logically I made the right decision because the new owner is going to give them a proper life and use them, but emotionally I feel sad and depressed.
Especially first thing in the morning when I go out to the barn to feed all the animals and their presence is no longer there.
My question is to you, Stefan, is, in life when it comes to these kinds of decisions, will it always be the case?
You are darned if you do and darned if you don't.
Either decision you make, will there be a lingering regret?
I totally understand this is a first world problem and I need to realize there are so many more difficult things to worry or get upset about.
I try to snap back into a that reality and ground myself again.
Thank you for your time and endless education.
Well, it's become a fetish.
I'm going to be frank with you.
The pet thing, I don't get.
I don't get the pet thing.
I had pets when I was a kid.
I love dogs.
My daughter and I donate to and go to a cat shelter on a regular basis, and she loves cats, and I love pets.
I don't get.
This is fetish territory.
Sorry, man.
You know, every human desire is subject to a bell curve, right?
Every human desire is subject to a bell curve, right?
So if you like a woman, let's say with a big butt, then there's these weird Brazilian butt lifts that turn them into apple-cheeked step ladders, right?
These butts that go out for three feet.
Well, that's gross.
That's too much, right?
And so a totally flat butt might not be appealing to you, but some absolutely weird cartoon Incredibles mom inflated cyber dump truck is going to be unattractive to you, right?
If you're a boob guy, maybe you like a larger boobs, but then there's, you know, the boobs the size of that weird guy with the prosthetic breasts.
And that's too much, right?
So every human desire is subject to a bell curve.
So if you look at sort of the history of animal husbandry, right, of domesticating animals was essential to the survival of particularly those of us Who grew up in ancestors with cold climates right in particular the east asians in siberia and those in the north of europe and so on.
We needed animals to survive.
So you would want to develop a strong attachment to your animals.
And I remember feeling this, you know, when my daughter would, when she was very little
and she would grip a frog too tight because if she was enthusiastic and didn't, you know,
obviously that's kind of common.
It only happened once or twice.
But I felt this like horror in my veins.
Oh, be careful.
Right.
And because, you know, I mean, it's a frog.
It's not like this is going to change the ecosystem if the frog gets squeezed too much.
But there's a sort of existential horror of hurting the pets, so to speak, of hurting the animals.
So an attachment to your animals as a means of survival is essential to animal husbandry.
You have to have a strong attachment to your animals.
You have to really care about your animals.
In order to survive, right?
So having, if you're completely indifferent to your animals, they're going to wander off.
They're going to die.
You won't build the fence and you'll die, right?
If you're over attached to your animals, you can use them as a substitute for actually having a wife and kids and then your genes die off as well.
So every, if you look at every human desire has a bell curve, right?
People who don't care about food are often underweight and don't have much energy and so on, have to remind themselves to eat.
And that's not healthy.
And people who are too attached to food end up eating too much, have digestive problems, get overweight, get gout, or whatever it is, right?
So, if you look at all human desires as an Aristotelian mean, as a bell curve, right?
Then that's healthy, right?
You want to know where you sit on the bell curve, right?
So you obviously don't want to be indifferent to your pets because then you wouldn't have pets and you'd be kind of out of the whole human evolution thing of being attached to your pets or your livestock or your creatures, right?
These were more than just livestock for you.
They were pets.
And so you want to be attached to your pets and you also don't want to be over-attached
to your pets because then that can be kind of a fetish and it can be a substitute for
other relationships.
Right?
So we all know this is cliche, right?
A woman who's indifferent to, who has cats and is indifferent to them is not healthy,
right?
That's not good, right?
We have cats and they're being indifferent to them.
But a woman who's way too attached to her cats is substituting cats for something else,
right?
So your pets should serve your flourishing and your survival and the survival of your
genes and your family and your reproduction and so on, right?
So I think that's it.
Everyone knows that a guy with a dog is more attractive to a lot of women than a guy without a dog because he's shown he can care and protect and provide and take care of and is willing to sacrifice himself, get up early, go for walks.
So a guy with a dog is attractive.
I get that and I've no issue or problem with that.
Guys with reptiles and snakes are just, to me, radiating sociopathy, but that's just a subjective opinion.
It's kind of weird to me.
But, you know, guys with little poodle purses, purse poodles is not great.
So a guy with a reasonably robust dog is attractive to women.
That's good.
But a guy who has, you know, five dogs and doesn't talk to women because he gets all this emotional needs sacrificed by his captive dogs is not healthy.
Right.
So beloved horses.
No, they're just horses.
I mean, you can be attached to them.
Obviously, you care for them, and that's great, and you have an attachment to them, and that's great.
They're just horses.
They don't love you.
They don't have much of a brain.
They just attach and say, oh, but they're so affectionate.
It's like, yeah, but not to your virtues, other than being nice to them, right?
Hitler was nice to his dogs.
Doesn't make him a good guy, right?
When you think that the horses love you, then you've gone into fetish territory.
When you think that your pets love you, they don't.
You know, I mean, it's childish.
Like, every kid wants animals to trust.
Oh, trust me, I'm going to be nice to you and feed the squirrel.
You want the squirrels to love you and all of that because you want the squirrels to see your good intention and so on.
But of course, squirrels know that creatures will fake good intentions to capture them.
So, um, you want the animals to like you, but you understand it's just imprinting.
So, you know, when my daughter has her ducklings and we go places and they follow after us, it's the cutest thing in the world.
But it's imprinting, and I say to her, this is wonderfully cute, but you understand, they don't care about us.
They just want larger creatures around so they're protected from predators.
It's not like they've evaluated our character and have found us to be loving, wonderful, virtuous, courageous people.
We're just bigger people who feed them, right?
An animal cannot love you.
An animal can be attached to you if you treat it well.
That's just how they're biologically programmed.
It's not virtue.
It's not love.
Your horses, your beloved horses, like, that's weird.
I'm sorry, that's just weird.
And you're using the horses as a substitute.
You can't love horses.
Because horses can't be virtuous.
They can't be courageous in the face of moral challenges.
They can't be assertive when bad people are saying bad things.
They can't be, like, They're attached, they're bonded, I get all of that.
They're herd animals so they attach to people and so on.
And the dogs don't even care about you.
They just, you know, you've seen all of these.
I saw this video once of this woman trying to work out and the dog kept trying to hump her, right?
I mean, you've seen dolphins try to hump their trainers, right?
I mean, they're just animals.
They're just bonded and biochemically attached and it's not virtue and it's not you and it's not love and beloved horses.
I just find it strange.
Sorry, I'm just going to be honest with you.
It means that you feel, I guess, I don't know, maybe you've got a wife and 12 kids, I don't know, who love you and adore you, but if you did, then why would you need to love horses?
It's just weird to me.
So I think that you probably feel lonely and you are selling a substitute.
Animals and the affection and quote love of animals is a dopamine drug substitute for the love of genuinely virtuous and courageous and moral human beings.
It is, you are using them as a drug.
And when you get rid of your drug and you can no longer get your drug, you go through withdrawal.
And you're going through, in my view, withdrawal from a fetish substitute for highly engaged in quality human relationships.
So go out and find someone to love.
All right.
Regarding the last episode about codependency, what to do if one has a high codependency score?
Well, a high codependency score comes from having to bond people.
You have to bond with people regardless of their virtues.
And that's just, you have to go through the pain of having been abused and neglected or rejected by your parents if that's what's happened.
Therapy can help with that.
Are you planning on translating Peaceful Parenting?
Yeah, I mean, if I don't have any particular plans, like I haven't hired a whole bunch of people to translate Peaceful Parenting, I'm still working on the shortened version, so if you want to help out with that, I would really appreciate it, and let me know.
Of course, the Peaceful Parenting AI is in a bunch of languages, so that's another thing, right?
I would like to know if you have an opinion on people who lack empathy and as a result have harmed others.
Warren Farrell says that empathy generally is taught to children, in general, by their fathers.
And perhaps if a person was raised without the presence of a strong father, they just don't have empathy and do not even know or understand that they may have done harm to other people.
Since they are in the unknown, they may never offer an apology.
Should these people just be avoided because if that window of brain development lacked the teaching necessary to confer empathy, they are now rigidly fixed and will never change?
Or do you think that there is some neuroplasticity and with philosophy, therapy, or some other kind of intervention, these kinds of people can be changed and be able to participate in healthy relationships?
Thank you.
Um, why do you care?
This is an important question, right?
I think about this with regards to giant boats floating around me.
I think about this with regards to, like, why do you care?
Why do you care?
Right?
Do you care because you fear that you lack empathy and want to know if you're lovable?
Do you care because there's someone in your life who lacks empathy and you want to find out if you can fix them and love them?
Like, why do you care?
And generally, if you want me to answer a question that's You know, kind of intense and kind of abstract.
I need to know why you care.
Right?
Like I had a question from the other guy.
He's like, well, you said this about parents.
And then later you said this about families.
And then now there's this about families.
And can you reconcile this, that and the other?
It's like, I mean, that's a big, complicated thing.
And I need to know why.
Why do you care?
Why do you care?
Why do you care whether a lack of empathy can be fixed?
Right?
Why?
Why do you care?
Well, the answer is obvious.
It's because you don't want to reform your life in order to have relationships with people who already have empathy.
Why do you want to try and get into the dangerous process of fixing other people without empathy, which may or may not work?
And the problem with empathy is you lack empathy for yourself, which means you don't have an observing ego, which means you don't have really the capacity to compare proposed behaviors to ideal standards, which means you don't have much of a conscience, which means you can't be fixed.
Much.
I mean, can people without empathy be fixed?
I mean, I guess so.
But why would you want to bother with that?
Why would you want to bother with that?
So let's say that empathy being fixed is like those really weird cases where people have terminal stage 4 all through their body cancer and there's just spontaneous remission, right?
Or they just get better.
It happens in, I don't know, like 1 in 10,000.
I have no idea what the numbers are.
Spontaneous remission of cancer, I suppose it happens, and so on, right?
So if you say, well, I want a healthy partner.
So what are the odds that somebody with terminal cancer is just going to spontaneously recover and be fine?
Are the odds zero?
No, I don't think they're zero.
Are they high?
Probably not.
So the question is, well, why don't you just, if you want to have a healthy partner, why do you care about spontaneous remission of terminal cancer?
Why don't you just find a healthy partner and not date someone who's got terminal cancer and cross your fingers and hope they get better?
That would be the logical thing to do, right?
It's like, what are the odds that somebody who's, you know, 400 pounds can get to a healthy weight and stay there for the rest of their life and not have any ill health effects from being overweight?
It's like, could it happen?
I suppose.
I suppose it could happen.
So why would you want to date someone who's 400 pounds and cross your fingers and hope that they become slender and have no lingering health effects from being overweight?
Why don't you just choose someone who's slender to begin with?
See, all of this talk of fix, fix, fix, and what are the odds, and it's like, you need to know me, you need to tell me why it matters.
Because the only reason it matters is either because you lack empathy, or because someone you care about lacks empathy, and you want to know how to fix them.
Well, philosophy can't fix anyone.
Any more than a diet book can make you thin.
Or an exercise book can give you muscles.
It can't.
Philosophy can't fix anyone.
People can't be fixed.
People can be shown the right path and they can choose to walk it.
That's it.
That's it.
That's all there is.
And if you get into the endless, bottomless, vacuous black hole of trying to encourage people and convince people and conjure people.
No, you should be good.
No, you should do this.
No, you should lose weight.
No, you should work out.
No, you should be kinder.
No, you should go to therapy.
No, you should do something.
Do you think you're going to live forever and you have an endless and inexhaustible coins of days to spend wasting, chasing people around to do good, right?
You tell people, I don't think you're doing good.
Here's how to do good.
And you see what happens.
That's it, man.
That's it.
That's all there is.
That's all there is.
Nothing else.
If somebody around you is really overweight, you say this is unhealthy.
Here's a book on dieting.
Here's someone who can help you with your diet.
I would really recommend you get a nutritionist and an exercise coach.
And, you know, that's it.
That's it.
That's all you do.
It's all you do.
That and nothing else.
Do not get sucked into trying to become somebody else's brain.
Oh my gosh.
And I say this with all humility.
Lord knows it's tempting because you feel like you're doing good by nagging and you're not.
You're just wasting time.
And every time you nag someone, you're reinforcing that they can't do it themselves.
It's an absolute disaster as a whole.
Don't do it.
Really tempting.
I understand the temptation.
I really do.
You got to be strict with yourself.
If someone's a heavy smoker or is damaging their health over time, probably through smoking, you say, Hey, I think you should quit smoking.
You know, there's like, uh, there's, there's patches, there's hypnotherapy, there's, there's, there's a smokers groups, you know, you should really quit smoking.
And then if they keep smoking, you shut up and move on.
Because there are people out there, like, can you imagine?
I just find some random person.
Let's say I was a coach, right?
Of a, I don't know, a relay, a running relay race team, right?
And I find some tubby guy in the neighborhood and I say, man, you should join my running race team, right?
That's what you should do.
And then I keep going over, ding dong, hey man, are you off the couch?
Are you exercising?
And he's not doing anything.
He's not exercising.
He's gaining weight.
And I'm just like, I keep going over.
Ding dong.
Hey, man, you should really do this.
I can't believe you haven't gained weight.
What's the matter with you?
Let's go to the grocery store and I'll pick you out the healthy foods.
I'll even prepare them for you and I'll put them in your mouth and I'll move your jaws for you and I'll pretend to digest for you.
Ding dong.
Hey, you should come out and get for a walk, man.
You're not getting much sunshine.
Ding dong.
Hey, have you learned to do those hamstring stretches and those hurdler stretches that I taught you?
Ding dong.
Oh my God.
God, stop wasting your time.
Who do you put on your running race team?
Well, the lean guy who's in great shape who shows up and says, I'll do anything to be on this running race team.
That's who you do.
That's who you put on your... Ding dong!
Hey!
You're on my running race team!
You're gonna be on my running race team!
I can't believe you're not gonna be on my running race team!
It's addictive behavior.
It's completely addictive behavior and incredibly destructive to everyone involved.
You're annoying the person who's not going to change.
You're giving yourself some bizarre life-changing vanity that you can just talk people into changing their fundamental personalities.
No.
Do you find just some random guy to be the lead singer for your band, whether he can sing or not, and just give him singing lessons and nag him to sing better?
It's like, no.
Who became the singer for Queen?
It was Freddie Mercury.
He was their roadie.
And he's like, well, you guys should do this.
You need costumes.
You need to make it a show.
I'm going to sing for you and you've got to write your own material.
You can't make it in the music business without writing your own material.
And he just nagged.
You say he nagged, but he got up and he sounded bad at the beginning.
He ran all over the stage.
He bellowed.
It took him a while to discover how to use his voice properly and all of that.
But he was massively enthusiastic and pushing them and they didn't need to convince him to be their singer.
Just Fall into your march in life with people already in motion.
If you circle back to try and drag people out of the quicksand of their own laziness and indifference, you get stuck, everyone else moves on, and your life turns to shit.
Don't do it, man.
Freedomain.com slash donate.
▲
Export Selection