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July 4, 2025 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
06:44
Tips for How to Figure Out if Someone Has an Inner Voice
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I don't know why.
I think I saw it once before.
Tips to figure out if someone has an inner voice is a great question.
It's a great question.
And I was having a conversation about that just this morning.
Not that there was anyone else in the room, of course.
So, how to figure out if somebody has an inner voice?
Well, this is true of conflict in general.
If you find yourself getting stuck in a conflict, then the best thing to do is to ask the person to describe your point of view.
Not to agree with it, just to describe it.
Can you describe my point of view?
It is a mark, of course, of empathy and to some degree of intelligence to be able to entertain a perspective you do not agree with.
Can you play the devil's advocate?
You know, when I was in, I was vice president of the debating club because they needed a president who was full of vice.
I was vice president of the debating club in university, traveled all over Canada debating.
And in debating, you don't know which side you're going to get.
So they have BERT, be it, resolve that, debate.
And you didn't know which side you were going to get.
So you had to be able to argue both sides.
If you are an actor, you have to be able to empathize with a character who's not your own and convincingly speak words that you don't necessarily agree with.
Or may in fact be, they may be quite difficult or unpleasant for you to accept.
It's one of the reasons why modern movies in particular and TV is so boring because writers can't create a convincing villain.
They're all afraid, right?
I mean, I think they lack that capacity as a whole, but they're also all afraid.
If you create too convincing a villain, then you're going to be accused of sympathizing with the villain and making him too charismatic and making people become extremists.
Yeah, like communism is not extremism.
But so if you're in a conflict, ask people to describe your perspective because you're trying to get something across to them.
You don't honestly know sometimes if they're capable of listening, of understanding, of appreciating your perspective.
Right?
You don't know.
Oh, there's the chat.
There's the chat.
Ah, I see the chat.
Uh-huh.
I just had to do something completely different than what I was doing for reasons that I don't quite understand.
So I will get your chat comments here.
Chats here, please.
But yeah, so get someone to describe your perspective, right?
And one of the things, of course, people, the partisans, right?
The partisans were commenting and saying, oh, but it's only people on the left who really have empathy.
And it's like, no.
Like, absolutely not.
And this is actually quite well known, but not by everyone, of course, because the left controls the media.
But if you go to people on the left and you ask them to describe the positions of people on the right, generally all they can do is insult, right?
So people on the right often have some skepticism about mass immigration.
You go to people on the left, you say, well, what is their issue?
What is the issues of the people on the right with mass immigration?
And they'll just say, xenophobic racists.
They can't actually process why someone would have a different opinion or an opposing opinion.
Everyone who has an opposing opinion is just evil.
And they just, so there's no negotiation.
It's possible.
You cannot negotiate with people who can't even describe your position.
All you can do is fold like a cheap shirt, right?
Whereas if you go to people who are conservatives and you say, can you describe the liberal position?
They have to do a pretty good job of it.
I mean, they don't agree with it, but they do a pretty good job of it.
And so that is just a sort of, and I think it has something to do with, of course, people on the right tend to be quite religious and you pray and praying is working with an inner voice, so to speak.
I mean, if you believe it's God, then it's God.
But if you don't, then you're working with an inner voice and do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
That sort of basic empathy stuff.
It means that you have to figure out what other people would like and what you would like and work and negotiate with that.
So, yeah, I think that the best way to figure out if somebody has an inner voice, well, you could just ask them, right?
But they may have trouble articulating it because if you don't have an inner voice, you can work really well with math.
Numbers are not language exactly.
You can work really well with objects, which is why it's not necessarily associated with IQ because you get super smart engineers.
They don't have an inner voice in the way that a lot of people do, but they work brilliantly with numbers and objects and so on, right?
So I try to avoid the prejudice of, well, if I have an inner voice, clearly I'm smarter.
I mean, I think it has something to do with empathy.
And the people who don't have an inner voice, you can see them being sort of triggered and reactive and hostile and sarcastic on the thread.
Maybe it has something to do with empathy.
I think it does.
But it's not an IQ thing.
And of course, they're just a, you know, people are saying, well, they're like animals.
It's like, no, they're not like animals.
They're just a different kind of person.
They're just a different kind of person.
And it's important to know, you know, that, you know, a third to a half of the people you meet, now, probably not in your social circle, probably not in your family circle, because this inner dialogue stuff starts developing around the age of two or three.
I assume this environmental factors, there are probably strong genetic components, but it is just the way that it is.
And one of the things that I was talking about as well was I was saying that an inner voice, I think, often develops out of resource conservation, the need for resource conservation.
So if you have a really cold, long winter, you need to stock up a whole bunch of food ahead of time or your family, you and your family are going to starve to death.
So you need to have a voice which says, oh, are you sure?
Are you absolutely sure you have enough food?
Are you sure you have enough food?
And it's going to nag at you until you have absolutely certain evidence that you have enough food and then you can relax, right?
But you can't relax.
So I think it comes from, are you sure?
Are you sure?
Whereas it's different in other locations.
So I think it comes out of that.
It could be any other number of things, but I think that's a pretty strong component.
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