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Oct. 3, 2025 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
47:50
Why Can I Not Forgive?!?
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Alrighty, hope you're doing well.
So I have been racking my brain trying to figure out this forgiveness thing, which I find a very fascinating topic because there's this dichotomy that's put forward that either you forgive or you are trapped in eternal bitterness and hatred forever.
Now, that's kind of like a medieval curse.
Do what I say or dire consequences.
You must forgive or I give you the voodoo curse of eternal misery and discontent and frustration and anger and rage and you'll be tormented by the Saturn orbiting rings of tiny frozen demon heads until the end of time.
Not a great argument.
Honestly, you know, it's like do what I want or you will live in torment forever.
It's kind of like a terrorist threat in a West.
Like, I mean, not real terrorism, but like emotional terrorism.
It's kind of like a terrorist threat.
And I know Lucky.
It's not an argument.
And it is, it's kind of destructive and abusive.
So why?
Now, I mean, obviously, there are people in the world who benefit from being granted forgiveness without having to earn it.
It's kind of like when people tell me how to do social media and be successful and they have like no followers.
It's like, why would I listen to you?
You're a fat man giving me diet advice.
So people don't like having to earn credibility.
And the way that you earn credibility back when you've wronged someone is, you know, you admit fault, you apologize, you make restitution, and then you show a reasonable plan by which it's not going to happen again.
So if you yell at some friend at a social gathering and call him an a-hole, then you obviously need to apologize.
You need to sort of say, here's why I think it happened.
Not that I'm blaming you or making excuses, but, you know, my father yelled at me all the time.
And if I get tense, I have that urge.
And then you make restitution, which is you apologize to your friend in front of the people that you insulted in front of.
And then you say, like, I'm going to get therapy or anger management.
You take the steps necessary to become a better person.
Now, when people say in Christianity, you have to love your enemies, sure.
But for men, love means rules.
For women, in general, love means support and approval.
So when I'm teaching my daughter chess, which she's become very good at, by the way, but when I teach my daughter chess, I say, here are the rules.
And if she follows the rules and wins, fantastic.
If she follows the rules and loses, not good if she tries to break the rules, or not that I would, but if she tries to break the rules when she was younger or just doesn't understand them or whatever, then I say no.
So for men, affection or love is teaching objective rules.
For women, though, a lot of times, it's sort of this boosterism.
And I get that.
There's nothing wrong with that.
There's no shade on men or women.
We've both evolved in general to do different things.
So women have evolved to be very enthusiastic about the crucial developmental milestones of babyhood and early childhood, toddlerhood, right?
So it's like, yay, good job.
Yeah, for you.
You're rolling over.
You're sitting up.
You're rolling a ball.
You're learning to walk.
You're riding.
Yay, good job.
Fantastic.
And that kind of boosterism where you don't actually have standards.
That's a beautiful picture.
It's just a lollipop person.
Again, it's beautiful.
It's fine.
There's nothing wrong with all of that.
It's wonderful to have that kind of enthusiasm.
But when children generally pass into the male world, then they have standards, right?
And those standards are objective and necessary.
So it's so important to remember that for most of their lives, like evolutionarily speaking, for most of their lives, females got pregnant in their mid-teens or maybe late teens and then had a pretty endless succession of babies.
And then by the time they were infertile in their 40s, they had grandchildren and then great-grandchildren and they were baby toddler early childhood caregivers.
And again, please understand, it's a beautiful thing.
It's why we're all here.
I love women for that.
But that's how they evolved.
Now, I'll touch on this briefly and I'll sort of get to the forgiveness thing.
So why do women find it unbearable to see people fail and want to prop them up and support them?
Because, you know, if you've got a 15-year-old and a five-year-old, like you've got a whole range of kids, you've got a 15-year-old and five, and you just lay out a bunch of food.
If the 15-year-old is really hungry, as teenage boys in particular tend to be, it's just like throwing groceries down a well, sometimes feeding teenage boys, the 15-year-old is going to take as much food as he can, and the five-year-old is going to go hungry.
And if that happens consistently, the five-year-old has a lower chance of survival.
Even if he gets enough to eat, his immune system might not have the energy to fight off an infection or something like that, right?
So women are dealing with people with unequal abilities through no fault of their own, right?
It's the eternal cry of the younger sibling.
It's like, why do you think you're better than me just because you happened to be born sooner?
You didn't earn that, right?
So women have a ferocious impulse to take from the more able and give to the less able by force if needed.
And there's nothing wrong with that.
If the 15-year-old is taking all the food and the five-year-old is going hungry, the mom needs to go to the 15-year-old and take the food by force, if need be, to give it to the five-year-old.
And that's why we live.
That's why we exist.
That's why we have survived and flourished so much.
I mean, the partnership of men and women have given us the most amazing miracle of the human mind.
So no shade on either, right?
And this is, of course, you know, a older woman taking food from a strapping 15-year-old boy is kind of an, I mean, that's why you need the men around or whatever, right?
So for women, there are needy creatures that cannot fend for themselves, that you must forcefully intervene to make sure they get what they want and need.
And this is the root of sort of the welfare state, socialism, and alimony, child support.
Like younger siblings through no fault of their own cannot compete with older siblings, and therefore you need a forceful authority to take resources from the more able and give them to the less able.
And all that most people need to do is to pretend to be children to women and thus they gain women's political vote and power to take away resources from men to give it to the supposed needy, the underprivileged, the marginalized, the excluded.
All of these are trigger words for forced redistribution, which again, in a family is absolutely necessary and in a society is absolutely catastrophic because to treat adults as if they're children will trigger women's redistributive urges, but it comes at the great expense of integrity, reality, and so on, right?
So For women, support, enthusiasm, redistribution of resources is part of their emotional makeup.
And again, in a family, in a clan, in a tribe, in a small community, it's a beautiful, wonderful thing.
And it's fantastic.
There does need to be a passover, though, from enthusiasm to rules and standards.
So when there's a toddler, you don't morally blame the toddler because the toddler does not have any robust abstract moral reasoning.
Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do.
Jesus is crying on the cross.
I mean, I already talked about it with regards to the Roman soldiers just doing their job, so I won't repeat that.
But that is the woman's cry if the toddler knocks over the can of paint, the open can of paint in the man's garage or workshop, and the man gets angry.
The mom is like, he doesn't know what he's doing.
Leave him be.
I'll clean it up, whatever, right?
And so forgive them, father, for they know not what they do.
That's women attempting to shield for as long as possible babies and toddlers from the moral judgment, usually of men, though not always, of course.
And these are just general trends.
There's tons of exceptions.
So forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do.
So for women, forgiveness is very important because they're in charge of babies and toddlers who don't have moral understanding in an adult fashion.
The age of reason, traditionally, it's around the age of seven.
That was around the age that in the Jewish community, if there was a family separation, the children would pass from the mother to the father.
It's around the age of seven, mid-latency period and so on.
Moral understanding is achieved.
And now excellence needs to be promoted.
Egalitarianism, forced egalitarianism, if necessary, is essential for the survival of babies and toddlers.
But for the survival of the tribe, in particular, boys need to go from yay to that's really bad, right?
Yay is great.
You know, the kid learns how to catch and throw a ball.
Yay, fantastic, right?
But you think of the hunters.
If the kid is not good at throwing the spear, if the teenager is not good at throwing the spear, you can't give him the spear because you don't have a lot of spears.
And once you throw the spear, the animals are spooked and they all leave.
So you've got to have, you know, dead-eyed Derek able to, you know, arrow that thing down and split a spear with another spear if necessary.
And so you move from egalitarianism to meritocracy.
That's the only way the tribe can survive, right?
I mean, if, you know, roomy-eyed, one-eyed Jack is bad at planting seeds, you don't give him a whole bunch of seeds to plant, if any.
Whereas if another guy is really good at planting seeds, you've got to give him the seeds.
Otherwise, you're going to starve to death.
So you go from forced egalitarianism, because it's not the younger kids' fault that they can't compete with the older kids for the acquisition of resources.
You go from that to a raw, masculine meritocracy.
So, you know, the first time, you know, the dad lifts up the kid and the kid sinks the basket in the net.
And yay, good job.
And that's great.
There's nothing wrong with a little toddler, right?
But if you're running a high school basketball team, there's no yay, good job.
Like you need the people who can, you need the kids who can actually sink the baskets.
And you go from yay boosterism, again, beautiful, wonderful thing, to raw meritocracy, which is needed for survival.
And raw meritocracy gets washed away under the endless waves of female voting because females see People doing badly, and especially if they don't have kids themselves, they want to help, they want to support, they want to make things equal.
They're really, really uncomfortable at seeing failure.
Whereas men, it's important to know and see failure to make sure you don't give your spear to the guy who can't throw.
And you don't give your seeds to the guy who can't plant, and you don't give your scarce swords and shields to the guys who can't fight.
But women find it very hard to see failure.
Men find it necessary to see failure because failure reveals success, right?
Like when I was a gold panner, I would swirl the dirt and the grit and the dust and the earth and the detritus, and then I would try and find the pieces of gold, right?
And that's the process of getting rid of the stuff that's not gold so that you can get to the stuff that is gold.
And that's necessary.
Now, of course, the little rocks that I threw aside that weren't gold, like granite or quartz or whatever, or pyrite, I didn't sit there and say, well, geez, they feel really bad that they're not going to end up on some ring or in a computer circuit or something like that, right?
So it's like, get rid of that stuff, get to the gold.
Meritocracy.
The best singer in the band should be the singer of the band.
The best drummer of the band should be, you understand, right?
And if you don't have meritocracy, you don't have a society.
You don't have a civilization.
Like imagine the NBA if they didn't have tryouts, they didn't need tall people, and anyone who wanted to join could join.
Imagine how much a random karaoke concert would sell out a stadium.
Like you get Cold Play or Katy Perry or whatever, Taylor Swift, they can sell out stadiums.
But if it's just like random karaoke night, how many people are going to pay for that?
You need a meritocracy in order to have a society among adults.
And in the family, you need redistribution of resources in order to have the younger siblings survive.
So these sort of tensions.
And without the state, these things would all resolve themselves peacefully and well.
But with the state, everything gets kind of pathological.
I mean, the state and political power turns sort of healthy human instincts into cancerous multiplication and it just becomes really terrible.
Instead of having lymph nodes, you have tumors.
So forgiveness for mothers is important, right?
I mean, and I remember always, was it City of God or something like that?
There was a Patrick Swayze movie, and it was kind of a good ad lib.
He was a funny guy.
And a baby peed into his face while he was changing the diaper, a little boy.
And Patrick Swayze laughed and said, Hey, he's going to be a fireman.
That's pretty funny.
Now, a baby peeing in your face is something you forgive, right?
The baby doesn't have to earn forgiveness.
They don't have to apologize right out 50 times.
I will not pee in a man's face.
But of course, if an adult pees in your face, assuming they're not completely insane, that's assault and they need to be punished.
They need to suffer negative consequences for that.
Every parent, most parents, have had the experience where they're taking a toddler to the grocery store and they come out of the grocery store, they're packing the groceries away, and they see that their little toddler is holding on to a stick of gum or a little piece of candy or something like that.
And they say, wait, did you just get that?
Did you get that from the store?
And they're like, yeah.
And they didn't hide it.
They didn't write.
They just took it like they would take it at Halloween or at home or something like that.
And then you have to sit down and you don't sort of, you thief, you shoplifter, call the cops.
You know, you say, oh, actually, we can't take things from the store without paying them.
And you sort of go through the explanation.
And next time you're at the store, you make sure you pay for it or something like that, right?
So, but you forgive the kid because this is nobody's doing.
Hey, I like candy.
There's candy.
I'll take candy, right?
I mean, they don't understand the abstractions of the score of the store and the economy and the money and transfer and property rights.
I mean, okay, totally understandable, right?
So forgive, forgive, right?
That makes sense.
So, and I certainly do understand, as I mentioned before, and I've just touched on it briefly, you know, the natural little shaving stuff that happens when you live with people.
You need to forgive that.
Otherwise, you just kind of, what was it?
I wrote more than a quarter century ago in one of my novels called The God of Atheists, which you should check out at free domain.com/slash books.
I wrote about a wife.
She collected resentment in the marriage like an elk collect burrs.
And at this point in the marriage, she was far more burr than elk.
I know that creates some stuff, great stuff in that book.
The husband lady yells at her.
If you can find any compassion in that over-tanned raisin you call the heart, you call the heart.
Anyway, it's a great book, very funny and very powerful.
The God of Atheists, you should check it out.
Anyway, so there are people who benefit from pretending that they don't know, and therefore you should forgive them as if they were toddlers, right?
So what is it that people always say?
If you say, you did me wrong, they say, I didn't mean to.
I didn't mean to.
So they're claiming the innocence of toddlers.
You should forgive me because I didn't know what I was doing.
I had no, I'm sorry that you took it that way.
I didn't mean it that way.
I'm sorry.
So they're kind of calling you, maybe crazy and paranoid or whatever, right?
But they're taking that sort of, you know, the Manson beams, like the wide, not the Manson beams, the wide-eyed toddler stuff, right?
I didn't mean to.
It was an accident.
Right.
And therefore, they're not to be held morally accountable.
So adults are morally responsible.
We can't function any other way, and they are morally responsible.
Again, I'm not talking about people who've massive brain injuries or Alzheimer's or sleepwalking or epilepsy.
I mean, I'm talking generally, normally functioning adults, morally responsible.
And that's the sort of adult view.
And it can't function any other way.
It is an epistemological fact.
It's a metaphysical fact.
Human adults are morally responsible.
Again, if somebody's got an IQ of 60, but it's very much a deviation from the norm, but sort of normal average.
Most, most human beings are, like in the white population, I think only 2% of people have IQs below 70, right?
So it's a very, very small minority.
So adults are morally responsible.
So where does it come from, this torment argument?
Again, been racking my brain to the melting point.
And I have a thought or two.
I'm not saying it's definitive.
I'm not saying it's final.
It's not syllogistical reasoning.
It's not deductive reasoning.
Some inductive stuff thrown in.
So I'll tell you what I think.
I'm going to start with an analogy.
So Imagine that there's a safe that comes to you in a will or something like that.
A safe comes to you and you are told that there is a million dollars worth of diamonds in the safe.
There's a million dollars worth of diamonds in the safe or five million dollars, whatever it is, right?
I don't know.
In the future, there'll be inflation.
So it's a crap ton of money in the safe.
but you are not given the combination.
So you'll try a whole bunch of things.
Like that poor guy who had Bitcoin on a drive that was password locked.
He couldn't remember the password.
So you will sit there spinning that dial back and forth or rolling the combination or whatever it is because there's all this.
Now, let's pretend for some reason you can't just cut the safe and whatever it is, right?
Maybe it is crypto on a thumb drive and there's some password that you don't know what the password is and so on.
So you could lose a lot of time trying to get at that valuable those diamonds, right?
That millions and millions of dollars worth of diamonds, life-changing amount of money.
You could spend a lot of time, a lot of time, trying to access that wealth, right?
Because it's in there.
You just have to figure out how to get in there.
And that would torment you.
And every now, even if you kind of gave up, like, oh my God, I'm never going to figure this out.
There's too many combinations.
Maybe you'd set up a robot or an AI to whatever it is to try and do and figure it out.
But it would torment you for years, right?
It would make going to work when you have all of this millions of dollars in a safe that you can't access, it would make going to work kind of crazy making.
And because there's massive value in there, you've got to figure out the combination, right?
Now, imagine that you found some way to x-ray the safe or there was a tiny hole you could put a camera in.
You just kind of discovered it.
So after a certain amount, whatever it is, months of trying, you finally get it x-rayed, and it's empty.
It's empty.
There's nothing in there, nothing in there.
So you're obviously disappointed, very disappointed, but you're relieved.
You're relieved.
Because now you don't have to keep trying the safe to get, because there's nothing in there.
So you go through a, I don't know, a grieving process or a disappointment process, and then you're free.
You're free.
And you go back to work without thinking about all this money in the safe and so on, right?
Or, you know, for the crypto example, you get crypto on a thumb drive that's password protected.
Let's say that there's an application that looks at it and says, no, there's nothing on the other side.
I don't know what's on there, but there's nothing there, right?
Like, I can't tell you what is there.
I can only tell you that there's nothing on the drive.
There's nothing, nothing on the drive.
Like the sectors aren't even remotely full enough to have anything other than a password protection.
There's nothing on the drive.
Then you'll, again, you'll be disappointed, upset, but you won't be going nuts and crazy trying to get the crypto off the drive.
So the reason that I'm giving you this analogy is for Christians, and of course, for religious people, who talk about Christians specifically at the moment, for Christians, There's always crypto on the drive, there's always gold in the safe.
Because there's always a good person in there, you just have to figure out how to access it.
And you can't walk away from the safe with millions of dollars of diamonds or the thumb drive with millions of dollars in crypto.
You can't walk away from that because there's always going to be value in there.
just have to figure out how to access it.
So, for more secular, scientific, and so on, there is no good, perfect person that is a ghost inside a bad, corrupt person.
If you've smoked for 40 years, you have smoky, bacon-flavored lungs.
They're damaged, potentially cancerous.
You got your COPD, your emphysema, your lung cancer.
Like, it's just, it's bad.
There are no healthy, pink, perfect lungs in there that you just have to figure out the right sequence of words to say to unlock them.
There is no platonic perfect you inside you.
If you have some tumor, there is no perfect you without a tumor that you just have to unlock to not have the tumor.
You've got to deal with the tumor, it's a real thing, or whatever.
So, with the soul, the concept of the soul, there's always a good, perfect, undamaged person in there somewhere.
You just have to find a way to access it.
Diamonds in the safe, crypto on the drive for me, there are definitely environmental and genetic influences.
But personality is almost no aspect of personality not touched by genetics, and influences are very strong, right?
So, I grew up, I was taught English, I was immersed in English, I learned English.
It was environmental.
Do I have a good facility with the English language?
Yeah, pretty much.
But it, so there's genetics and environment that have contributed, defined really in many ways, my facility with English.
I have a good language brain, and I was taught English.
The good language brain, I did not earn.
Being taught English, I did not earn.
It was just an accident of birth.
And the choices that I make with the English that I can speak, whether I use it to promote virtue or gather power or money or corruption or mess people up or whatever, enact some syllabilistic, sadistic impulse on the world.
That's my choice, right?
That's integrity, virtue, those are choices.
But my facility with English was unchosen.
What I do with that facility, you know, if you happen to be born with a great singing voice, you still get to choose whether you sing nihilistic death metal or beautiful Bach or something like that.
Even John Anderson did have a virtum corpus, I think, from Mozart.
So each sort of little decision that you make determines the path in life, whether you go up or down.
There are times when you can turn back, and then there are times when you cannot turn back.
I remember reading many years ago, some columnist in a newspaper was saying he was quitting smoking in his 50s, and he'd been a heavy smoker for decades.
And I think, if I remember rightly, this is not medical advice, it's just what I remember.
I think the doctor said, well, you know, it'll be nicer for you, but I don't know it's going to do much to undo the damage, right?
And again, I don't know whether that's sort of valid or not, but that's sort of the way that it is.
So after a certain amount of time, it becomes irreversible, right?
One cigarette, you're probably not going to get sick.
A billion cigarettes, whatever, you kind of get it, right?
If you have one drink a month, probably not going to affect you that much.
But if you drink two bottles of wine a day, so you understand.
And at some point, you can't back out, right?
At some point, you can't back out.
I always think of choices like driving a pickup truck along a road that is heavily rained on.
I say you're slightly going down, right?
You're going down a road.
Now, because I did a lot of truck driving when I worked up north, and you always had to worry about getting back out, right?
I can get in.
Can I get back out?
Particularly if it rains, because if it's slightly downward sloping and there's rain, you're the rivalry, the mud, and you can't get out.
You can't get out.
And especially if the rain lasts for days, you're toast, right?
So everyone's got to be careful of that kind of stuff.
So, you know, if you're going down a road, it starts to rain, you can back out.
But if you keep going down the road and it's raining and it's raining, you can't back out.
You can turn around, you can't get back up the hill, right?
So in a material sense, if you don't have the perfect ghost of the perfectly healthy immoral you in there that you could access if you just figure out the right incantations or hand gestures or prayers or combinations of whatever, then you're like, okay, I have what I have.
Like there's no perfect young stuff stuck inside my aging flesh, right?
I am what I am.
So from a material standpoint, the brain goes like this.
You can shape clay when it's new and young and wet and fresh.
You put it on your wheel and shape it and so on, right?
And, or concrete, you can pour concrete when it's new and fresh and wet.
And then what does it do?
We used to call it, we used to call it spackle.
I don't know why we called it spackle, called polyphylla, right?
So polyphylla, you squeeze, you've got a hole to fill in the wall.
You squeeze out the polyphila, it's soft, you put it, and it hardens, right?
We've all had that kind of stuff, right?
Clean up that glue, it's going to harden.
Mortar.
Anyway, you understand, right?
So the stuff that starts off soft and then it hardens over time.
And that's our choices.
With, I mean, I suppose the caveat, I suppose the caveat is that if you choose to remain flexible, you can remain flexible.
So if you choose to follow reason and evidence, then you are still moldable by reason and evidence as an adult.
But if you choose to become dogmatic, if you choose to become defensive, if you choose to attack contrary opinions, if you choose to reject empirical evidence, then your brain hardens and it can't unharden.
This is what Yuri Besmanov talks about in terms of being, what was it, not disillusioned, but dispirited, disempowered.
The word will come to me.
But when he talks about it, it's like it doesn't matter.
Like no matter what facts and evidence you provide to people, it won't matter anymore.
Once they're broken in this kind of way, my brain is like still looking for that word, but I'll have to abandon it because it's not coming.
Somebody's going to say it below, but like, ah, of course, right?
So when your spirit is broken and you just become dogmatic, then you can't become undogmatic and you can't get reason and evidence later.
So it's like if somebody chooses not to smoke, they can either sit or they can run, they can run.
If somebody chooses to exercise, they can either sit or they can do whatever exercise.
If somebody chooses to learn tennis, they can either sit or they can go to learn tennis.
But I don't know how to play Ma Yong, so I don't play Ma Yong.
What else do I know how to do?
I mean, almost an infinity of things.
I don't know how to play the saxophone, so I don't have the option to play the saxophone.
So if you learn skills and the skills are reason and evidence, then you remain flexible to reason and evidence.
You retain the ability to change your mind.
If you become dogmatic and aggressive and so on, and insulting and contemptuous and in a hole, basically, then you lose your ability to change your mind over time and your brain hardens.
Your brain hardens into dogmatism or it remains soft, healthy, and pliable through the pursuit of truth and reason and evidence.
So I think that the Christians say, either I forgive or I'm tormented forever.
In other words, either I give up my desire or I'm tormented forever because I don't have the option of saying there's nothing of value in the safe.
There's nothing of value on the thumb drive.
There aren't millions of dollars of diamonds in the safe.
There aren't millions of dollars of crypto on the thumb drive.
I think it's when restitution has been offered.
When restitution is not offered, there's a sort of fundamental acceptance of the reality that, and I, for me, it's a 24-hour rule.
Like if somebody does something bad to me, they have 24 hours to apologize, or it's never going to happen.
I mean, and the great thing about getting older is you don't have to worry about what-ifs because you have enough experience, right?
I'm in my 60th year, right?
So I have enough experience to know when things are going to happen.
And if somebody has a conscience, that conscience will plague them and say, I did something wrong.
You really need to apologize.
And if somebody doesn't have a conscience or they've talked themselves into there's no need to apologize, I didn't do the wrong thing.
He misinterpreted, and they sort of create that stone wall of self-justification that traps you in a windowless cellar eventually, then they're not going to apologize because they've justified it to themselves.
If somebody is willing to be uncomfortable in the face of their conscience, that will provoke them or promote better action.
If I'm still trying to get that best mouth, stop that parallel tracking, brain.
We got to focus on this.
So, is there still gold in there?
If somebody has done you wrong and they don't apologize, again, I've never had a long, if somebody hasn't apologized to me in 24 hours, it's never happened.
And this is not just true.
I've asked this of tons of people over the course of my life.
Nobody I've ever talked to, it's a lot of people by now.
Nobody I've ever talked to has been apologized to later in any sort of meaningful way.
I mean, if somebody gets into a 12-step program, they might give you some sort of bullcrap non-apology kind of thing, like, I'm sorry if you were upset.
But nobody sort of genuinely apologizes, makes restitution, has a plan to have it not happen again.
That stuff doesn't really happen After 24 hours.
Because if they've wronged you after 24 hours, they've just justified it.
And now it would be considered, they would consider it wrong to apologize.
Well, I have nothing to apologize for.
He provoked it, whatever, right?
So if people have indicated that they're never going to apologize, then to say they are now irredeemably selfish, corrupt, whatever you want to say, negative.
is to say there's no hope for them, but you can't say there's no hope for them because they have a soul.
So you're stuck in this torment of expectation and waiting.
So you just have to forgive them.
And I think that's where this torment of expectation and waiting.
You can't detach.
You can't stop thinking about the safe because there's still money in there, millions of dollars of money in the safe.
So you can't stop thinking about it.
So that's your torment.
Whereas I'm like, there's nothing in the safe.
There's nothing in there.
Empty, dusty, like Al Capone's big reveal under Heralda, right?
There's nothing in there.
Okay.
So I don't have to think about this.
I can move on, right?
And I think this is the difference.
I think this is the incomprehension that Christians and I have.
That I'm like, okay, so the person has revealed to me the hardness and structure of their brain in wrongdoing without apologies or restitution.
Even when I sit down and say, this is what you did that was wrong.
And here's why.
There are no apologies.
And so because of that, I stop thinking about the person because they have revealed their brain structure.
Like if you want to recruit someone for a basketball team and you say, hey, I'd like you to try out for the basketball team.
And they, you know, they take a pee into your gym bag and throw the basketball at your head, curse you out and storm out and never apologize.
Do you say, oh, but there's a great basketball player somewhere inside you.
You've got to come back.
Right.
You can't just say, oh, let's take that guy off the list, shall we?
Because good riddance, right?
Good riddance.
I don't think about the people because there's no secret good person in there.
Like if you've got corrupted lungs from decades of smoking, sick, compromised lungs, and you have to work with that and accept it.
But if you believe that there's some anti-Kaufman magic that's going to restore your healthy lungs, then you're kind of tormented by that.
So I think the forgiveness thing is I can't detach from the person because that would be to say they have no hope and that would be a sin because they have a soul and therefore there is always hope.
But my empiricism says there's no actual hope.
There's nothing that's going to manifest.
So I can't withdraw from the relationship.
I can't let because there's still gold in the safe.
I can't just throw the safe out.
I can't just throw.
See, to me, if I get a safe, somebody tells me, or I believe that there's billions of dollars in the safe, and then I x-ray it, there's nothing in there, just throw the safe out.
I can't open it.
There's nothing of value in it.
If I could open it, maybe you could use it for something else.
Nothing of value in it.
I can't open it.
Let's get rid of it.
It's a useless thing.
It's just taking up space.
I guess you could format the thumb drive or whatever it is, right?
So that's what I'll say.
I don't have a tortured relationship with the safe I can't get into that I know is empty.
I just don't have it around anymore.
And it's the same thing with relationships, where someone does me wrong, I say that you did me wrong, and they don't apologize, they double down, they insult, they gaslight, they counter-attack, you know, Daravo, right?
Deny, attack, reverse, victim, and offender.
Why are you kind of coming at me so hard, man?
Like, because you did me wrong.
And they don't have any sort of rational counter-arguments because, you know, you can always, I and you and everyone can always misinterpret that someone has wronged us when they haven't, right?
That's why you give them the right of reply.
It's fair, right?
So I accept that there's nothing in the safe.
I can't open it.
So toss it.
And where I want to be is in relationships, to stretch the analogy perhaps a little too far.
I want to be in relationships with people where I don't have to fight to open the safe and the value is very clear.
The exchange of value, of positivity, of health and happiness, of humor, of wisdom, of virtue is clear, right?
It's clear.
I don't have the luxury, which I think is actually quite negative.
I don't have the luxury as an empiricist, as a rationalist, as a non-reality of abstractions guy.
Abstractions are valuable, but they don't exist in sort of Platonic form.
The essence of the personality is the aggregation of neurons.
It is not a ghost in the mind.
I'm still a free will guy, of course, right?
There's no virtue without free will.
There would be no such thing as philosophy without free will.
And anyway, I've made sort of these arguments.
Essentialphilosophy.com, you get all these arguments.
So I don't have the illusion of value in the safe.
So if I can't open the safe and I know there's nothing in the safe, I don't need the safe.
I'm not tortured by a perpetual relationship with the safe.
But for Christians to walk away from someone who's done them wrong and is unapologetic is tough, especially for women who are primed to not hold people morally accountable because they're dealing with babies and toddlers a lot of times.
And the moral instruction generally passes to the male, right?
Which is what we're adapted for.
So I think that's sort of the essence of the disagreement.
I'm like, okay, this person has done me wrong.
I talk to them about it.
They won't apologize.
They are counter-attacking.
They are now doing me additional wrong.
So there's nothing here.
I mean, I've actually opened the safe and there's nothing in there.
But you can't open the safe in the Christian world because there could always be a soul.
Well, there is a soul in there that could always be turned to good, which is why Christians tend to love the stories of the deathbed repentance and the softening of the heart at the end of life and so on, right?
That's generally, it's a massive fantasy.
I remember a woman, there used to be some pretty good articles on the back of the Globe and Mail, sort of personal article sent in by people.
And I remember one woman was talking about how she taught her father to hug at the end of his life and he finally softened and there was something nice.
And that's fine, I guess.
But a hug is a long way from being a virtuous person, though.
Some softening and empathy is important for that.
So I think that's sort of the essence of our disagreement: I'm like, no, no, no, I've looked like I've actually opened the safe and there's nothing there.
There is no virtuous consideration there.
The person has shown who they are and how they behave.
They have shown that they simply double down because if they've done you wrong, you tell them and they don't apologize and they don't apologize within 24 hours.
All they've done is justified it to themselves.
So there is no virtue to becoming.
There is no empathy to becoming.
There is no virtue to becoming.
All they will do is double down.
And there's no ghost in The person that is perfect and moral and good and can take over at any time, right?
If you have a long-distance running team, right, you got to win like a relay race or something like that, you're going to win, then you don't take the guy who's been a chain smoker for 40 years because he won't be able to run.
There's no, well, we've got to bring him on the team, and then we've got to convince him to run with his healthy lungs, his ghost, healthy lungs.
It's like, no, there's no ghost.
The brain gets corrupted by bad decisions, like the truck going down the hill, it's raining.
And the good news is, if you make good decisions, you're less likely, you don't even want to go back to bad decisions, right?
And so every decision you make hardens your brain.
We are constantly making decisions, and I've just written a whole novel about this, so it's kind of on my mind.
So every decision that you make hardens your brain in a particular direction.
You go from soft clay to fire clay, and then that's who you are.
And that's good news.
That's really good news.
I mean, I was saying this to my wife the other day: like, we don't wake up every morning saying, I wonder who I married today.
I wonder what kind of personality I'm going to be with today, right?
I mean, love is about predictability.
Predictability is about integrity.
Integrity is about making similar decisions.
Like, I don't wake up and say, well, what can I do just for myself?
And I don't care about my family or my friends or the world.
Like, no, I wake up saying, what good can I do to my family, my friends, the world as a whole today?
And that's the way that I roll.
And that, I mean, it happens to give me great happiness as well.
And it also helps me avoid the regret of having significant abilities and wasting them on transitory selfishness.
So my wife wakes up and is you know, good-natured and wonderful and funny and affectionate and all of that.
And I know that's so the hardening of the brain, so to speak, is good.
I mean, I hope that you don't come to these shows after 20 years almost and say, gee, I wonder if he's going to start promoting collectivism, mysticism, and political tyranny.
Like, no, consistent non-aggression principles, self-ownership, property rights, virtue, free will, all that kind of stuff, right?
So, consistency is good.
And consistency is required for love, right?
One of the things about borderlines is I love you, I hate you, I hate you, don't leave me, kind of thing, right?
It's just all contradictory.
So, I think that's at the essence of the disagreement.
And why the Christians say you either have to forgive or it's eternal torment is because they can't say there are no diamonds in the safe.
They can't walk away because they can't walk away and they won't get the satisfaction they need.
Their only choice to reduce the torment is to forgive, forgive, forgive.
And you can't require that it's earned because if it was earned, that would be a better person.
But you are in force, you are unfortunately reinforcing immorality and corruption.
You're actually paying it.
Once you give somebody a reward called forgiveness without requiring they earn it, you're actually rewarding corruption and selfishness.
And that's not the mission.
Like, whether you're Christian or UPB, or I mean, I don't know if there's much of a third option for universal ethics, but that's not the mission.
The mission is not to reward corruption.
So, for men, it's like, yeah, love your enemies.
Sure.
Love your enemies, which means require them to be better before you give them a reward.
You can't say, I love the potential for hard work in my lazy brother-in-law, so I'm going to give him $10,000 a month for doing nothing.
That's actually harming him, you understand?
Having him suffer negative consequences of failing to work and not bailing him out is tough love, but that's more of a male prerogative.
Not you don't have tough love for babies, right?
You know, you learn by falling down the stairs, you don't do that, right?
And so I think that's the fundamental distinction.
I'd love to hear what you think.
And I love you guys for the conversations.
It means everything to me.
Thank you so much.
Freedomain.com/slash donate to help out the show.
And please post the dis something that I can't remember from Yuri Besmanov.
And I'll talk to you soon.
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