Stefan Molyneux and a caller named Stefan dissect the psychological impact of parental abuse, arguing that framing trauma as inevitable "weather" rather than conscious choices undermines adult agency. The host challenges Stefan's passive language regarding his father's rage and bullying, asserting that modern society allows individuals to reject these evolutionary survival mechanisms by leaving toxic tribes. Ultimately, the discussion concludes that overcoming deterministic views of family failure requires embracing anger at parental deficiencies and actively seeking mentors who demand high standards for personal success. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, WAV2VEC2_ASR_BASE_960H, sat-12l-sm, script v26.04.01, and large-v3-turbo
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Personal Struggles and Nervousness00:03:04
Hello?
Hey, how's it going?
Hi.
Yeah, I'm okay, thanks.
I'm quite nervous, to be honest.
But yeah, I'm okay.
So, yeah, is there anything that I need to do before we start or anything like that?
No, not in particular.
Just, of course, it's a public call, so it's free.
But if you could stay off names and places, I would appreciate that.
And I'm all ears.
Oh, of course.
Yeah, no, I'm definitely fine with that.
Yeah, I definitely would like that as well.
So, yes, shall I start out by reading what I sent you?
Yeah, sure.
Yeah, okay.
I'll just get my notes up right now.
Apologies, one second.
Okay.
So, by the way, is my audio okay?
It's good, thank you.
Okay, great.
Dear Stefan, I've been an intermittent listener for about a decade.
I found your explanations of secular ethics to be really insightful.
And I've tried to apply this to the way I view the world and try to act.
However, on a personal level, I've generally struggled throughout my life.
I've had some adverse childhood experiences, which you've helped me to identify, but I've not been able to overcome.
I was diagnosed with autism as a toddler, and until recently, I've had minimal help in managing my life around the condition.
Despite being accepted into what was a high tier university and getting a STEM degree, I've experienced chronic underemployment.
Seeing the way the world is going has left me feeling that there's very little I can do.
To improve things without my efforts being futile.
Fundamentally, I feel a lack of purpose and direction in my life.
My limited dating experience has left me feeling disappointed, anxious, and nihilistic about relationships, which I suspect is connected to childhood experiences.
I'm now closer to 30 than 20 and desperately need to feel that I have the future.
I know that part of me wanted to apply to this call for affirmation, but I know that you will be as brutally honest with me as you can, which is scary.
And to be as specific as I can about what I'd like to talk about, how can I build hope and positivity for myself in a world that is by design against me?
And I said, just how do I find purpose when I can see that humans are, albeit intelligent animals, driven by adaptive behavior and I have no power to change society's flaws?
Great questions, great comments.
I think it's stuff we all struggle with.
And I wouldn't underestimate the degree to which I assume you're a white male.
So, yeah, the world is kind of against you.
Yes.
In order to teach you.
But yeah.
And I know, like, you know, we've got to try to try and do the best we can despite our personal circumstances, right?
But yeah, is there anywhere in particular that you'd like me to start with, like, elaborating on anything?
Sure.
Mixed Feelings About Childhood00:09:44
Let's do childhood.
Okay.
So, like, chronological?
Whatever works best for you.
Okay, fine.
So, yeah, my childhood was complicated.
I think it was quite different to a lot of people's childhoods.
So, like I mentioned, I was diagnosed with autism when I was quite young.
And some of my earliest memories are, yeah, some are positive, but of course, the negative ones stand out.
So, I would always be as a toddler, the child who was preferred to play on their own.
But Like academically, I've always performed quite well, hence, you know, achieving a degree and so on.
But yeah, I've of course, I know you've talked about like adverse childhood experiences quite a lot as well.
So, like, my parents, I would say they didn't follow the role of like peaceful parenting particularly.
It wasn't as bad as some other people's experiences, of course.
But it was, yeah, like, I did experience quite a lot of like verbal abuse and also sometimes physical abuse.
And yeah, I guess I've just never really felt very comfortable.
I never felt particularly bonded to my parents, to be honest.
And yeah, kind of from there.
So I was in mainstream education for the first few years of my childhood until I was about 10 years old.
And then I was homeschooled.
Those first years of education, It was strange because my family had never been particularly religious, but I was sent to a state school, but it was a Catholic affiliated school.
They would be attending Mass fortnightly and stuff like that.
And I think they just told me that they said send me there because someone said it was a good school.
But it was a really quite terrible experience for me.
I remember kind of.
Yeah, again, I always found it very difficult to make friends.
And I was really scared of teachers because they were never really physically abusive to me, because I think that's kind of illegal.
But they were verbally and emotionally kind of would shout at me, would raise their voice.
I felt like there was never any kind of negotiation, any room for thinking outside the box.
I could obviously see lots of.
Um, so lots of like holes in the narrative when they were like, you know, trying to like talk about religious stuff, and um, I think a lot of the time, and like this has also been true in like later years, where like it's been like, I've sometimes like I think I've understood things more than the teacher, and and and that's been um, yeah, I think that obviously has led to conflict, and and yeah,
I just found it very difficult to relate to other people my age, and I.
Well, I wouldn't say there was never a time where I had zero friends at all.
I still, like, I would only have like one or two friends and I wouldn't be like their best friend, right?
So it would be like one sided friendships.
And, sorry, am I talking too long?
No, no, go ahead.
Okay.
So, yeah, a lot of the time when I look back on those friendships, including until quite recently, I suppose, they definitely had like, Yeah, I definitely wasn't kind of held in.
I never really felt truly, yeah, like it was an equal kind of friendship, like I said.
And a lot of the time, like people would tell me to, you know, to stop hanging out with these people because they're not good for me and they're not nice to me or whatever.
But I always saw the alternative as being just to have nobody to be friends with.
And I thought that would be worse.
So I never, yeah, like I just kind of.
Endured it, I suppose, and I thought it was fine.
And I think, you know, while of course, like, you know, being autistic isn't everything about me, I definitely think it's left me more kind of open to like being influenced by other people and like ideas and stuff.
So, yeah, I think that's most of what I want to talk about early childhood.
Then after that, by the time I was about like 10, 11 years old, so I don't know if you're, because obviously I'm from the UK, right?
So I don't know how familiar you are with like the education system there, but.
You go into like secondary school when you're about 10 or 11 years old.
And instead of that, I was, or like my mum kind of gave me the, well, I still wasn't really, I don't think it's really my choice, but you know, because she was responsible for me.
But I was going to be homeschooled and I was for a few, for until I was 16.
Yeah, I don't want to be too specific, I suppose that's fine.
And that was nicer for me.
I feel like, Yeah.
I mean, I guess I have very mixed feelings about that time in my life.
I did feel like I was able to, like, I would self teach quite a lot during those years because, like, my parents were in no way qualified to educate really on anything academic.
And so I kind of.
Yeah, I just somehow managed to kind of learn in my own way, I guess.
And my socialization during that time was, of course, still limited.
There was like a very small group of other people who were homeschooled.
And I would, yeah, I would kind of try and socialize with them a bit.
But I always still never felt like I fit in.
A lot of them were like very left leaning.
Well, I wouldn't say that I'm particularly.
Right wing.
You know, I've always tried to be open minded and question things.
And yeah, I've always, throughout my life, I've always just come across, yeah, like people who don't like it when I like question certain things and stuff like that.
And so that ended.
And then I went back into mainstream education and got some qualifications.
And yeah, I did really well academically for a few years.
And it was kind of to the point that, like, I could pick to do whatever I wanted to do at university.
And I thought, like, at the time, what everyone's saying, you know, don't go and do like a sociology degree or whatever, because that's useless, right?
So I decided to, yeah, to go into STEM.
And I went to quite a high ranked uni.
You might have heard of it.
And yeah, luckily I didn't get any student debt, which was really fortunate.
I'm really grateful for.
But Also, going there was really kind of, I guess you'd almost say like a little bit like black pilling about, I don't know if I'm allowed to say that word, but yeah, about the world really.
Because I saw like there were quite a few people who came from very powerful families and stuff.
And I could just see that it was like, you know, I mean, compared to like my primary school, it was like my primary school was like really gentle compared to this.
There it was full on indoctrination.
And I even know I was in STEM, so I managed to avoid quite a lot of it.
But yeah, it was really quite shocking to see.
And obviously, everyone knows how university is like nowadays.
And then, kind of partway into my university experience, something happened in 2020, which I'm sure we all know about.
And that was a really interesting time for me because part of me really enjoyed the social isolation.
But I was also kind of, yeah, just by that point, like I just kind of felt like I almost like, I obviously knew that like the lockdowns and stuff were a terrible idea and all the mandates and stuff.
It felt like I was.
I know there are people, but very few and far between.
Like, I was one of the only people who could really just see how nonsensical and, you know, I could be malicious this whole system was and the whole situation was.
And yeah, since then, I have experienced periods of unemployment, particularly during the COVID period and stuff.
And then I've.
Early Dating and Deception00:05:27
Yeah, I've always kind of struggled with like, even now, like I would be considered like underemployed.
I do mostly like kind of freelance work.
And yeah, that can be kind of up or down.
And yeah, during that time, I, and should I talk a little bit about like my relationship history as well?
Sure.
Yeah.
Okay.
So, and this is one of the reasons I'm very glad that this is anonymous is because actually I do feel quite, quite ashamed and embarrassed about this, but I, I didn't really have my first relationship until I was 23.
So, and that was, yeah, I was always very, you know, like it's not, as a guy, it's not something that, you know, you really tell people about.
You try and keep it to yourself.
Before then, like I had tried to get a girlfriend, I suppose.
And yeah, I guess I always came across like, I was able to, To initially, like, you know, have people interested in me.
But then, yeah, I would always, it would always just get like messed up some way.
And like, or like I would just like, a lot of the time, like, I would kind of look back like six months later and interaction I had with someone and be like, oh, wow, they actually wanted, they were actually asking me out like on a date or something.
And then, you know, by then it's far too late.
And yeah, but when I did, did, did, did funny enter a relationship, um, So, I've had two relationships.
The first one lasted about eight months.
And I kind of went into it partly was just like, you know, I'm in my 20s now.
Like, you know, it might never happen.
So, I thought I may as well just, yeah, get some experience.
And unfortunately, yeah, my first girlfriend, she kind of had kept quite a few things from me.
It turned out like I should have seen the red flags, and now looking like in hindsight, I would because now I kind of know more.
But like, she was, yeah, she was very feminist and she had quite a high body count, you could say.
And, you know, she kind of kept that from me for quite a while.
And yeah, it was just kind of, yeah, it was just kind of, it was enjoyable while it lasted, but then that finished.
Then my second relationship, that lasted about three years.
And yeah, it was shortly after the first one.
And I really liked her for at least the first couple of years.
It wasn't just about like the sex or anything.
It was like she said she was like a voluntaryist and she really seemed to agree with a lot of, you know, like, yeah, we really seemed to have a lot in common.
And she seemed to be, you know, like I seemed like I could really trust her, like in quite stark contrast to my previous relationship.
And yeah, yes, yeah, I almost feel like I've been duped a bit, though, because it seemed like, like I said, for the first couple of years, like I would, she would always kind of go along with whatever I was kind of, you know, like hobbies and interests, like to go to a certain place, talk about certain things.
And yeah, Yeah, then after a couple of years, you kind of started saying, I don't actually like doing any of this.
Why wouldn't you let me pick things that we do and stuff like that?
And I was like, I've kept on giving you the option to pick your own things, but you never did.
And you said at the time you were perfectly happy doing these things I wanted to do, going to these places I want to go.
And so at the time, there was no way I could have known that I was being selfish or.
Or whatever.
And so basically, at least the way I think about it now, it's like I had been told, you know, that she was a certain type of person.
And I just kind of worked with what I could, you know, and kind of thought, yeah, this is fine for me.
This is what I'm looking for in a relationship.
And then, yeah, it turned out that she'd been kind of, yeah, like bending the truth, at least.
I guess, I don't know, maybe just to kind of keep me around.
But, but yeah, and then, yeah, that ended quite recently.
That ended only a few weeks ago, actually.
So, yeah, I just thought, yeah, well, now it just kind of feels like I, like, yeah, I don't really see any purpose in my life.
You know, I have things that I enjoy to do, you know, I enjoy doing.
The Need for Emotional Connection00:13:18
I, you know, I do.
Work at the moment.
I am looking to hopefully get my own place soon because at the moment I'm kind of in between.
I guess I mainly live at a family home still, but I've spent time living with partners as well.
So that's good.
And financially, I'm kind of okay.
That's another thing about my family.
While there isn't really that strong, I feel like they couldn't give me a lot of emotional connection and development.
I've had to find myself.
Sorry, sorry.
Couldn't.
What do you mean by couldn't?
Couldn't what?
You said they couldn't give you much emotional connection.
Well, yeah, I don't know.
They simply didn't, I suppose.
Didn't and couldn't are two different things, right?
Yeah, but I mean, it can be the same result, right?
So to me, that's good.
That's an interesting philosophical question, right?
Like you just kind of blew past that one as if it's not an important distinction, right?
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
No, I think you make a good point.
Like the same.
So there's an old statement that says, was it Mark Twain, the man who doesn't read is indistinguishable from the man who can't read.
Yeah.
If you can read but don't read, do you have more responsibility for not reading than if you'd never been taught how to read?
Oh, yeah.
No, I agree.
Yeah.
So when you say, and I'm not trying to nitpick, I just want to be clear.
No, no, no.
When you say, my parents couldn't give me emotional connection.
That's interesting.
Now, if your father, if your parents were brain dead, right, that they were being kept alive by tubes, obviously they couldn't give you emotional connection.
If your father was deployed, was drafted, and was deployed to some foreign war for years and years, then he would be unable to give you that kind of emotional connection, at least directly.
So there are situations where, or if he was in jail, right?
So there are situations where people can't give you that kind of emotional connection.
And I don't know.
Whether you mean your parents were unable to in some foundational way, in which case we wouldn't judge them, right?
Yeah.
Right.
If your father had a railway spike through his head and was kind of drooling on himself, we would say, you know, that's tragic, but we wouldn't blame him for not being a good father because he would be physically unable to do so because his brain had been half destroyed or something like that, right?
Yeah.
So I'm trying to understand what you mean.
Critical or skeptical, or any.
I just want to understand what you mean.
Do you mean that your parents were unable to or unwilling to?
So, I suppose, yeah, like compared to the circumstances you've described, yeah, it would be a matter of ability.
However, it might be a good time to talk a little bit more in depth about, like, based on previous calls you've had of other people, it seems like.
You know, it's a good time to like talk more about like my parents' kind of background.
Would that be helpful?
Yeah.
I mean, but when you said unable to, is that what you believe that they were physically like, let's say that your father was severely autistic, like nonverbal or whatever it was, like, and somehow you got born or something like that.
Then we would say, yeah, I mean, your father, you know, severely autistic, nonverbal, then he would be unable to give you that kind of emotional connection.
So, that's what I'm trying to understand when you say they're unable to, because I want to be able to morally evaluate the situation.
And moral evaluation has something to do with free will.
We don't morally evaluate people who are not in a state of free will, right?
So, if a guy robs a bank, but it turns out that someone made him rob a bank because they took his children hostage, we wouldn't blame the person for robbing a bank.
We would say they were under a state of compulsion and were not in a state of free will.
Does that make sense?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure.
So, that's what I'm trying to understand with regards to your parents.
Were they unable to, or could they have but didn't?
I think it's mostly they could have but didn't.
However, I will say that with the caveat, but like, kind of my father, especially, I've always noticed he does seem to lack emotional intelligence.
He's always had anger issues.
And so I think a lot of the time, like, Yeah, he's had to just express things in terms of anger.
I have a lot of.
Sorry to interrupt.
So, again, I'm just trying to understand the language.
So, to give you another analogy, let's say that in another universe, I married a Polish woman and she already had a child who only spoke Polish, right?
Now, if that child, and let's say I never learned how to speak Polish and he never learned how to speak English, then if I said we were unable to communicate, would that be true?
I mean, it's an interesting question, right?
Because if I never learn his language and he never learns my language, Then we are, in fact, unable to communicate.
But we're unable to communicate because we haven't learned each other's language.
Right.
So if you say your father lacked emotional skills, that does not absolve him of moral responsibility.
Because if you lack a particular skill, you learn it, right?
Right.
So was he, again, was there some biology or some etiology or something that rendered him incapable?
Of learning better emotional skills, or was he just lazy?
Because, you know, if I marry some woman who's got a kid who only speaks Polish, isn't it, aren't I responsible for learning how to speak Polish?
If you want a good relationship with someone, yeah, of course.
I am responsible whether or not I want a good relationship because I'm in the house and I'm a father figure.
I don't have the choice to not learn Polish.
Like, I don't have a moral choice.
I can be a lazy bastard and I can say, ah, learning Polish is a hassle.
I'm just going to have no communication with the child.
But that's cruel, right?
Yeah.
Because it's saying, kid, I'm only here for your mom.
I don't care about you.
You're an impediment to me.
I'm not even going to learn the basics.
I'm not going to spend a month or two even learning the basics.
You know, to hell with you.
Like, that's cruel.
It's mean, right?
Right.
So I don't have the moral choice to not.
So that's what I'm trying to understand.
When you say he lacked emotional skills, well, he's supposed to learn emotional skills, right?
That's what you have to have emotional skills.
If you're going to be a parent, right.
Yeah, no, when you put it that way, yeah, you're definitely kind of helping me see that, yeah, it was more of a matter of lack of will.
Well, I don't know.
I don't know.
That's what I'm trying to understand.
And the reason why I'm hammering this point so hard is that you feel a lack of control in your life, right?
You say the society is against you.
And again, I'm not disagreeing with any of that, that you feel a certain amount of helplessness, right?
Now, why do you feel a certain amount of helplessness?
Because you keep describing your parents as if they're helpless.
And if your belief about human beings is they're helpless, that's going to infect you.
Like, whatever we say about our parents is what we say to our own essence, to our own metaphysics, really, to our own, I'd say, souls to use a non technical term.
But whatever we say, whatever excuses we give to our parents, we will inevitably use to limit ourselves.
If your parents are helpless, guess what?
You're helpless too.
Yeah.
So, why you said your father's lack of emotional skills, he would get angry a lot?
Yeah.
Yeah.
I, yeah, like raising, raising his voice, like to the point of, like, just as, like, as loud.
You can tell it, like, as loud as he physically could.
And, like, yeah, I mean, occasionally there would be, he would be, like, you know, physical, like, like, like, like being, being hit, but that would maybe only be, um, Like a few times a year, perhaps.
So I'm going to, again, sorry to be annoying, but I need to pause you on your language here.
You said, and occasionally being hit.
So you went from active to passive, right?
So it's really important how you frame human will in your thinking.
Really important, like foundationally important.
So when people say he lost his temper, that's kind of like a passive thing.
Like if I lose my keys, I'm not throwing them off a cliff, right?
If I throw my keys off a cliff, I'm not losing them, I'm throwing them away, right?
So I lost my keys.
He lost his temper that's kind of passive.
And then you say violence in terms of being hit.
And that goes from active to passive, right?
Because you didn't say he hit us, you said being hit, which is the equivalent of the media.
Things happened, right?
Stuff occurred.
I think I know why I'm doing that.
Go ahead.
I think it's because part of me is just so kind of horrified and disgusted by the fact that those things happened.
And then, yeah, just really scared about it.
Oh my God, bro.
They didn't happen.
Weather happens.
They were inflicted on you voluntarily by choice.
Sorry, I'm going to be annoying now.
Even more annoying.
No, no, no.
So, even when you say, here's why I describe things passively because I'm annoyed that things happened and you go back to passive right away, I've just got to be really alert because this is eating away at your sense of will in your own life.
Sorry.
Yeah.
No, no, don't apologize.
There's absolutely nothing to apologize for.
You have nothing to apologize for at all.
That's like going to the doctor and saying, I'm sorry that I'm unwell.
It's like, you have to apologize.
That's why you're at the doctor's, right?
So, no problem.
No problem at all.
It's interesting and instructive.
So, how are you?
Sorry, go ahead.
So, you're encouraging me to phrase it in the active way and a more direct way.
The factual way.
I mean, I'm asking you.
To tell the truth.
Shocking, I know, for a moral philosopher.
But that's why I was asking if your father had some genuine mental disability, right?
I mean, if your father had epilepsy and you say he would fall down and shake from time to time, assuming he was getting the proper treatment, we wouldn't blame him for that, right?
No.
It'd be like unfortunate, unless he somehow caused the epilepsy with, I don't know, excessive drug use or something crazy like that.
So that's why I try to understand if.
A choice is being made or not.
Right.
If you had a father who was an old dad, right, and you'd say, you know, he didn't run around and play with me in the playground, right?
And I said, well, gee, that doesn't seem very good.
And then you said, but he was 75 and really frail.
We'd say, oh, okay, well, maybe he could have been a younger dad, but we wouldn't blame him for that because he's 75 and frail.
Right.
So that's what I'm trying to understand.
Every excuse you give to your parents.
Leaches your sense of control over your own life.
Because then I give those excuses to myself.
Well, of course.
I mean, you're a human being.
They're human beings.
And so everything you give to your parents is in the category called human being because they're human beings, right?
So if you say, well, people just lack skills and they have no responsibility for it and they lose their temper and it's just because they lack skills and then hitting happens and nobody's making any direct choices.
And if nobody, then you're saying human beings can't make direct choices, things just happen.
And then you sit there and say, gee, why is my life just happening to me?
So, you think the problem might be that I've been kind of viewing other people as just being passive.
Well, I'll be more precise than that because I don't want to fault you for things that weren't under your control.
Temper Control and Blame00:15:14
Right.
So, give me an example in your childhood, hopefully in the single digits, but whenever, when your father got really angry at you, yelled at you, or hit you, or something like that.
What happened?
Give me an example.
And a lot of this I tried to just like forget about really and block out.
But honestly, like, it's like I remember like the moments, right?
When like when the wrath was when he chose to, you know, impose his wrath more than what preluded it.
But it would be, for example, like I have like a younger sister.
So, like, if I Yeah, like I can't even remember exactly what caused or, you know, what caused the story.
So you're floundering and weaseling here.
And again, I say this with all due respect and no hostility.
So exactly is a weasel word, right?
So nobody can remember about things that happened decades ago exactly.
Right.
Right.
So that's saying that's creating an irrational standard, right?
So if I said to you, Do you remember a particular birthday party, let's say 13?
And let's say you do remember the birthday party, right?
And if I were to say, exactly when did it start?
Exactly.
Would you be able to answer that?
Not reliably, no.
I mean, Barrah, it's unspecific.
What does exactly mean?
I mean, would you say, well, it was 3 47 and 45 seconds?
Like, you wouldn't remember that, right?
But even if you did, I could then just further time slice it.
And say, well, that was when the doorbell was rung, but no kids had come into the house yet.
Right.
Right.
So there is no such thing as exact in memories, particularly early childhood memories from decades ago, right?
So when you say, I can't remember exactly, that is signaling to me that you are avoiding memory by creating a standard that is impossible to maintain.
Okay.
So if a police officer pulls you over and He would say to you, Do you know how fast you were going?
And you said, Well, officer, not exactly.
That would be an avoidance of an answer because nobody can know exactly how fast they're going.
Let's say I glanced at the speedometer and I was going 40, but I still don't know if I was accelerating.
I don't know if it's 40.01 or 39.9.
Like, you know, like nobody knows exactly.
It's just a way of avoiding the answer.
Does that make sense?
Yeah.
So just roughly, just roughly, with the understanding that we're talking about memory, which is not exact.
Sorry, go ahead.
Yeah.
So, so, so, yeah.
One, one, one example I can think of roughly would be just like saying, like saying the wrong thing, to be honest, is, is like the, the most, most prominent things that comes up.
Like, yeah.
Just like, like say, like, just like, I mean, using like a, using a cuss word, but like, not, not, not in like, just like casually, cause like I learned it at school or something, or like, Just like verbal stuff.
Sorry, I didn't get the example.
I something school?
I didn't quite catch that.
Oh, like, like, like, like, some, like, some, like, naughty word that I learned at school or something.
And, like, someone told, like, I know someone told me it wasn't a naughty word or whatever.
And then I came home and I just, like, said it, like, oh, I learned this new word.
And then it was, like, a naughty word and I didn't know.
And then I would, yeah, that, that would kind of lead to, lead to shouting and, and, like, anger.
And another, another, another thing I distinctly remember and, and, and, um, Even now, I still see it happen sometimes.
Is just when something like when someone does, because it's not just with me that this has happened.
I mean, I'm the one who's like had it the most, but when people like when people don't go along with his advice on something, it is he really gets quite mad.
I don't think that anything like hitting ever happened to me because of that.
It was mostly.
Well, it was mostly, yeah, just like disobedience that led to him initiating use of force, you could say.
Okay, so it's all very vague.
You haven't given me a specific incident.
Now, listen, I'm not trying to nag or criticize, I'm just pointing that out.
Maybe you genuinely can't remember, but you're giving me categories.
Well, I used a cuss word without knowing why, or I didn't follow advice, or something like that.
So, those are categories.
I'm just curious about specific instances that you remember.
I mean, I assume that you remember at least one time of being hit because you remember being hit, right?
Not as a category, but as an instance.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Okay.
So, another thing I remember is when I got in trouble at school one time for being rude at school.
I think I said a rude word at school to a teacher.
And then I remember when I came home.
Yeah, he got really mad.
And yeah, he shouted.
And yeah, it's not the best memory possible, but yeah, I'm pretty sure that was one of the times that he struck me.
Okay, so you got in trouble for using a bad word at school, right?
Yeah.
Okay.
Do you remember what the word was?
I'm pretty sure.
I think this is when I was, again, approximately seven, eight years old.
And I think that was around the time I learned the F word.
And yeah, I used that.
And it was weird because a lot of the time, and I think it happened with this as well.
Someone told me at school that it wasn't a swear word, but they told me, oh, it's a really nice word you can use.
Because I'd never heard it before, I was naive, and I think I just used it.
And yeah, that led to.
Oh, yeah.
Just for those who don't know who are listening to this later.
Truly, half of British fucking society is about setting up younger kids to get in trouble.
That's all that the older kids seem to be obsessed with doing.
I'm not exactly sure why, but I mean, I was the youngest kid in my boarding school in England.
And yeah, that's all they do is they just set you up to try and get you in trouble as much as humanly possible.
It's some weird fucking sadistic bullshit to go on.
But it's very common, right?
And everybody knows that if you're younger, the older kids.
Are going to try and screw up your life in some way by causing you to innocently get into trouble, right?
Yeah, I definitely experienced that.
Yeah.
Okay.
So you drop an F bomb at school, and the school wrote a letter to your dad or something like that?
Yeah, I believe about that specific time.
I think it's slightly different to detention, but I was taken out of class.
And I remember at that school, I was forced.
To stand outside the principal's office, just like stand there in the corridor.
I couldn't even sit down.
Like you were just forced to stand.
Well, you know why that is, right?
Oh, I feel like a sort of humiliation, make an example of you kind of thing, right?
Yeah, it's all those kids who are like, ooh, he's in trouble.
Like you just put it, it's like being in the public stocks.
It just shows that you've socially screwed up and you're being punished and it gets the other slaves in the school to mock you and so on, right?
Yeah.
Okay.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Definitely.
All right.
So, sorry, go ahead.
Yeah.
Sorry.
And then, yeah, then I was sent home.
And then I was like, yeah, like my parents were informed that they may have been called up by the school when they got home.
And my mum would always, you know, she wouldn't always, she would never like kind of like have my back.
Like she would go along with, like, if my dad was angry at me, she would go along with it.
And maybe at some point, if he was like about to like throw something, she would maybe be like, Right, that's enough.
Calm down.
Well, that's because the police could be called and you might end up in hospital.
That's not to do with protecting you.
That's just to do with protecting her.
Yeah.
Right, right.
All right.
So let's try.
I want you to understand.
Sorry again to sound like I'm lecturing, but I want you to understand why you don't hold your parents accountable.
Because it's not a flaw.
It's not a bug.
It's a feature.
It's helpful.
It's why you're here.
It's how you survived.
So I want you to pretend to be your dad and, you know, you can really get into it.
Just dig in and we call these role plays, right?
So, I'll pretend to be you at the age of, say, seven.
Yeah.
And I come home, your dad's there, he's got the message from school, and what does he say?
He says, like, what?
We can swear, right?
So, yes.
Well, actually, he wouldn't have sweared at this point, but he would have just said it in a really loud, angry way.
Being like, yeah, what have you done here?
Like, what is wrong with you?
Are you some kind of idiot?
He would say something like that.
So we just do that.
So you're not putting much heart and soul into it, but we'll get there, right?
So try it again, but with feeling.
Yeah.
Well, I don't really shout much.
Okay, I'll try my best.
Right, what is this?
Are you some kind of idiot?
Why did you do this?
Sorry, do what, Daddy?
I just got this message from school saying that you were going around swearing.
What is wrong with you?
You're some kind of idiot.
I don't know what you mean.
Like I said, I said the F word.
Yeah.
And you know, hang on, hang on, slow down, Dad.
Take a breath.
No, no.
Hang on, Dad, Dad, Dad, take a breath.
Why do you think I said the F word?
I don't know.
Why would you say that?
Oh, good.
Okay, so good.
Now you're asking a question rather than just insulting me.
Okay, so the reason I said the F word was because I was told by the older kids that it was not a swear word.
In fact, it was a fine and good word that was socially acceptable.
Sorry, I'm going to break character here.
I wouldn't have had the same experience.
No, no, we're doing a complete fantasy exercise.
This is not what you should have done or anything, right?
I'm telling you why you didn't do this.
Right?
So you would say, look, I said fuck because I was told that it was a good word, like soft or rain or cloud.
Right?
And I've heard lots of adults use it and they don't get in trouble.
Well, adults can use it because we're older and we know what it means.
And children need to show more respect.
Okay.
So what you're saying, Dad, is that I should have known that that was a bad word.
Yes, because now what people are doing is.
So, wasn't it your job to tell me and to teach me?
You shouldn't have known that.
You should.
Yeah, well, I sort of don't have an answer to that.
Well, that's the question.
Like, Dad, you're getting mad at me for not knowing something that it was your damn job to tell me.
You need to get a grip on your temper and start asking some questions.
This is not a failure of me at the age of seven, this is a failure of you at the age of 37.
You should have taught me.
I mean, are you trying to tell me, Dad, that when you were a kid, no older kids or no other kids ever tried to get you in trouble by lying to you?
Ever.
Never.
Well, I did get in trouble because that happened.
And my dad hit me.
And I'm glad he did because now that's how I learned.
That's how I learned.
That's how I grew up.
Okay.
So I got it, Dad.
I got it.
So you had older kids lie to you and get you in trouble, right?
Yeah, and that's just part of growing up.
Okay, so why didn't you teach me?
Well, first of all, if it's just part of growing up, why are you yelling at me?
And secondly, if you knew that kids would lie to me to get me in trouble because they lied to you to get you in trouble, why wouldn't you warn me about that?
Because I went through this with my dad when I was raised.
You've got to learn to respect your elders this way.
And sometimes that will involve being disciplined.
What?
Hang on, hang on.
Yeah.
Hang on, hang on.
So, are you saying it's a good thing that I was lied to and got in trouble?
Yes, because that's how you'll learn.
Okay.
So, if it's a good thing and that's how I'll learn, why are you yelling at me?
I mean, if I studied math and learned how to do math better, you wouldn't yell at me because that's how you learn.
Right.
So, I'm not sure why you're yelling at me and calling me an idiot.
Just to make it seem like, Dad, I'm not finished.
I don't know why you're yelling at me when you tell me that this is a good and necessary way to learn things.
Why would you be yelling at me if it's necessary and good?
Because you need a short, sharp shock so that you know you learn quickly and you're not going to forget when I hit you so that you'll know to fall in line later.
And then if you don't want this to happen again, You know, you will learn and you will stop doing this and you will show some respect.
Sorry, respect for who?
Am I supposed to respect you who knew about a significant danger and failed to warn me about it?
How am I supposed to respect that?
Isn't your job as a parent to help me avoid disasters?
I mean, you made me wear a helmet while I was biking.
Why would you do that?
Why wouldn't you just let me fall and hurt my head and then I'd learn?
Like, isn't your job as a parent supposed to?
B, to help me avoid obvious dangers that you yourself went through?
Evolutionary Survival Mechanisms00:09:21
Yeah, I mean, this is like, again, a kind of breaking character because, yeah, I just can't really defend that this is a situation.
No, no, you can't.
Sorry, I understand that.
So, what would your dad do if you proved him wrong?
He would just get mad.
Yeah, he would get more and more angry, right?
Yeah, yeah.
Right?
And so you can't hold your father responsible because he escalates in rage.
Yeah, right.
So I would just apologize and get really scared.
No, no, I get that.
Try not to do it again.
And if you were to say to your father, Dad, you are out of control of your temper, this is embarrassing.
You're like a toddler.
You just rage like a crazy person, like a baby, like a toddler.
You need to take a breath and try and get control of your anger because this is dangerous and scary and weird.
Like, what's wrong with you?
Why are you screaming at a six year old?
Like, you've got to show some self control.
You've got to, I really want to respect you, Dad.
I really, really want to respect you.
But when you just lose your temper and, like, you're like a rabid animal or like some toddler having a tantrum, I'm embarrassed.
Like, Please stop being so ridiculous.
What would he do?
He would say that it was my fault, but he got that way.
And he would actually.
Now, some of this is coming back, right?
So it would get into what you call victim blaming.
And he would actually be like, Oh, I remember one time he would say, Oh, I'm not enjoying eating my dinner now because you made me so angry.
Okay.
And then I would say, But, Dad, aren't you the one who's supposed to be in charge?
Are you saying that.
Your entire emotional life is run by a six year old little kid.
Like, you're not in charge.
You're not in control.
What are you like?
You're the child and I'm the parent.
Like, aren't you supposed to have some self control?
Well, I try to, but you're just so difficult.
You're just so difficult to raise.
And I've tried to do everything right for you, you know, as parents.
We, yeah, me and your mum.
Hang on, guys.
We've given you everything you wanted.
Take another breath.
You're just going off on another rant here.
So let's get back to.
Me being sent home because I said the word fuck, right?
So if you're upset because I swore, then the thing to do would be to teach me about swear words and teach me that older children will lie to get me in trouble so that I can avoid these problems.
So it's like if you don't maintain your car and then you complain that your car is so difficult to work and run because it keeps breaking down, right?
What would people say to you if you failed to change the oil and get the maintenance and so on?
And then you said, well, this car.
Just is so difficult to run.
What would people say to you?
It's your info.
Yeah, you didn't maintain the damn thing.
So you can't blame the car if you're failing to be proactive to maintain it.
And you can't blame me for being difficult to raise when you knew I was heading into trouble with swear words and older kids and you failed to do a goddamn thing to warn me and to help me.
Right.
That's like not bathing.
That's like forbidding your child from bathing and then saying you're upset because your child is smelly.
Like, this is ridiculous.
Take some responsibility for your life.
Please be the kind of father that I can respect.
What do I do about this now?
I'm not sure what you're asking me.
Well, so, like, obviously, this role play is kind of revealing quite a lot about.
Well, hang on.
So, let's play this out, right?
What stem did you take?
I took maths.
Maths, okay.
All right.
So let's just talk about human evolution.
So, why don't children do this?
And they don't.
And they shouldn't.
Why not?
What happened?
Let's go all the way back to prehistory, 50,000 years ago, when our genes were evolving, right?
How difficult was it to not keep a child alive 50,000 years ago?
It was easy to not keep a child alive, right?
They could be abandoned.
Give me the mechanisms.
Yeah.
Give me the mechanisms by which a child could be not kept alive.
Abandonment, deprivation of resources.
You just don't like.
Yeah, like expulsion, just physical violence.
Yeah, failure to protect from predators and so on, right?
And yeah, favoritism.
Like if you don't give the kid enough food or that kid gets sick, it won't have energy to fight the infection, whatever, right?
So there's a million ways.
Or you could just lose the child.
Oh, I thought he was right behind me or whatever.
I mean, there's so many stories in fairy tales of children being led out to the woods and abandoned there, right?
Yeah.
So, and it's step parents as well, right?
Step parents are very dangerous.
A lot of women would die in childbirth, and the new women would come along and not wanting to put resources into the man's kids with the previous wife because they've got no genetic investment.
So, there are countless ways in which children can be unalived throughout our evolution, right?
Right.
Now, if you stand up for yourself and point out the hypocrisy and immaturity of a parent who is.
Violent and aggressive, what does that do to your odds of survival?
Diminishes them.
Well, it almost eliminates them in many ways, right?
So, the reason why children didn't do what I did in the role play and call the parent out for immaturity, aggression, hypocrisy, and generalized bullshit is because we are dependent upon our parents' goodwill for survival.
And if Our parent, as most parents are, or certainly were, almost all parents would be irrational, entitled, narcissistic, aggressive, violent.
And I mean, we're just talking about maybe Europe.
I mean, how well did you do in Central and South America under the Aztecs, right?
Who regularly sacrificed a couple of thousand kids to their guards.
They certainly didn't sacrifice the popular kids, right?
Right, right.
So childhood survival was razor thin.
In almost all of our evolution.
And so you could not piss off your parent.
You simply could not.
Or to put it another way, as you know, the children who pissed off their parents and challenged their parents' immaturity and irrationality had a much lower survival rate.
So those genes get weeded out, those habits get weeded out pretty damn quickly, right?
Yeah.
I mean, I'm sure you've heard of these experiments.
There's a Russian researcher who took a bunch of foxes and.
Within a couple of generations, by breeding the most aggressive foxes with the most aggressive foxes, produced a whole lineage of very aggressive foxes.
And then by breeding the most peaceful and friendly foxes with the most peaceful and friendly foxes, developed a whole lineage like two different creatures creatures that would attack when they saw humans and creatures that you could pet easily.
And that's just in a couple of generations.
Selective breeding.
Yeah, selective breeding.
And so humanity has been selectively bred.
For compliance with parental anti rationality.
And so your ancestors and my ancestors complied.
And that's why we're here.
And this is why you give your parents excuses because you had to grow up giving them excuses.
Because if you didn't give them excuses, you feared, and historically rightly so, that you would not survive.
Yeah.
And now, of course, we have the option, which really never existed before in human evolution, we have the option to change our tribe.
Right?
So, in most of human evolution, if you challenged.
The anti rationality, the craziness, the immaturity, the hypocrisy of the tribe, they would just expel you, or nobody would mate with you, or they'd ship you off to a monastery, or they wouldn't protect you, or whatever, right?
Yeah.
And so being able to challenge the hypocrisy of the tribe is very, very, very new.
To be able to successfully challenge it, I mean, I'm sure you heard about what happened to me in 2020 when I was de platformed from like, I don't know, 15 or 20 different platforms, all Very rapidly, and that's because I was going against the anti rationality of the tribe.
And normally that would have got me killed or at least expelled, and my genetics would have died off or whatever it is, right?
And even if I'd had kids, my kids would be very unlikely to survive, and you know, all of that kind of stuff, right?
Yeah, yeah.
Death Anxiety and Responsibility00:07:06
So you have a survival mechanism called comply and do not hold your parents responsible because if you hold immature people responsible, they simply.
Escalate until you are in fear of your life.
And I'm not kidding about that.
Like genetically, deep down, we are afraid of dying.
I mean, even now, I really think that a lot of kids get killed, you know, they call it SIDS or whatever it is, right?
But so that's why I just wanted you to sort of understand that that's why you have a tough time holding your parents responsible, it provokes death anxiety in us to hold our parents responsible.
For the bad things that they've done.
Does that make sense?
Yeah, that makes sense.
All right.
Okay.
So your parents were capable, your parents were capable of doing better, right?
They were capable of being more rational.
They were capable, your father was capable of learning better social skills.
I mean, there was nothing physically wrong with his brain, right?
No.
Right.
So then the question is well, why didn't he?
Well, in general, people don't learn better social skills because what negative consequences do they face for not learning better social skills?
Well, none really, because of the aforementioned issue where children have to obey their parents or die.
Like, we can't, like, there's no power greater than that of parents in the world because parents shape your thinking, right?
And your parents have total control over children in a way that, you know, even abusive husbands or wives, they don't have total control.
Over the kids, right?
The spouses can leave.
They have legal independence.
They have a lot of, often a lot of support for leaving abusive relationships and so on.
So, yeah, it's a whole different planet with regards to parental power as opposed to any other power in the world.
So, then the question is to me becomes, and I'm always quite fascinated by this, is what does it mean to say that you were autistic?
And tell me why you think that diagnosis was made.
So it was made when I was very young.
And I definitely knew, but I wasn't.
Sorry, I knew what?
Like, so I definitely knew I could tell, even at the time, even as a child, I could tell that I wasn't hitting the like social developmental milestones that most other people my age were.
Um, and yeah, I think my parents just told me that they'd taken me to see a psychiatrist when I was a toddler and I'd had some assessments, and they told me that I was autistic when I was about seven years old.
They left it until that long to tell me.
And so, could you be more specific about what your question was?
You said about like.
Well, you said that you weren't hitting the developmental goals or milestones, right?
Yeah.
And I wasn't like socializing properly.
And it took me a lot longer than like in terms of like verbal development, that was actually quite normal.
But in terms of most other things, like being able to like kind of like dress myself and like tie my shoelaces and.
Ride a bike and lots of those things.
That took me a lot longer.
And my body language has always been very different to other people's.
And I get very self conscious about that.
And I think it's put other people off, like just like subtle things, like, you know, like walk with them out of the gate.
And of course, eye contact is very, very difficult for me.
So, like, I meet a lot of the classic.
Criteria for autism.
So I definitely can see why I was diagnosed at the time.
Okay.
Now they say diagnosed, but it's not quite the same as being diagnosed with cancer or being diagnosed with an infection or something like that, right?
Because the diagnosis is simply a description of behaviors.
Yeah.
Okay.
So let's see.
I mean, sorry, go ahead.
So, sorry.
Yeah.
I mean, like on paper, like it's official, but.
But yeah, no, I definitely can tell what you mean by the distinction.
Well, on paper, slavery was official.
I mean, who cares about on paper?
And look, I'm not trying to say that autism doesn't exist, of course, right?
I mean, there are people who have severe disabilities and so on.
And I'm not trying to sort of say that that's not real.
Now, but let's look at something like eye contact.
Is there any other explanation as to why you might have difficulty maintaining eye contact other than something like autism?
Something does come to mind.
So, yeah, I think it's to do with what we've talked about a bit, right?
About the compliance thing.
I think it's because, at least to me, it feels like eye contact can represent, like, it's kind of like being assertive, right?
Like, kind of like being like confident and kind of almost like.
And I've always kind of implicitly thought of it as somewhat, yeah, like almost like.
Confident, maybe even slightly confrontational, slightly intimate, right?
And so maybe it's because, maybe it's just because I'm, yeah, I'm quite scared of other people.
So that's like, yeah, I'm not sure another way to put it.
Do you have any thoughts?
Well, okay.
So let's look at the more primitive life forms, apes and, you know, maybe criminals and so on, right?
So is eye contact when somebody is threatening you?
What does lowering your eyes versus maintaining eye contact represent?
What does that represent?
Maintaining eye contact would mean like you're ready to engage, kind of like you're ready, you know, like if there's like you're if there's going to be like a fight or something, you're ready for it, right?
Whereas, um, whereas, whereas averting your gaze, right?
Like, like, yeah, lowering your eyes, like you said, looking away, it's kind of to signal that, well, like you're not a threat, I suppose, but, but like you're, you're, you're, yeah, yeah, lowering your eyes would signal submission, right?
Yeah, yeah, you're right.
Okay, so with regards to your father, and we can talk about your mother a little bit more later, but with regards to your father, he seems to have been extraordinarily aggressive.
Escalation and Self-Gaslighting00:05:58
Yeah, I suppose I've always compared it to the extremes.
You know, it's like, oh, I was never severely injured or anything.
So it's like, I've always tried to cope.
Yeah, yeah, I've always tried to cope.
I mean, that's like, sorry, to take an extreme example, that's like a woman who says, Well, I wasn't stabbed by the rapist who held a knife to my throat because I complied, and then saying, Well, maybe there wasn't that much danger, but it's like, that's because you complied.
Yeah.
And I guess, yeah, this is really, really deeply ingrained.
Because can I tell you what just went through my head, man?
Of course.
Like, it was this idea that, like, I almost, like, almost making excuses for him, like giving him the benefit of the doubt, like, oh, even if I hadn't complied, he might not have escalated.
That's what came to my mind.
Yes, but you understand that from an evolutionary standpoint, children can't take that risk.
Yeah.
Right?
So the idea, and I hear what you're saying, right?
So the idea is like, well, I mean, he wouldn't have strangled me.
He wouldn't have thrown me down the stairs.
He wouldn't have beaten me and broken an arm or anything like that, right?
But evolutionarily speaking, you can't take that chance.
Let's say there's only a 10% chance that your father is going to escalate.
Well, Why would you take that chance?
Compliance is 100% he won't escalate, and rebellion is a 90% chance he won't escalate.
But of course, it's like a negative Pascal's wager.
Yeah, yeah, for sure.
I mean, no organism is going to willingly take on a 10% chance of self destruction when the alternative is perfectly viable.
Right.
Right?
Yeah.
So I just really wanted to sort of point that out that your genes are making a rational calculation because also if.
It turns out that he's just a paper tiger and is not really aggressive.
If that's what turns out to be the case, then he has no authority at all going forward.
Right?
Yeah.
Because you know the threat is not real.
So he is likely going to escalate.
And I think that the odds are far higher.
I think it's 90% likely he will escalate.
And if he escalates, see, if you comply, you can retain the semblance of will.
If he escalates to the point of true brutality, Then you get too depressed to even function because then you realize that you're a complete slave and that he doesn't care about you.
He only cares about your compliance.
Does that make sense?
Like, you don't want to find out how brutal and uncaring your parents are if they're violent because it will just cause you to cease functioning.
Like, you won't be able to get out of bed because it's like, oh my God, I've got another 15 years of this or another 10 years of this.
Oh my God.
And then if you're too depressed because you realize how much of a slave you are, and let's say that.
When you're dating, respond to confidence and you're really depressed and feel helpless.
What does that do to your reproductive capacities and your sexual market value?
Well, it's very bad for it.
It's terrible.
It's terrible.
So there is no benefit.
There is no benefit to fighting back.
It's all downside.
Yeah.
Now, you, of course, know that you're being mistreated because the whole purpose of yelling at kids and calling them names and hitting them is to cause them to feel bad.
So you know you feel bad.
And so you know that your father and your mother are cruel and society as a whole is accepting it.
In fact, probably benefiting.
Affirming it.
So you can't pretend that you don't feel bad.
So, what's the only way to resolve the problem that your parents are repeatedly causing you great suffering?
How do you resolve that without becoming catastrophically depressed?
Because if you wake up and say, oh, my parents are just immature sadists and they're going to torment and lie and dodge and they're going to blame me for things that they themselves are choosing, that's too depressing.
And then, of course, you also threaten your own survival because, and this is another thing to do with the eye contact.
If you look at your raging father with the contempt and scorn he so richly deserves, you don't say anything.
You just look at him like, yeah, right, old man.
Jesus, what a pussy.
Well, how sad is that?
A grown man can't even control his own temper and blames a six year old for his emotional state.
That's cucked and pathetic.
Pathetic, you know, in the way that the British people say.
So if you look at your father when he's raging at you, With scorn and contempt, with full knowledge of how immature and petty he's being, what happens then?
Don't say anything.
He goes nuts.
He goes nuts.
So you can't even look at him with scorn.
Sorry, go ahead.
Sorry.
And that's really dangerous, right?
Very dangerous.
Yeah.
Very dangerous.
So you have a paradox, as we all have, you know, for the most part when we're growing up and so on.
So you have a paradox.
Which is your parents are treating you very badly, and they know that they're treating you very badly.
And you can't get too depressed about it because then you're not attractive to females.
You can't look at them with scorn and contempt because they will escalate even further and you'd be in more danger and all of the myriad ways that children can be under life throughout our evolution.
So, what is the only real solution to this problem?
That you can't hold them responsible.
And you can't get too depressed at their cruelty.
Turning Parents Into Weather00:03:10
You have to comply, right?
Sure, but I mean, that's the practical thing.
But what's the mindset?
Because if you comply with full knowledge of how brutal and immature they are, well, you can't allow yourself to have the knowledge of how brutal and immature they are.
Because if you look at them with that knowledge, then they will further escalate because they will be stung by your contempt, right?
So then I suppose that just leaves the option of having to gaslight yourself into believing that that is.
Acceptable and it's justified.
Well, I think so.
So, what you have to do is I don't know if you've ever known someone, or maybe you've been that person, where they get annoyed at the weather.
Annoyed at the weather.
Like you go out for a hike, it starts pouring, and they're like, oh, come on.
I mean, I checked the weather this morning.
They said it was going to be sunny all day.
This is ridiculous, blah, blah, blah, right?
Yeah.
Or like if I'm in traffic or something, like, and yeah, something like that.
Trivial but out of my control happens, it's inconvenient, right?
Like, yeah, yeah, I am that person sometimes.
I think we all are to some degree, right?
Yeah.
So, what you have to do to survive all of this, and this is why earlier I said weather happens, human beings make choices, is you have to turn your parents' behavior into something like the weather or traffic or something like that, right?
Like, that makes no sense to rage and rail against traffic or the weather or whatever, right?
Like, if you've maintained something, I don't know, like you turn on your computer and.
It just doesn't work, right?
Yeah.
You just get that BIOS message or something like that, right?
Now, that can be a little bit frustrating, but you don't rage at the computer, right?
There's this funny John Cleese show called Faulty Towers, where he's in a hurry and his car won't start and he rips up a small sapling and he starts hitting the car with the tree.
And that's funny because it's crazy, right?
You don't hit a car because the car is not acting against you in a chosen way.
No, but it's still a relatable kind of emotional response, I think, to a lot of people.
I remember when I was in my teens, I had an Atari 520 ST and it had a mouse with a rollerball, and the rollerball would regularly get gummed up or stuck with hair or something like that.
And you'd have to thump the mouse, and it just got so frustrating because there was no keyboard shortcuts.
So you had to just use the mouse or you couldn't use the computer.
And the mouse were expensive, and I couldn't afford it.
And so I'd clean it and I'd tap it, and it was just, oh, it was so frustrating.
And I think at one point I just threw the mouse.
Across the room, and I broke the mouse.
And that was my way of saying, I need a new mouse.
I got a new mouse, and it was fine for a while.
But it was not, you know, the fact that you have these laser mice now is fantastic, right?
So you have to turn your parents into things like the weather that just happens.
The weather doesn't make choices.
Fighting Parental Passivity00:13:33
And nobody gets depressed really about the weather and feels that the weather is personally targeting them, right?
And if in England, right, summer comes on a Wednesday, if it rains all week, Nobody sits there and says, the weather gods are trying to depress me.
So you view your parents like the weather, that you have to navigate it and you have to work around it, but you don't blame the weather.
It's just happening, which is why we don't say, we say it's raining.
We don't say, I'm upset that the clouds are trying to screw up my day by raining on me personally.
Sometimes it does feel like that, though.
Yeah.
Yeah, but wait, sorry, we married rascals or parents?
Well, yeah, no, I mean, it does feel like, yeah, like minor inconveniences throughout the day.
Like, it does feel some, like to me, like sometimes it does feel like maybe this is like, like, I know logically, but it's not, but sometimes it does feel like, oh, this is typical.
This is like what happens.
This is, you know, this is just my life, like I'm cursed or something.
Oh, yeah, no, I get that.
I mean, I don't know if you're still young, but When you get older, I mean, I've had years and years with no health issues, and then I had like two or three cluster, nothing major, but it was just annoying last year or whatever, right?
And it's just like, oh, come on, right?
Just one damn thing after another.
Yeah.
But it's just the random distribution, right?
So, although we may feel that way, and I think everyone does, we know that it's not rational.
Yeah.
I logically, right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
We know.
Like everybody's been in a hurry, and you keep getting red light after red light, right?
At the traffic lights.
That's like in Meet the Fuckers, like the movie, the first movie, right?
I think that happens.
Yeah, in fact, my father had a friend in Africa who'd managed to get hold, if I remember the story rightly, there were ambulances that had a special transmitter that would change the lights so that they could go through the lights more quickly.
And he'd managed to get a hold of one and never had to stop for a rest.
It was really quite a wild story.
But yeah, so there are times when we're in a hurry and we keep getting yellow light or red light and it just feels like the universe is conspiring against us.
Sure.
I mean, but we also know that it's not rational.
Mm hmm.
So, although we have these feelings, we don't feel that they're true.
We don't feel that the gods of the traffic lights are personally thwarting us in malevolence.
It's frustrating.
But of course, what we have to say is the fault lies not with the stars, but with ourselves.
The fault lies not with the traffic lights, but the fact that we left too little time for our destination.
So, when you talk about your parents early in the conversation, And you said, you know, it happened or a heading happened, and my parents were unable to do this, that, and the other.
You are treating them as physics, as facts of nature.
When people gain weight, if they're rational, they don't blame gravity, right?
Yeah.
Right.
They blame, hopefully, they blame their eating too much or not exercising enough or some combo, right?
So I would say that you have to turn.
Your parents into the weather, into things that have a negative impact on you, but not things that are directly willed against you.
Well, they didn't know how to do it.
You've heard these excuses a million times on these call in shows, right?
They were doing the best they could with the knowledge they had.
My father himself had a bad childhood.
He just wasn't aware.
He didn't know.
So you are removing human consciousness and choice from the equation, which turns your parents into a kind of deterministic weather.
And that way, you don't get too depressed, right?
Because it's not personal to you.
They're not choosing it consciously any more than the clouds are choosing consciously to rain upon your parade, right?
Yeah.
And women, of course, will sometimes do this.
Some men too, but women a bit more, you know, if they plan a wedding, an outdoor wedding day, and it turns out that it's raining all day, they're frustrated and upset, which, you know, is understandable, but we still don't take it personally.
Like the weather is not out to get us, right?
So, you turn your parents into a kind of weather, and that relieves you from the stress of holding your parents responsible, which is dangerous, right?
But the problem is that you slowly become weather too.
Right.
Because if adulthood and maturity is having no responsibility and just being a domino of blind reactive forces, then it's almost impossible.
In fact, logically, it is impossible.
To will things in your own life.
If your parents are weather, how old were your parents when they had you?
They were quite young.
They were in their early 20s.
Okay.
And you said you were a little closer to 30 than 20, right?
Yeah.
Okay.
Yeah.
So what's interesting is that you are trying to fight your way out of the weather system, so to speak, at about the same age as you were when you first became conscious.
Of your parents' choices.
So you would have been about five when they were your age at the moment, right?
Maybe five or six.
Right.
And six was one of the earlier memories that you had.
I don't think it's a coincidence that you are fighting to free yourself of passivity at the same age as your parents were when you first had the giant defense called, My parents are passive.
My parents are like the weather, they're not making malevolent choices.
That's why earlier I was saying, If you said my father did not have emotional skills.
Well, if I steal a plane and I don't know how to fly a plane and I crash the plane and I say, well, the reason I crashed the plane was because I don't know how to fly a plane, is that reasonable?
No, of course not.
Yeah.
Right.
So saying that my parents lack emotional skills is not an excuse as to why they were volatile.
No.
It explains it, right?
It's not just a case.
Well, it's the hypocrisy.
I actually just did a show this morning where I've said, I don't.
I don't generally, at first at least, I don't hold people to moral standards they have not espoused themselves.
So if you were to get really angry and shout at your father, what would he say?
Oh, he would be like, What are you, why are you doing that?
Calm down.
How dare you?
That's so disrespectful, blah, blah, blah, right?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, okay.
So then he knows that shouting at people is aggressive and disrespectful.
So he's a hypocrite.
Right.
So I don't hold people to UPB or peaceful parenting or some abstract standard that has yet to be invented.
That would be.
Unreasonable, right?
That would be like saying an 18th century doctor was a terrible doctor because he didn't prescribe antibiotics.
It's like they weren't around yet, right?
So, with your father, if he says aggression is good, then he should welcome your aggression.
But what he says is, aggression is good for me, but bad for you.
Now, in other words, most people, if you were to say, who is more mature, a 30 year old or an eight year old, what would people say?
30 year old.
Right.
Now, if you were to say, who is more likely to have control over their emotions?
A 25 year old or a 4 year old?
25 year old.
Right.
So if your father loses his temper and says, I can't keep my temper because of external circumstances, then he should have no problem with you losing your temper because you're over 20 years younger than him.
It would be like me saying, I can't lift 500 pounds, but my kid who's seven should be able to lift 500 pounds.
I can't keep my temper, but my kid who's seven better be able to keep his temper.
I, with full brain maturity and wisdom and independence, cannot hold on to my temper.
I lose my temper.
I choose to bully.
And it is always a choice, right?
And so I assume that your father did not shout at you.
And or hit you when you were in public in front of a policeman or a security guard, or did he?
Oh, well, no, of course not.
Yeah, right.
So he was perfectly able to control his temper when it suited him.
He was perfect, like you say, he lost his temper.
Nope, losing your temper is a choice.
Did he ever shout at a policeman?
Did he ever threaten to hit anyone in authority?
No, I mean, yeah, not seriously.
Like, obviously, you know, like lamenting, like, you know, like government or whatever.
No, no, I get that.
But yeah, just casually.
He did not act out his anger against anyone who had power over him.
This is, did he ever threaten to hit his boss if his boss didn't do what he wanted?
No.
Did he ever shout at his boss and call him terrible names if his boss didn't give him the raise he wanted or the promotion he wanted?
No.
Right.
So he's perfectly capable of keeping his temper.
In fact, most of the times that he got upset, he kept his temper.
Like the most Zen monk you could think of.
Because he did not, so he never lost his temper.
He chose to get angry because he was in a position of power and authority.
He could bully you and get away with it.
He couldn't bully his boss or a policeman or a security guard or a flight attendant or a border crossing guard or whatever it is, right?
So he couldn't bully those people and get away with it.
So he was perfectly compliant and did not lose his temper once in 50 plus years.
However, When he can get away with it, then the restraints come off.
He doesn't lose his temper.
He gives it away by choice.
He can always control his temper.
So every time he loses his temper, this is why I said earlier it's not like epilepsy, because people have epileptic attacks no matter where.
If that's what happens, it just happens.
They can't stop it.
So he didn't lose his temper like, oh, it's just, it spilled over.
You know, it's like the bathwater running too long.
It just spills over.
You can't stop it.
It's like, no, he was perfectly able.
To control his temper anytime he wanted, as was my mother.
She was violent as well, but never in public.
In fact, she was very sweet in public.
That's camouflage, right?
So my mother was not out of her mind.
She wasn't schizophrenic.
She wasn't epileptic.
She wasn't possessed, right?
She made very specific choices to keep or lose her temper based upon the power differential in the environment.
If she had less power, she would keep her temper, be sweeter sugar.
If she had more power, she could yell and bully and threaten and hit.
It is not anything but a choice.
I think you're right.
And I definitely think that's something I've implicitly been trying just to block out.
And now you are growing into your parents' phase of life that you first began giving them excuses for.
And now, as you gave excuses to your parents and turned them into the weather, now.
You feel like you don't have any directness or control or authority in your own life.
Is that right?
Yeah, I'd say that's roughly true.
Right, right.
So if you are not willing to get angry at your parents, you're not going to have any willpower in your life.
Because getting angry at your parents is saying, no, damn it, they chose to be cruel, they chose to be mean.
It wasn't the weather, it wasn't dominoes, it wasn't Determinism.
It wasn't because my father had had a bad day or had a headache or I was being difficult or, you know, mom wasn't giving him any or he'd been yelled at by his boss or he'd had a bad childhood.
None of those things is causal.
It's all a specific choice to be cruel, to be mean, to be difficult, to be unpleasant, to be hostile, to be sadistic, to frighten your children.
That's an absolute choice.
And I have bottomless contempt.
I have bottomless contempt for bullies as a whole.
But the big, brave fucking moral heroes who only bully their own little children are the saddest fucking specimens on the planet.
Big tough guy when he's facing down a seven year old little boy.
Situationships and Role Playing00:09:52
Big tough guy.
But with his own boss or anyone in authority, he's a cringing toady vermin.
Yeah.
In fact, I've always thought like he actually can be a bit of a simp sometimes.
And sorry, I didn't want in public.
A bit of a simp, like a suck up, kind of to, especially to like women, like female family members and stuff.
He's always like really like, doesn't yell at them, right?
Sickly sweet.
Yeah.
Sorry?
Doesn't yell at them, doesn't hit them.
No.
No.
Oh, no, never.
Right.
So, what's your relationship like with your parents now?
I suppose I've tried to, yeah, I've tried not to bring up these things and stuff.
I've kind of talked around the edges a bit, really.
I've had to kind of talk about, I have tried to bring up a few childhood problems.
But I've done that mainly, yeah, within the context of, you know, like personal struggles, you know, like, oh, you know, like it was, you know, I was autistic and so that's why I, like, you know, couldn't make friends or stuff like that, right?
So, but like, are you talking more in practice, like how close we are and stuff?
I love it when people go rubber bones.
What do you think I mean?
Sorry.
When I say, how's your relationship with your parents at the moment?
What do you think I mean?
Yeah.
I suppose you probably mean more in a sort of like emotional way, right?
Assuming that's what you mean.
Oh, sorry.
Do you mean, do you think I mean financially or like what do you think I mean?
Yeah.
I would just like in like daily life kind of.
But no, yeah.
So, okay.
Going with the first assumption.
Yeah.
Like there are topics that I just, Don't bring up, and the reason I don't bring them up is because I don't want to, you know, feel uncomfortable and stuff.
And, um, but, but like, yeah, like overall, like I'd say, I'd say it's better, slightly better with my mom than with my dad.
Um, because I, I am, I, I think even now, like, I am just quite, quite scared of my dad, to be honest.
Is he still, uh, yelling?
Yeah, occasionally.
I mean, I, I, I spend, I do spend less time around him.
Okay, so I'm sorry, now the money.
Sorry to interrupt.
Remind me how old you were when you were diagnosed with autism.
I was three.
Three, okay.
Now, I'm no expert on autism, so please correct me where I go astray.
But isn't autism, doesn't it have something to do with being overstimulated, with an inability to reduce or manage general stimulation sometimes?
Yeah.
And I'm sorry, I'm starting a bit.
I do have some of those symptoms, yes.
Okay.
So.
Your father, did he think that the diagnosis of autism was just new age bullshit or did he think that it was real and true?
Somewhere in the middle.
I remember when he first talked about me, he said he thought it was like, he talked about it quite positively, actually.
He said, Oh, this is the gift.
This is why you're doing okay academically in school and you're going to be really smart when you're older.
But I think it's like he's much more like he tries to emphasize the positive aspects of it as being, you know, like privileges I have.
Okay.
You know, like, oh, I can learn quicker.
Does he accept that people with autism often are easily overwhelmed by external stimuli?
Yes.
Okay.
It wasn't something he's super well aware of, but we have talked about it a bit recently, actually.
No, because when you find out your kid is diagnosed with autism, Your father is a human intelligent man.
That's actually something I was going to mention.
So, intelligence can be like, you know, it depends, you know, like kind of, it can be difficult to kind of pinpoint and say whether someone's intelligent or not.
But, well, no, no, hang on.
I will say degrees of intelligence are different.
Intelligent, I simply mean that he's, you know, somewhat above average in IQ.
And it's not necessarily true, but it would be unusual if.
You were very smart, and your father was like IQ 85.
That would be unusual.
Yeah, I know, right?
But there are a few things that actually make me doubt his intelligence.
So he's very, he always struggles with reading and writing and even basic maths.
Like he will misspell, he struggles reading.
Sometimes he'll ask me to help him with a really simple calculation.
And it can sometimes, it does sometimes feel like, again, I don't know if that's another separate problem he has, why those are problems.
Sorry, in what field does he work?
So he works in a manual labor kind of job.
So it's like, I guess, like tradesman.
Is it like skilled labor or like ditch digging?
I'd say it's like semi skilled labor.
It's slightly more skilled than like ditch digging.
Okay.
And does he have any hobbies that might indicate intelligence?
Like he's into, I don't know, cartography or chess?
Does he do complicated card games?
I mean, is there any indication of maybe more specialized forms of intelligence?
Nothing like that, really.
No.
Okay.
All right.
And what about your mother?
In terms of her intelligence or just in general?
So, yeah, I'd actually say that, yeah, she does show some traits of intelligence.
So, yeah, she performed fairly well academically at school, if I recall.
But she made it.
Towards the end of high school.
Sorry if I'm stuttering too much.
No, don't worry about a thing.
Honestly, I'm enjoying the conversation.
You're doing fantastically.
So, yeah, take your time.
Great.
Thank you.
So, she chose to, so she might have been able to go on to further education, but she chose to go traveling.
So, I know like lots of people do a gap year, but she kind of wanted to do one for like kind of more like semi permanently.
And she kind of found seasonal work and went on to do that.
And that's actually where, how she met my.
My dad.
Okay, so sorry.
If your mother is reasonably, like, say, average or above average intelligence, if your father is below average intelligence, what do you think was the attraction?
Was your father very good looking or was he very charismatic?
And the reason, so when we were doing the role play, this is probably why you struggled with the role play with your father because you're a very intelligent young man.
And your father, if he's not smart, it's really tough for smart people to role play less smart people, if that makes sense.
It's impossible the other way, but it's very difficult to.
If you've, if let's say your father is 90 and you are 120, then you're two standard deviations away.
I'm not saying you are 120, it's probably higher, but I'm just sort of trying to give some rough.
I mean, if you did STEM, it could be even higher.
Yeah, I understand.
Normally, it doesn't really like you.
Two standard deviations, it's really tough to have a theory of mind that includes two standard deviations different going down because, yeah, it's just tough.
So, why do you think your parents got together and they're still together?
Is that right?
All right.
So, why did they get together if your father is not particularly smart and your mother could have done higher education?
I mean, this is anonymous.
So, like, I don't want to sound like I'm being slanderous or anything, but I know, like, at the time, like, they were both very hedonistic, very, like, into partying.
And I think they just both, um, Yeah, they were both like, yeah, they're doing like seasonal work and just kind of like lots of partying.
And it was only like, and I think they just wanted to like kind of travel together.
Like from what I can tell, it was a bit of like a situationship.
And was your, hang on, was your father attractive when he was younger?
I know.
I would say fairly.
Okay.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Could just be lust, right?
Could just be lust.
Yeah.
Well, yeah, and this kind of brings me on to an important point I was going to make because it was only like several months into the relationship that they found out that, yeah, my mum was pregnant.
Sorry.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And then they found out.
It's classic.
What do you mean they found out they had unprotected sex?
Yeah.
I don't like to think about that.
It is very, very easy to not get pregnant.
I know.
Very easy to not get pregnant.
Yeah.
Bullying and Parental Responsibility00:15:07
Find out.
You know, this is like somebody who's a smoker finding out, oh my gosh, I've got cancer.
So it's very easy to not get women.
There's 18 different forms of birth control: there's abstinence, oral sex, manual sex, you know, whatever, right?
And so it's so easy to not get pregnant that pregnancy, especially in the modern age, is a choice.
So they didn't find out.
Yeah.
Sorry.
Can I rephrase that?
Yeah.
Yeah.
My mom was irresponsible and hedonistic and took unnecessary risks.
As a result, yeah, she chose to take the risk to become pregnant with me.
And do you have any siblings?
Yes, I do have a sister who is just over three years younger than me.
Okay, got it.
All right.
So the reason I'm asking all of this is I checked with Grok here.
Do autistics struggle with overstimulation?
Yes, says Grok.
Many autistic people experience overstimulation.
It's one of the most common and well documented aspects of autism spectrum disorder.
This is often tied to sensory processing differences.
Autistic brains frequently process sensory input, sound, light, touch, smell, taste, et cetera, more intensely or have more difficulty filtering it out compared to neurotypical people.
Now, so we're just looking at this.
Your mother and your father, upon receiving a diagnosis, a diagnosis, I can do the word, I really feel like it.
A diagnosis of their child at three of autism would learn and read about autism and they would look things up and so on, right?
And, you know, 25 years ago, there was still an internet, and you could get books from the library for free, and they could ask their doctor or their experts, right?
And so, one of the things that would be told is do not bombard your child with excess stimulation, right?
Yeah.
And what did your father do?
Exactly that.
Bombarded you with hitting, yelling, anger, right?
So, like, there are some people who have, I think it's called hyperacuasis or something like that, where they hear sounds too loudly.
And if you know that your child hears sounds too loudly, and then you grab your child's head and bellow in his ear, you're just a pure sadist.
When you put it that way.
No, seriously.
I'm not kidding about that.
Like, that's just pure.
You know that your child has a vulnerability, and you exploit that vulnerability to bully and get your way.
Your father knew that overstimulation was torment for you, and he shouted and yelled and hit you.
The way I've always coped with this is just like giving him the benefit of a doubt that he didn't know for some reason or another.
There's no excuse called he didn't know.
It's your job to know.
Were you ever told this as a kid?
Ignorance of the law is no excuse.
Yeah.
He had to know.
He would have been told about it.
He would have been told about the difficulties.
He would have seen you flinch.
He would have had to read about it.
And even if he doesn't read that much, his wife would have read about it.
Your mother would have read about it and told him and said, listen, whatever we do, we have to recognize when we speak.
We speak above our normal toning.
He experiences that as shouting.
When we're just a little bit louder, he experiences that as screaming.
When we hit him, it's 10 times as bad because his brain has challenges reducing overstimulation and so on.
And so your parents knew at the age of three that you were autistic or that that was the diagnosis.
And then at the age of six, your father is shouting, yelling, and hitting.
That's wild.
Right?
That's like if your kid.
Has a broken rib and you want your kid to obey you, and you dig your fucking thumb into that rib.
I mean, that's sadistic, isn't it?
Yeah.
Because you're hitting him where it hurts the most in order to control him.
Yeah, compliance.
Yeah.
And it's like Room 101.
And if you've ever read 1984, it's like the worst thing.
They have to study you to figure out what the worst thing for Winston Smith was, rats, for other people, it's spiders or whatever it is, right?
Yeah.
I'm familiar.
So, if you make all of these excuses, which again, I hope I've made a decent case that that's the survival mechanism, you've made all of these excuses for your parents.
You're saying they're not in control of their lives.
If they're not in control of their lives, how can you be in control of your life?
Because if you take decisive action and you start doing things and you reject passivity and you escape the curse of being the weather, as you become passive, More powerful in your own life, your anger towards your parents will rise.
Now that you're the age that their parenting really began to kick in, right?
The age of four or five, parenting really, I mean, parenting babies is pretty easy and toddlers pretty easy.
But when your kids start to have their own will and beliefs and thoughts and values in opposition to your own, which is healthy, of course, they're different people.
So you are facing a crossroads.
Do you will things and get angry at your parents by taking full responsibility for your life, or do you make excuses for your parents, which puts you into the category of passivity that things happen to you that you're not in control of your life?
Because if you're in control of your life in your mid to late 20s, your parents were in control of their lives in their mid to late 20s, in which case they did you wrong by choice.
If your parents in their mid to late 20s, well, they just did the best with the knowledge they could, there's no shortfall, there was no deficiency, they just did what they did, and there's an excuse for everything.
How are you supposed to will anything?
You're now the same as your parents were at this age.
You give them excuses, you cripple yourself.
Yeah.
The price of willpower, if raised by passive, self pitying parents, the price of willpower is anger.
Your parents are still playing the victim, aren't they?
Yeah.
Right.
So if your parents are victims into their 40s and 50s, how are you supposed to escape passivity in your 20s?
Right.
I have to reject that mindset they have.
Well, you don't have to because that's.
There's just choices and consequences, right?
You don't have to.
You can continue to make excuses for your parents, which crushes your own capacity for willpower in your own life.
You can continue to do all of that.
Absolutely.
I'm just telling you, I can't tell you what to do, obviously.
What I can do is point out the choices and the consequences that if you choose to keep making excuses for your parents, you will not have willpower and traction in your own life.
It's just too much of a contradiction.
Yeah.
I'm fully in control of my life, but my parents were passive victims of circumstances.
No, it's one or the other.
Have you talked to your mother about the negative things that occurred for you as a child?
Only the things that weren't directly related to them.
Like, yeah, like negative, like, yeah, being bullied at school and stuff like that.
I've talked about.
Sorry, how is that not related to them?
Well, it's not, I sound like directly related to them, right?
They weren't like the perpetrators.
What are you talking about?
Well, they weren't the ones like pointing and laughing at me at school or whatever because I like got into trouble.
But why?
I mean, there were some kids who were bullied and some kids who weren't bullied, right?
Yeah.
Okay.
What did your parents do about you being bullied?
They would just kind of tell me things like, oh, just ignore them.
They're just jealous, like all those cliches.
Okay.
So your parents did nothing really about you being bullied?
Well, no.
I mean, I mentioned that like I was homeschooled.
For a while.
That might have been something to do with it, although that was like too little, too late.
By then, it had been going on for years.
When did the bullying start?
How old were you?
It was about like around the earliest memories, really, like six, seven years old.
Okay, so it could have started before then, but that's what you remember, right?
Yeah, so basically, as far back as I can remember.
So your parents did not do anything.
In particular, that was decisive about you being bullied, right?
No.
Okay.
And that's why you were bullied.
Because the bullies knew that you did not have a close and connected relationship with your parents.
That you were helpless and unprotected.
Or to put it another way, you were bullied at school because you were bullied at home.
It is your parents' responsibility that you were bullied.
It certainly can't be the bullies' responsibility, let's say you were bullied at five and the bullies were six or seven, right?
You can't blame the bullies at six or seven.
Not directly or hugely, right?
Because they're little kids too.
That's what I have tried to do.
Oh, so the parents are not responsible in their 20s, 30s, and 40s, but the bullies are responsible at the age of six or seven.
So, no, you understand that there is a direct causal relationship between being bullied at home and being bullied at school.
Yeah, I think that makes sense.
Helplessness in the face of bullying is inculcated at home first, and the bullies are like vultures picking up the leftovers of the lion's meal.
And they know that you're not protected.
They can sense the weakness, right?
Well, weakness is a sort of judgment that's harsh on yourself.
It wasn't that you were weak, it's that you were unprotected.
I mean, lions will go for adult male zebras or baby zebras.
Baby, yeah, of course.
They're easier.
Right.
And they go for baby zebras, not because the baby zebras have some self created moral weakness, but because they're easier.
They can run less fast.
They can't kick, right?
So every time a lion goes for a zebra, it could get kicked in the jaw and, you know, die a horrible, painful death of starvation and pain, right?
And so, yeah, it's not I mean, it's true objectively that the baby zebras are weaker, but it's not a moral judgment.
They're just younger, right?
So instead of saying weaker, which sounds like, oh, I was bullied because I was weak, which is a judgment against yourself, it's another form of self bullying, is to say, I was bullied because I was unprotected.
Yeah.
If your parents had been the kind of parents that you were really close with, and if the bullies had got the sense that if they tried bullying you, your parents would raise holy hell with the school, they would get the police involved, they would march over to the bullies' parents' places and demand prompt action and talk about the bullying and go to the newspaper if they had to.
If your parents were ferocious in their protection of you, would you have been bullied?
Most likely not.
Well, no, not at all.
Lions, if they have a choice between a baby zebra that is out in the middle of nowhere or a baby zebra that is surrounded by adult males and females, which are they going to go for?
The lone one.
Yeah, the unprotected one.
Yeah.
The unprotected.
Now, both baby zebras are equally weak.
The only difference is that one is unprotected.
I mean, the purpose of a lot of predation is to separate the weak.
From their protectors, right?
So you weren't weak.
You were just unprotected.
And so when you say, well, it wasn't my parents had nothing to do with my bullying or something like that, I would strongly disagree.
That your parents' indifference was the root cause of the bullying.
And the fact that your parents also bullied you at home meant that you were radiating helplessness in the face of bullying when you were at school.
And this is communicated through eye contact, through body language, through Assertiveness through confidence.
Like, I was bullied at home and I just had this I don't know, it's not something that I earned.
It's just I had this odd confidence and gait and so on.
So, I didn't experience much bullying at all at school.
I think I was bullied once or twice for pretty brief amounts of time, but I was just cocky as hell.
And I know it's also, did you do sports at all?
I did, yeah, a little bit.
Yeah.
Like, you mean like team sports?
Well, any sports.
Yeah, I did.
I was never very good at them for the most part.
Right.
Team sports is one of the best ways to be protected against bullying is to do sports, in particular team sports, but any sports.
Do you know why?
Because then it's like you're like a pack, right?
Oh, you have a pack.
You know how to work with a team.
You have friends and teammates who are physically competent.
And did your parents encourage you to do sports?
Yeah.
So they encouraged, but you just didn't want to, right?
I tried like, I know, like, more frankly, you call it soccer, right?
But football.
I tried like that.
And it was like, I wasn't very good at it.
Like, I just didn't have like, I was like physically quite fit, but I didn't have like the hand eye coordination, like the motor coordination.
And if anything, I feel like it backfired because I would like lose the ball and then the opposing team would score a goal.
And then like the team I was on would like resent me.
And so I just never felt like I was very competent at those types of sports.
Okay.
And when you were not good at sports, did your parents.
Did they say, listen, let's go out, let's play footy, let's practice ball handling, let's, you know, whatever it takes to get you to be decent at the sport?
I think they did a bit, actually.
But yeah, I was just very demoralized, to be honest.
And then I would like, then they'd kind of be like, yeah, I suppose, yeah, like it's partly my fault.
I've just kind of like give up really and like been, I'd try another one, like rugby, or something like that.
Overcoming Sports Demoralization00:13:14
So, where did you learn about giving up?
I think if I look back to that time, it was just kind of like.
I think it feels like it was just a logical conclusion I came to, where it's just like if I'm not good at something, what's the point?
Sorry to interrupt.
Have you ever spent time around babies and toddlers?
Yeah, a little bit.
Okay.
Have you ever seen.
A toddler learning how to walk.
Yeah, it's shit at it, right, to start with.
And sorry?
I didn't quite catch what you said.
It's something.
I said, yeah, toddlers are shit at walking to start with, right?
Is that what you mean?
Right.
And how fierce is their dedication and desire to learn how to walk?
Well, yeah, it is very fierce, right?
Right.
So we couldn't survive as a species if we gave up.
No.
So, where did you learn about giving up?
Because your innate mental structure is to persevere no matter how tough.
I don't know where I learned to give up.
Okay.
The first place to ask is Did you see your parents struggle to overcome obstacles no matter what?
Not particularly.
No, I think.
I suppose not.
Kind of a weasel word as well.
What does particularly mean in this context?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Like, did I see them struggle to overcome obstacles?
So, you know, a stupid example would be my daughter saw me have 15 years of work erased from the internet and then struggle to regain an audience, right?
Did I just say, oh, you know, I'll just find something else to do or I'm just going to be depressed for six months or, right?
She saw me and look, Again, I'm not trying to put myself forward as some perfect guy or anything like that.
Lord knows I've had my struggles, but she has seen me work to overcome obstacles and to find a way to push on no matter what.
Because that's life.
I mean, we have to push on.
What else are we going to do?
Just go into a fetal position and give up?
That's not what we do as a species.
That's not what any animal does, really.
So, our default position is to struggle, to take on obstacles and to overcome them, right?
To take arms against the sea of troubles and by opposing, end them.
That's sort of Hamlet's description of humanity, right?
So, in some manner, I mean, my daughter knows that I've given speeches with bomb and death threats.
That, you know, the Charlie Kirk stuff, right?
Yeah, yeah, I think I remember.
Yeah, and she's seen the videos of me marching with the communists into tear gas and so on.
That was probably a bit foolhardy.
So, you know, maybe there's a moderation that I'm still working on.
But she sees me overcoming obstacles, overcoming challenges.
When I banged my knee really badly some years ago and I went to rehab, and oh my gosh, it just took forever and ever.
I just kept trying different things until I figured out.
What the problem was.
I didn't just say, okay, well, I guess I'll just have to live with this limitation on mobility for the rest of my life.
Or, like, I just, I'll figure something out.
I'll find something to be able to move forward on.
So, have you seen your parents struggle to overcome a limitation?
Certainly not if your father is relatively content doing something slightly more difficult than digging a ditch for his whole life.
He still struggles to overcome challenges.
Oh, sorry.
Does he say, I have trouble with reading and spelling.
I'm going to figure it out.
I'm going to make sure that I get good at this?
No.
No.
Does he struggle to overcome his bad temper or his emotional immaturity or his lack of social skills?
No.
So have you seen your parents overcome obstacles?
Because we are born with a grim, fierce, relentless desire to overcome obstacles.
Otherwise, we'd be 20, still in a fetal position, being fed by a giant boob.
Or something like that.
We strive for independence.
We strive for mastery.
We strive to overcome obstacles.
I mean, if you've ever seen, you know, baby horses, the foals, right?
They immediately try to stand up, they wobble, they just have a fierce desire for mastery.
So we're not born with, like, oh, I guess I'm not that good at soccer.
I guess I'll just avoid it.
And, like, that comes from your environment.
That's not innate to your nature.
Mm hmm.
Yeah, that's an, yeah.
Okay, let's just cut to the chase.
If this makes sense, I don't want to take up your entire day.
So, in my view, maybe this is harsh, and listen, you're the expert on your parents, so I completely defer to your experience.
But your parents sound like failures as a whole.
Your father never really amounted much to anything, he doesn't strive to overcome things.
He doesn't have any self criticism, really.
He doesn't have any desire to improve even things that he's obviously bad at that are kind of basic, like reading and writing and spelling and so on.
So, yeah.
And, you know, we can say this is low intelligence.
I mean, who knows, right?
I don't know the man, but if I were to look at him as a whole, I would say he was pretty much a failure as a parent.
He's been pretty much a failure in his.
I don't know, job, career.
It's not even a career, just moving stuff around or whatever he's doing.
Yeah.
And your mother is married to him and failed as a mother to protect her children and failed as a mother to an autistic child to make reasonable accommodations for those challenges and has remained married to a guy who's kind of a loser in life.
And that's your parents.
They are losers, they are failures as a whole.
Now, we could say maybe they're not smart or whatever.
Okay, fine, whatever, right?
But nonetheless, that's your template.
Is people who have incredibly low expectations of themselves or others because success, assuming the raw physical capacity, is simply a matter of raising your standards.
That's all it is.
I try to do better shows and better shows every time.
Like I'm trying to make this the best show ever with the most insight, right?
New ideas and all of that, right?
So success is simply a matter of raising your standards.
That's all it is.
And your parents don't sound like they've raised their standards.
Above that of your average amoeba.
They don't have higher standards.
They don't have aspirational goals.
They don't try to improve.
They just live in this placid water buffalo in mud kind of way, doing whatever feels like.
It doesn't sound like they're any less hedonistic now than they were in their teens and 20s.
So there's no progress, no raised standards.
And without raised standards, you can't have humility because humility is I can do better.
I'm not there yet.
And so no humility, no raised standards.
And of course, free will is our capacity to compare proposed actions to ideal standards.
And your parents don't seem to have any ideal standards.
They don't seem to have any self criticism.
They're just kind of placid NPC, low rent failure bots, so to speak.
And you want to achieve more, right?
Yeah, I would like to, yeah, like almost like, I suppose, yeah, advance beyond like where my parents got to in terms of, yeah, like, I suppose, like, that's true.
Well, they have no experience in doing anything other than being fairly low rent failures.
How can they help you?
You're asking someone to teach you Polish who doesn't even know that Polish exists.
How can they help you?
How can they do anything other than be in the way?
Yeah.
I mean, if your parents sat you down and said, listen, son, you got a lot of potential, you got, you know, we put a lot on hold for you to get well educated.
Like, What are you doing?
Like, what's going on with these low rent jobs?
What's going on with this not dating?
Have they sat you down and said, How can we help you be better able to achieve even reasonable levels of success in dating and career?
No.
Right.
So losers cannot help you win, especially when they don't even know they're losers.
Like, your parents could say, Listen, you know, we faffed up and we did drugs or hedonistic shit and, you know, we pissed away our potential.
That doesn't have to be you.
Right.
I mean, they seem to be fairly placid and content with where you are.
Sorry, go ahead.
Yeah.
I mean, yeah, they've never really had, like, they've never really, like, directed me back, kind of, at anything like that.
Well, how could they?
Yeah.
Yeah, they couldn't.
Yeah.
Sorry, you were about to say something else.
My apologies.
Yeah, yeah.
No, I was going to say, yeah, yeah, but they, they, they, of course they can't really, like you said.
Well, they can't now.
Because they've never developed those positive habits.
Like a 90 year old guy probably can't run a marathon if he's never exercised his whole life.
Right.
So, yeah, they can't now as a result of prior choices.
I mean, they could have cracked a book on parenting, right?
I mean, I assume that they wanted you to study for tests that you had, and parenting is the most important test, and it doesn't sound like they studied for it at all.
No, my mum flat out said to me a few months ago, but oh, I was just so young.
I didn't know what I was doing as a young parent.
And at the time, I didn't say it, but I thought, well, actually, you know, that's kind of your responsibility.
Well, no, it's not kind of.
Sorry.
Yeah.
If you had an exam and you didn't study for it and you said, well, you know, I was just young.
I didn't know what was going on with the exam.
What would you say?
Be like, that's nice geeks.
Well, you crazy?
You knew the exam was coming.
Why didn't you pick up?
Why didn't you study?
Yeah.
Why didn't you learn something?
I mean, so if she says, well, I was young.
I didn't know what was going on.
It's like, I don't know what.
I mean, that's just too strange for me.
I'm sure that if you had said, To your parents, I got an F on a test at school because I just didn't bother to study.
Would they have said, No, that's fine.
I mean, you did the best you could with the knowledge you had.
That's no problem.
What would they have said?
Sorry, could you repeat that?
I didn't quite catch that.
If you had failed an important test when you were in school and in, say, junior high school or whatever, and the message was sent home to your parents, You got an F on this science test, and your parents said, Well, what was going on?
And you said, Oh, yeah, I just.
I mean, I didn't study.
I didn't know what was on the test.
I mean, I was just young.
What would they say?
They would have been bewildered and they would have been upset and they would have, yeah, they would have probably been a bit mad at me.
What do you mean you didn't study for the test?
Why are you so blase about it?
What do you mean you didn't study for the test that it's fine?
You got to study for a test.
That your mom is like, well, it's infinitely more important being a parent than it is doing some stupid ass spelling B in grade 10.
And your parents were like, no, it's fine.
No, we just didn't know.
We didn't crack any books.
We didn't study for anything.
We didn't learn anything.
We didn't know anything.
We just made mistakes because we didn't know.
And it's like, and listen, I'm fine with that.
I mean, in a weird way, at least it's not hypocritical.
If you failed to study for a test and your parents were like, yeah, that tracks, you know, don't bother studying.
Doesn't matter.
Just do the best you can with the knowledge you have.
You don't have to study for anything.
But parents never say that, right?
That's the hypocrisy that bothers me very deeply.
The parents say, You have to study for some stupid ass spelling test in grade seven, but we didn't have to crack a single book on how to be not shitty parents.
I think I've always implicitly, ever since I've been thinking about these types of things, I've always implicitly recognized that double standard.
Hypocrisy in Parental Expectations00:06:26
Who's the most, the last question I have, who's the most successful person you know in your life personally?
To be honest, probably my grandpa.
Yeah.
Yeah.
My grandpa.
Your grandpa on which side?
Maternal.
Okay.
So your mother's father is very successful in what way?
He was just born in the 50s and he started a business during an economic boom and just became a.
He essentially managed to buy up lots of.
Lots of like property, and you know, I haven't gone into too much detail, but like, yeah, he just, yeah, he just became very financially successful.
And is he in your life?
Is he alive and in your life?
Yeah.
Yeah, it's a benefit of young parents, right?
Okay, so has he ever sat down with you and tried to give you some advice on success?
Not really.
I think, to be honest, I think because of my experience with my parents, I've always tried to kind of keep other people at a bit of an arm's length.
No, no, no.
It's just his job.
His job.
It's his job, right?
I mean, it's not up to you.
He would see that you.
As his grandson, are having trouble getting traction in the world.
So he would make that a priority, right?
Yeah.
I mean, that would be nice, but he hasn't.
No, like he's kind of humble bragged about, you know, how things were for him back in the 70s, you know, when he was making loads of money or whatever.
But yeah, he hasn't really given me any specific advice or anything like that.
Okay.
Has he given you unspecific advice?
These words, they just keep coming up.
Oh, yeah.
I mean, yeah.
I think when I was younger, actually, like before I went to uni, yeah, he was like encouraging me to go to uni because he was like, because he would almost like play down his own success because like it involved a lot of hard work.
And I think he saw like, you know, like people going to uni because he never went.
I was a first generation student in my family.
And I think he, yeah, like, Lots of people in my family have regarded going to university as, oh, it's like what you should do if you want to be successful.
And so, yeah, I suppose the most specific I could get with advice was encouraging me to pursue further education.
Okay, but he knows that your parents are not successful, right?
Yeah, and I think, to be honest, they've been propped up quite a bit by.
Him.
Right.
Okay.
So if he knows that your parents aren't successful, then he knows that you're not going to get any particular information about success from your parents.
So he needs to step in, right?
You'd think so.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So it's not your job.
So he doesn't give a shit either.
Otherwise, he'd say, Hey, you're in your 20s and you're not really doing that much compared to your education.
What can I do?
How can I help?
You know, that kind of stuff, right?
Yeah.
So I'm sorry you're just not surrounded because that should be something that he would.
He would do, right?
Do you think it's like I could initiate conversations around that?
You certainly could, but you'd also have to perhaps ask why he hasn't.
Like, what do you think of mom and dad?
Like, do you think they're successful?
Well, no.
Well, I mean, why haven't you sat down and tried to help me out with things?
Or like, just be curious, right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
So the point you're making here, right, is that like in order to, To have these conversations, it would have to imply that, yeah, my parents haven't been successful, right?
And kind of address what's gone wrong there and how I can not let that kind of become me as well, right?
Yes.
But just noticing when people aren't helping you is very interesting and challenging, right?
And of course, you're a self critical person, so you'd be more likely like, well, I must have done something that I failed to generate interest or whatever it is, right?
There would be something, right?
Yeah.
You would say that.
Yeah, but that's kind of my default.
Right.
And that's a good thing.
It's a good thing to be self critical for sure, but not regarding your elders.
With regards to your elders, it is their job to take an interest in you and their job to help you.
You shouldn't be out there begging your grandfather who knows your limitations at the moment and also knows the limitations of his children.
He's got a dunderhead for a son in law and a wife who's happy to marry a dunderhead for many decades, which does not exactly undunderhead her.
And so, yeah, I mean, if I have a grandchild and the grandchild is struggling, I mean, you think I'm just going to talk about how great my life is and not.
Do anything or say anything?
No, no, that would be wrong, like morally.
Yeah.
Yeah, you need to surround yourself with people who, if you want to be successful, you need to surround yourself with people who are invested in your success, heavily ego invested, personally invested, emotionally invested in your success.
And it just doesn't sound like anyone is doing that.
And maybe they take the autism thing and, you know, this is the usual comment.
That I have, which is that people who call me and say that they're autistic, if you hadn't told me you're autistic, I never would have guessed.
Well, yeah, but I mean, you're not observing my body language.
And, you know, if you like spent a week with me, I think you would definitely notice there's something wrong.
Like, no, wrong, but yes, something different to be.
Well, maybe, maybe, but you are an intelligent, brilliant person raised by dunderheads.
It's just going to be a certain amount of awkwardness in that, no matter what.
Yeah, I suppose you're right.
Shaking Off Childhood Determinism00:01:02
Yeah.
So, all right.
Well, listen, should we close up here?
I know we didn't get to your dating life, but I think that this has a lot to do with it as a whole.
I'm certainly happy if you want to book another call to talk about your dating life.
But yeah, I would say that you've got to shake off this determinism that you've had to deliver to your parents so that you could survive your childhood.
You've got to shake it off, but that means getting angry at their deficiencies.
Yeah.
Then that shakes you out of the weather and train tracks and inevitability domino stuff that goes on.
When we give too many excuses to our parents.
Right.
Yeah, no, this has been really helpful.
Thank you very much.
And I'll probably listen back to it and take some notes.
No, I'm sorry.
I will.
I hope so.
I hope so.
I certainly will.
All right, brother.
Well, listen, I appreciate the conversation.
I'm very sorry about the deficiencies in your upbringing.
I have no doubt that you can overcome them.
And I hope you'll keep me posted about how things are going.