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72. Bullies and Victims: The aftermath of culture
Summary:
Summary here.
Transcript:
Good afternoon everybody. It is January the 27th at 4:55. I’m on my way home for a lovely weekend with my wife, and I wanted to finish off the unholy trinity of soul murder – boy, what a lovely topic we’re doing at the moment! I promise it’ll be nothing but fun and giggles next week.
So far we’ve been really chatting mostly about the “done unto” scenario, and I wanted to talk a little bit more about the “doing unto others” scenario, which is a bit more than a scenario, it’s the inevitable cycle of this kind of problem, of this kind of corruption. So, of course, we’ve sort of talked about two major areas: one is the invisible apple dinner, and the other is what happens to keep you dependent upon that kind of fantasy, which is during the destruction of the true self that occurs in the appeal to morality around the eating of the apple. In the next part, we have the replacement of the decaying or destroyed true self with the false, which is generated by an appeal to vanity, an appeal to empty vanity, which is culture, which is “We’re the best” and so on. This bears its fruit things like nationalism and so on.
What I wanted to talk about, then, is when you become an adult, after you’ve gone through this process (and this process generally occurs before puberty; in fact, I would say that it almost always occurs before puberty. Of course, you want to corrupt children’s thinking before they have the capacity for rational analysis. “Get ‘em while they’re young” is the order of the day when it comes to this kind of propaganda, as it is with all kinds of propaganda). Parents or those who are older and more powerful tend to bully children their children precisely because they lack the physical strength to fight back, or the independence to make better choices, or to make happier choices in associating with their own family (if their family is out and out nasty, which is not too uncommon in my experience).
In the same way that you want to abuse a child physically when that child is young, you also want to abuse that child mentally when that child is young. There’s lots of questions here around the term “abuse” in this scenario. We could change it to corruption if you like, but it doesn’t really matter. It is the infliction of things that are patently false upon children with no examination of the alternatives. That is corrupt no matter which way you cut it, and it is certainly abusive to teach children that things are false.
It is bad to teach children even things that are true if you do not teach them the methodology of thinking. Even if you teach them that 2 + 2 is 4, even though you don’t teach them anything about mathematics and have them say it back by rote, that is almost as corrupt as teaching them things that are false. In fact, it could be said to be more corrupt, when I think about it, because this is further confusing the child by providing them with the right answer but no methodology.
The only process of raising a child that is absolutely central to parenting is to teach the child independent thought. This is the only possibility that the child has of happiness, of good relationships with others, of integrity, of decency, of morality. You have to teach the child independent thinking. (Independent and thinking is sort of redundant, since you can’t think collectively.) You absolutely first and foremost want to teach a child how to think, how to reason, how to determine truth from falsehood; otherwise, you are completely crippling their mental faculties. That’s what I mean when I talk about corruption.
The reason that parents know it’s corruption is that they don’t accept it in other areas. If I were to say to somebody who was 30 years old, “Listen, you come and work for me, and I will give you an imaginary paycheck that is really real but you can’t ever cash it,” or “you’ll be able to cash it after you’re dead,” or “you can only cash it in the eighteenth century” or something, then of course they would just laugh at me and say, “Look, you’re not giving me anything of value here, because a paycheck which I can’t cash in this life or in this time frame is not a paycheck at all, it’s just imaginary.” So that’s how you know for sure that the parents are corrupt, because they absolutely do have the ability to tell a real game from a false game, and therefore they know fully how to reason and rationalize in their own self interest. If you tell them that they should play tennis, and that there’s an imaginary person who’s going to play tennis with them, but very badly, but that they should coach that person on how to hit the ball back better, they would look at you strangely and say “what you trying to pull here?” I mean, if I don’t see this person on the other side of the tennis net, then if not going to try to pretend to be coaching this invisible friend of yours. Of course, an invisible friend is one of those things that children are supposed to outgrow, and if they don’t, it’s considered to be a mark of psychological ill health. So parents or those who are in authority have absolutely no problem whatsoever determining true values from false values when it is to their detriment in the short run or even the medium run to believe in the false values.
So, for instance, the government says, “we’re the government, we have rights that are different from you, and therefore we can tax you.” Of course, if you say to them, “well, I am Stefan Molyneux, I have rights different from everyone else, that is why I don’t have to pay taxes.” They’re not going to let you do that. They’re going to subdivide themselves or split themselves away from the general rights of humanity through this abstract thing called “the government,” but if you create some abstract entity of your own called Fubar, assign yourself to the abstract entity, and then say that that abstract entity which you represent obviates your need to pay taxes, they’re going to laugh and send the cops out to drag you off to jail. [8:00]
The true facts of the matter are, if you’re rational enough to invent a false absolute which you claim to represent, which is certainly the situation, then you obviously know enough to manipulate logic to your own self-interest or your own advantage, and therefore you’re fully responsible for the corruption of thinking which you are undergoing. When a child says, “Why should I obey you?” to his father, and his father says, “You must obey me because I am your father,” then the father, or the dude, is creating an abstract entity called “fatherhood” or “the father” or “father” which contains all of the certainties that are required to win the argument.
Now, of course, to allow the child the same capacity is obviously not allowed. So let’s say that the child is now sixteen years old, able to reason and to think for himself, and the child says he is going to create a category of obedience called “sixteen years old,” and you have to obey that category, then the father’s gonna say, “Well that’s nonsense. There’s no such category as ‘sixteen years old,’ and even if there were it wouldn’t have any moral stature,” and so on. To one level of sophistication or another, that is what the father is going to say. So the father is able to puncture any opposing or alternate claims [10:00] to moral certainty based on irrational absolutes. That is where the hypocrisy and the abuse and the corruption comes in.
This priest says, “I worship god A,” and you say, “I worship god B.” If the priest says, “god A is better than god B,” and you say, “god B is better than god A,” then the priest, of course, the priest cannot say “no” to you logically. So the priest can’t say, “I’ve created this imaginary fictional entity that is the best.” You’re just attaching the label “the best,” which is an empty category without any content. If I said to you, “What is the best Himmani Himmani,” you wouldn’t know what I was talking about. It may not be even positive in the normal sense: the best Himmani Himmani might be the most challenging case for a cancer specialist, which is probably not the most positive thing if you’re the patient. So the category “best” is empty or meaningless without any content, and since something like “a god” has no intellectual content whatsoever, but is simply a negation of logic and empiricism and so on, saying “This is the best god, this is the true god,” doesn’t mean anything, but it’s an absolute. A priest cannot say to another priest, “Your god is wrong.” An individual cannot say to him, “My invisible friend is more powerful than your god and better than your god is who I choose to worship.” The priest, of course, is going to say, “No that’s not correct. Your imaginary friend, your imaginary construct is incorrect for this that or the other reason.” So to logically follow the criteria of empty abstract categories, you would have to have to logically say, “Sure, your imaginary friend is a perfectly valid thing to worship.” You couldn’t just say “no” to that, but they do.
A person who says, for instance, “You must obey me because I’m older than you”: let’s say the mother says, “You must obey me because I’m older than you, and therefore you must obey me without question,” and blah blah blah. Now if her husband happens to be older than her, then logically, of course, the husband should say, “Well you are younger than me, and therefore you, my wife, must obey me without question and without any independent thought.” But of course the mother doesn’t do that. All of these categories that are generated in order to bully other people are not ever accepted by the people who create them as logical categories in and of themselves. Somebody who had a logical category in and of itself would be curious about situations or circumstances under which that construct didn’t work. So if your mom says to you, “Well I don’t know what is right or wrong, but I’m going to think about it, and I’m going to come up with a moral rule called ‘the oldest person wins, and the youngest person must submit without any complaint and without any questions.’”
If that was genuinely her process of thinking, then she would say to you, “You have to obey me because I’m older.” and then you would say, “Well you don’t obey Dad, and Dad’s older than you.” Then she’d say, “You know, I hadn’t really thought of that. That’s an absolutely excellent point. Let’s sit down and talk about. And congratulations on reaching the age of reason!” Similarly, if you have an older brother or sister, and whoever is older is the master without any interference, then what happens if your mother and your older brother or sister give you a contradictory instruction? You have two people who are older who are then giving you instructions which conflict, and so there’s no way to know who to obey. You’re in an impossible situation, which means there’s a flaw in the logic, which means that the rule is probably immoral (one of them is, for sure). [14:30]
If those who came up with these rules that they claim as the basis for their justifications of their actions actually formulated those rules based on thought, then once a contradiction was pointed out, they would go, “Oh wow, that’s pretty interesting, maybe I should change my mind about that.” But they never do they never, never do. All they do is come up with some other justification.
For instance, George Bush these days is on this “rescue the war in Iraq” kick, because they’re not done bleeding the treasury dry and pillaging the taxpayers, so they have to keep it going. So he says, “Well, look: everybody in the whole wide world thought that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, so you can’t blame us.” Well, of course, that’s not true at all. Those who did believe that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq were those who were fed intelligence either by the CIA or the U.S. intelligence agencies or by the Mossad, [an] Israeli intelligence agency. Of course, the Israeli intelligence agencies had an enormous incentive to get rid of Hussein, because Hussein was funding the PLO and Arafat and so on, and directly paying the survival benefits of those families that had a member that was a suicide bomber, and destabilizing the region. In the first Iraq war, he sent Scuds into Israel. It wasn’t like every country in the world had all these constellations of spies deep in Iraq who were trying to figure out if there were weapons of mass destruction and they all independently came to the same this conclusion. That’s nonsense. That’s just a complete fiction.
George Bush is completely aware of this. He knows for an absolute fact that the U.S. had intelligence and was paying [Ahmed] Chalabi and all these people who came out of Iraq to give them information that would lead to a war. And he knew that the Israeli intelligence agenc[ies], not noted for its objective adherence to facts, also had a strong self-interest in getting the U.S. to invade Iraq. He’s perfectly aware of all of this; it’s just an empty excuse clad in a rational justification. You know it’s an empty excuse clad in a rational justification because as soon as you apply the same logic to something else, it doesn’t really matter. So if you join some libertarian group where nobody believes you have to pay taxes, and you don’t pay your taxes for ten years, and you say to George Bush, “Sorry, you can’t prosecute me because everyone around me also thought I didn’t have to pay taxes.” They’re going to say, “Sorry, ignorance of the law is no excuse. It was pretty easy to check up on. You shouldn’t have taken that step. And didn’t you notice all of the other people who were paying taxes?” That’s what you’d get back from George Bush, so he is perfectly aware of processing all this information. In the Iraq war, the similar line of reasoning would be, “Well, everyone else thought that they [had WMD].” Well, they were telling all these people that there [were] weapons and then when they tell you that you claim it as justification. You might say, “But didn’t you notice that no one else was actually invading Iraq at the time? You claim for an absolute certainty, you didn’t say ‘we think.’ You said ‘there absolutely are, we know where they are, we have the locations, we have the videos, we have the footage, we know exactly where they are.’” It’s pure nonsense that these people are coming up with, and to argue them at a logical level is ridiculous. You call them stone evil and you go on your merry way. You don’t discuss. That’s one of the things I get a little irritated about with libertarians trying to discuss this or that political issue, as if there’s any rationality in it whatsoever. There’s pompous, windy self-justification, but that’s about it.
So when you become an adult, and you’ve gone through this sort of soul murder at the beginning followed by the substitution of the false self for the true self through the application of vainglorious cultural absolutes, then you are ready to go out into the world and to complete the cycle. What does that look like? As I’ve mentioned just previously, you have this wonderful ability now to come up with fluid rationalizations and justifications for everything that you’re doing, so you’ll never have any self-knowledge; you’ll never be caught in any way, shape, or form; you’ll always have a perfect answer for any question that can’t be argued with, because you’re dead. Emotionally and spiritually, you are a corpse, you are one of the walking undead. You are a blight upon the world, a hatred and hostility to all that is good and true. Your entire purpose of existence now has become the destruction of truth and virtue in others. That pain which we fail to acknowledge, we will always reproduce in others. These unbelievably hateful specimens of humanity – which is, in my experience, most of humanity – claim to be acting for virtue, but they’re doing the complete opposite. When faced with a contradiction they always just have another bull-crap answer at the ready to continue justifying the exploitation of others.
The cycle becomes, emotionally, the agony that we talked about a couple of days ago, at the table of the invisible apples, the agony of realizing that your sole means of survival, which is your capacity to understand things rationally, is under direct attack by those who claim to love you. The horror of facing the fact that you are surrounded by people who are as hoping to destroy your capacity for love, happiness, truth, and virtue; or that you are insane and nobody knows it except you, because they’re all believing that you can see this invisible apple. Of course, nobody really believes the latter. People just know the former. They know that it’s the straight desire to corrupt them and destroy them that this invisible apple is held up, whatever it is – God, country, the family, culture, or whatever. So they know for fact that they’re trying to be corrupted and destroyed, and the agony and terror of that gets suppressed initially and repressed eventually, so that you no longer feel that kind of pain and horror, but that pain and horror still exists in the world. Whatever we don’t permit ourselves to feel, we end up causing other people to feel ten times over. That’s why the sociopath who has gone through so much horror usually in his early life feels no pain or guilt is continually cruel towards others: the pain and horror are facts of reality, and they have to be manifest somewhere, and therefore they get manifest as vicious behavior towards others with no guilt or shame.
If you don’t acknowledge the agony of this early and incredibly successful assault upon your personality and your being, what happens? Whenever you’re in a situation of power, whenever you face somebody who is dependent upon you or who is in your control in some manner, what happens psychologically is you get these faint echoes of that early pillage of your personality, this early rape of your natural faculties. The whiff of that pain – and I’m not saying this happens at a conscious level – but the whiff of that pain causes you to react aggressively. You faced incredibly extreme aggression against yourself when you were young – the worst kind of aggression, which is the soul murder – and then when people are now dependent on you, the subterranean agony of what it is that occurred for you is always manifest when you’re in a position of power. This usually happens with your children, but also can happen if you’re a TA, if you work in a daycare, if you have younger siblings, or you have employees; it doesn’t have to necessarily only occur when you have children.
You’re going to become one of two things. The first is to become compliant in general, in other words you take the side of the abused child mentally and submit, but you also don’t process the agony and therefore you’ll end up having to continually submit so that you don’t feel the agony. You submit in order to avoid feeling the agony of this soul murder, and so you’re going to continue to submit, because the moment you fight back, you’re exposing the true facts of the situation, which is that you were horribly preyed upon when you were younger, and exploited, and people were really out to destroy your personality in order to exercise power over you. So if you cease obeying, you awaken that old wound, it becomes a possibility that you didn’t have to obey, and thus the evil of those who preyed upon you becomes more and more clear.
You end up either obeying, or you end up preying on others. So if you take the second route that we talked about previously, you choose to become cynical and give up on morality. If you take the first route and you try and be a good person, then you’re going to end up having to be an obedient sucker for the rest of your life. If you take the second route, which is the amoral “I give up one on morality and truth,” then you become one of the abusers – rather than a continual victim, you become a continual abuser. You will have no choice, really, but to continue to prey upon those whenever you’re in a situation of power, because if you don’t exercise your power in a horribly destructive way when you’re in that situation, then again what you are going to inevitably be starting to think about is, “Well, if I can get by without abusing those who are in my power, then it was possible for my parents and those around me to do it, which means that they chose to abuse me, which means that they are evil, which means that I was hurt, which means that there is agony.” You’re going to have to make decisions about your family of origin, and have to make decisions about your whole culture and community. No one wants to do that, because it’s painful and time consuming and mental energy consuming.
You either have to perfectly comply in principle (it doesn’t mean you’re always going to comply), or you are going to become an abuser and then commit the soul murderer on others. You have to turn either abuse or victimhood into an absolute, so that you can avoid the pain of knowing that people chose to hurt you when they could’ve chosen otherwise. What we can’t handle emotionally, we pretend are absolutes. If we have been victimized, then we pretend that victimhood is simply the best and responsible way to deal with conflict, and it’s a virtue, and “turn the other cheek,” and blah blah blah. If we take the amoral route, then it becomes “an eye for an eye, vengeance is all, power over the weak is the way to go.” Both of these strategies are designed to help avoid the natural agony of being horribly preyed upon by those who had almost infinite power over you as a child. You can see this line of passivity versus hyperaggression going all the way through most systems of thought. If you look at Nietzsche’s thoughts, his division of philosophy into master morality and slave morality falls very much along those lines.
If you look at the instructions in the Bible, there are these two contradictory instructions. The first is to turn the other cheek and if your enemy asks you to walk a mile then walk two miles, and if he asks for your cloak then give your shirt as well. If you look at that side of things, that’s very much from the side of “victimhood is inevitable, nobody has a choice, you must submit to power.” The other side to see is the Old Testament damning God, with thunder and fire and brimstone and Hell. This is all the amoral “one has no choice but to exercise power over the weak, they deserve it, they are weak and must be toughened up” and so on. You can see this in the more traditional (although it’s not as traditional anymore) male-female approach to parenting, the “Shape up!” kind of stuff which is Sergeant-Major Dad and the more gentle and kind and sympathetic side of your mother. That’s often a kind of split that way.
You also see this in the velvet fist of government. On the one hand, “you chose us, we are your responsibility,” say that politicians. “You voted for us, and this is the system. It’s fundamental value to help the poor and help the sick” (as I was talking about earlier), and that’s the victimhood side of things. “You are responsible for us, and you created us as the voters, so you have to obey.” The second is that if you don’t do what they tell you to do, then they’ll rain down the police and the military on you and shoot you if don’t go along with things. That is the sadism side of the sort of masochism and sadism continuum.
The effects in the long run are perfectly constellated to exploitation. For exploitation to occur, you need two parties. You need somebody to exploit, and somebody to be exploited. So what you really want is obedient people who are in the majority, and a minority of sadistic, cold, hypocritical, and pseudo-moralistic exploiters. These can be either those who do it verbally through politics or violently through the military as a military man or a policeman. This is how the system perpetuates itself, how it reproduces itself, I guess you could say. You have majority – and it has to be a majority of compliant people, because if you have a majority of aggressive people, then the society self-destructs. If you have a majority of sadists, you end up with Nazi Germany, and even then the people that paid taxes and obeyed the government were by far in the majority compared to those who preyed on the population and murdered so many people.
That’s how it reproduces, that’s why I said what I said the other day that all of the all of the evil and corruption and predation within the world occurs in this moment, where this invisible apple is proffered, and you are considered to be a horrible person for hesitating, or refusing, or questioning whether or not is something valid is occurring or whether you’re just being exploited. This is why this moment, this dinner table from hell, is what pushes you inevitably into this. Either you are going to be an aggressive exploiter, or you are going to be a passive-aggressive, self-justified, hypocritical (both sides are hypocritical) victim. All of it is to avoid the pain. The agony that the world is in at the moment is mind-bending. It is beyond description. Even if you take out of the equation all of the horrible countries with theological dictatorships and military dictatorships and juntas and all that, even if you just look at the West, the amount of agony that is in the West at the moment is just staggering. The West is in its death throes of irrationality, but with all of the added bonuses of the products of the rational framework of capitalism, which is the guns and the bombs and so on paid for by taxation but produced by the market or through the products of the free market.
So the West is absolutely is in its paroxysm of death and destruction mentally. This is why nobody’s relationships are very satisfying (except for maybe a few, and if you’ve gotten this far in the podcasts you might be one of the people who has seen through some of this stuff), why the good men are all full of jumpiness and the bad men are all full of conviction. This situation which is occurring, this agony that’s in the world, and the agony that the West through foreign policy is inflicting upon its victims is just staggering. The genocidal impact of foreign policy on external countries, particularly from the West, is just beyond belief. It also beggars description, but perhaps I’ll take a stab at it this weekend.
If you get a sense of the agony of the world, then you get a sense of the horror of this moment around the table, when you’re offered this fruit which has no existence and you are told you must believe in it or die to one degree or another, or be condemned at the very least. The agony that is spread out through the world and manifested across many decades of a man’s life or woman’s life, that is the effect of this unbelievable trail and destruction and soul murder that occurs very early in life. That’s what points people towards these two poles of sadism and masochism, and that is what, at root, we need to oppose. That is what, at root, we need to fight. We need to fight it in ourselves as well, we need to fight it first ourselves, that’s where clarity has to come from: through the acceptance of the agony of that initial moment of ultimate betrayal and destruction. If we can’t accept and fight that within ourselves, we’re not going to have any luck trying to fix and fight anything in the world.
The strength that comes from self-knowledge and the acceptance of the horrors that were perpetrated upon us as children by our parents, by our schoolteachers, by our priests, by our politicians, by our community leaders, by everyone epistemologically or metaphysically, all of that then flows into the corruption that we see in the world. There’s really no point trying to fight that corruption without first being aware of its source within ourselves, and re-experiencing the pain and horror of that early betrayal so that we can become strong, passionate, and integrated, and that way we can have an effect on the world that has never, ever been seen before. Thank you so much for listening, as always; I wish you all the best.
Summary here.
Transcript:
Good afternoon everybody. It is January the 27th at 4:55. I’m on my way home for a lovely weekend with my wife, and I wanted to finish off the unholy trinity of soul murder – boy, what a lovely topic we’re doing at the moment! I promise it’ll be nothing but fun and giggles next week.
So far we’ve been really chatting mostly about the “done unto” scenario, and I wanted to talk a little bit more about the “doing unto others” scenario, which is a bit more than a scenario, it’s the inevitable cycle of this kind of problem, of this kind of corruption. So, of course, we’ve sort of talked about two major areas: one is the invisible apple dinner, and the other is what happens to keep you dependent upon that kind of fantasy, which is during the destruction of the true self that occurs in the appeal to morality around the eating of the apple. In the next part, we have the replacement of the decaying or destroyed true self with the false, which is generated by an appeal to vanity, an appeal to empty vanity, which is culture, which is “We’re the best” and so on. This bears its fruit things like nationalism and so on.
What I wanted to talk about, then, is when you become an adult, after you’ve gone through this process (and this process generally occurs before puberty; in fact, I would say that it almost always occurs before puberty. Of course, you want to corrupt children’s thinking before they have the capacity for rational analysis. “Get ‘em while they’re young” is the order of the day when it comes to this kind of propaganda, as it is with all kinds of propaganda). Parents or those who are older and more powerful tend to bully children their children precisely because they lack the physical strength to fight back, or the independence to make better choices, or to make happier choices in associating with their own family (if their family is out and out nasty, which is not too uncommon in my experience).
In the same way that you want to abuse a child physically when that child is young, you also want to abuse that child mentally when that child is young. There’s lots of questions here around the term “abuse” in this scenario. We could change it to corruption if you like, but it doesn’t really matter. It is the infliction of things that are patently false upon children with no examination of the alternatives. That is corrupt no matter which way you cut it, and it is certainly abusive to teach children that things are false.
It is bad to teach children even things that are true if you do not teach them the methodology of thinking. Even if you teach them that 2 + 2 is 4, even though you don’t teach them anything about mathematics and have them say it back by rote, that is almost as corrupt as teaching them things that are false. In fact, it could be said to be more corrupt, when I think about it, because this is further confusing the child by providing them with the right answer but no methodology.
The only process of raising a child that is absolutely central to parenting is to teach the child independent thought. This is the only possibility that the child has of happiness, of good relationships with others, of integrity, of decency, of morality. You have to teach the child independent thinking. (Independent and thinking is sort of redundant, since you can’t think collectively.) You absolutely first and foremost want to teach a child how to think, how to reason, how to determine truth from falsehood; otherwise, you are completely crippling their mental faculties. That’s what I mean when I talk about corruption.
The reason that parents know it’s corruption is that they don’t accept it in other areas. If I were to say to somebody who was 30 years old, “Listen, you come and work for me, and I will give you an imaginary paycheck that is really real but you can’t ever cash it,” or “you’ll be able to cash it after you’re dead,” or “you can only cash it in the eighteenth century” or something, then of course they would just laugh at me and say, “Look, you’re not giving me anything of value here, because a paycheck which I can’t cash in this life or in this time frame is not a paycheck at all, it’s just imaginary.” So that’s how you know for sure that the parents are corrupt, because they absolutely do have the ability to tell a real game from a false game, and therefore they know fully how to reason and rationalize in their own self interest. If you tell them that they should play tennis, and that there’s an imaginary person who’s going to play tennis with them, but very badly, but that they should coach that person on how to hit the ball back better, they would look at you strangely and say “what you trying to pull here?” I mean, if I don’t see this person on the other side of the tennis net, then if not going to try to pretend to be coaching this invisible friend of yours. Of course, an invisible friend is one of those things that children are supposed to outgrow, and if they don’t, it’s considered to be a mark of psychological ill health. So parents or those who are in authority have absolutely no problem whatsoever determining true values from false values when it is to their detriment in the short run or even the medium run to believe in the false values.
So, for instance, the government says, “we’re the government, we have rights that are different from you, and therefore we can tax you.” Of course, if you say to them, “well, I am Stefan Molyneux, I have rights different from everyone else, that is why I don’t have to pay taxes.” They’re not going to let you do that. They’re going to subdivide themselves or split themselves away from the general rights of humanity through this abstract thing called “the government,” but if you create some abstract entity of your own called Fubar, assign yourself to the abstract entity, and then say that that abstract entity which you represent obviates your need to pay taxes, they’re going to laugh and send the cops out to drag you off to jail. [8:00]
The true facts of the matter are, if you’re rational enough to invent a false absolute which you claim to represent, which is certainly the situation, then you obviously know enough to manipulate logic to your own self-interest or your own advantage, and therefore you’re fully responsible for the corruption of thinking which you are undergoing. When a child says, “Why should I obey you?” to his father, and his father says, “You must obey me because I am your father,” then the father, or the dude, is creating an abstract entity called “fatherhood” or “the father” or “father” which contains all of the certainties that are required to win the argument.
Now, of course, to allow the child the same capacity is obviously not allowed. So let’s say that the child is now sixteen years old, able to reason and to think for himself, and the child says he is going to create a category of obedience called “sixteen years old,” and you have to obey that category, then the father’s gonna say, “Well that’s nonsense. There’s no such category as ‘sixteen years old,’ and even if there were it wouldn’t have any moral stature,” and so on. To one level of sophistication or another, that is what the father is going to say. So the father is able to puncture any opposing or alternate claims [10:00] to moral certainty based on irrational absolutes. That is where the hypocrisy and the abuse and the corruption comes in.
This priest says, “I worship god A,” and you say, “I worship god B.” If the priest says, “god A is better than god B,” and you say, “god B is better than god A,” then the priest, of course, the priest cannot say “no” to you logically. So the priest can’t say, “I’ve created this imaginary fictional entity that is the best.” You’re just attaching the label “the best,” which is an empty category without any content. If I said to you, “What is the best Himmani Himmani,” you wouldn’t know what I was talking about. It may not be even positive in the normal sense: the best Himmani Himmani might be the most challenging case for a cancer specialist, which is probably not the most positive thing if you’re the patient. So the category “best” is empty or meaningless without any content, and since something like “a god” has no intellectual content whatsoever, but is simply a negation of logic and empiricism and so on, saying “This is the best god, this is the true god,” doesn’t mean anything, but it’s an absolute. A priest cannot say to another priest, “Your god is wrong.” An individual cannot say to him, “My invisible friend is more powerful than your god and better than your god is who I choose to worship.” The priest, of course, is going to say, “No that’s not correct. Your imaginary friend, your imaginary construct is incorrect for this that or the other reason.” So to logically follow the criteria of empty abstract categories, you would have to have to logically say, “Sure, your imaginary friend is a perfectly valid thing to worship.” You couldn’t just say “no” to that, but they do.
A person who says, for instance, “You must obey me because I’m older than you”: let’s say the mother says, “You must obey me because I’m older than you, and therefore you must obey me without question,” and blah blah blah. Now if her husband happens to be older than her, then logically, of course, the husband should say, “Well you are younger than me, and therefore you, my wife, must obey me without question and without any independent thought.” But of course the mother doesn’t do that. All of these categories that are generated in order to bully other people are not ever accepted by the people who create them as logical categories in and of themselves. Somebody who had a logical category in and of itself would be curious about situations or circumstances under which that construct didn’t work. So if your mom says to you, “Well I don’t know what is right or wrong, but I’m going to think about it, and I’m going to come up with a moral rule called ‘the oldest person wins, and the youngest person must submit without any complaint and without any questions.’”
If that was genuinely her process of thinking, then she would say to you, “You have to obey me because I’m older.” and then you would say, “Well you don’t obey Dad, and Dad’s older than you.” Then she’d say, “You know, I hadn’t really thought of that. That’s an absolutely excellent point. Let’s sit down and talk about. And congratulations on reaching the age of reason!” Similarly, if you have an older brother or sister, and whoever is older is the master without any interference, then what happens if your mother and your older brother or sister give you a contradictory instruction? You have two people who are older who are then giving you instructions which conflict, and so there’s no way to know who to obey. You’re in an impossible situation, which means there’s a flaw in the logic, which means that the rule is probably immoral (one of them is, for sure). [14:30]
If those who came up with these rules that they claim as the basis for their justifications of their actions actually formulated those rules based on thought, then once a contradiction was pointed out, they would go, “Oh wow, that’s pretty interesting, maybe I should change my mind about that.” But they never do they never, never do. All they do is come up with some other justification.
For instance, George Bush these days is on this “rescue the war in Iraq” kick, because they’re not done bleeding the treasury dry and pillaging the taxpayers, so they have to keep it going. So he says, “Well, look: everybody in the whole wide world thought that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, so you can’t blame us.” Well, of course, that’s not true at all. Those who did believe that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq were those who were fed intelligence either by the CIA or the U.S. intelligence agencies or by the Mossad, [an] Israeli intelligence agency. Of course, the Israeli intelligence agencies had an enormous incentive to get rid of Hussein, because Hussein was funding the PLO and Arafat and so on, and directly paying the survival benefits of those families that had a member that was a suicide bomber, and destabilizing the region. In the first Iraq war, he sent Scuds into Israel. It wasn’t like every country in the world had all these constellations of spies deep in Iraq who were trying to figure out if there were weapons of mass destruction and they all independently came to the same this conclusion. That’s nonsense. That’s just a complete fiction.
George Bush is completely aware of this. He knows for an absolute fact that the U.S. had intelligence and was paying [Ahmed] Chalabi and all these people who came out of Iraq to give them information that would lead to a war. And he knew that the Israeli intelligence agenc[ies], not noted for its objective adherence to facts, also had a strong self-interest in getting the U.S. to invade Iraq. He’s perfectly aware of all of this; it’s just an empty excuse clad in a rational justification. You know it’s an empty excuse clad in a rational justification because as soon as you apply the same logic to something else, it doesn’t really matter. So if you join some libertarian group where nobody believes you have to pay taxes, and you don’t pay your taxes for ten years, and you say to George Bush, “Sorry, you can’t prosecute me because everyone around me also thought I didn’t have to pay taxes.” They’re going to say, “Sorry, ignorance of the law is no excuse. It was pretty easy to check up on. You shouldn’t have taken that step. And didn’t you notice all of the other people who were paying taxes?” That’s what you’d get back from George Bush, so he is perfectly aware of processing all this information. In the Iraq war, the similar line of reasoning would be, “Well, everyone else thought that they [had WMD].” Well, they were telling all these people that there [were] weapons and then when they tell you that you claim it as justification. You might say, “But didn’t you notice that no one else was actually invading Iraq at the time? You claim for an absolute certainty, you didn’t say ‘we think.’ You said ‘there absolutely are, we know where they are, we have the locations, we have the videos, we have the footage, we know exactly where they are.’” It’s pure nonsense that these people are coming up with, and to argue them at a logical level is ridiculous. You call them stone evil and you go on your merry way. You don’t discuss. That’s one of the things I get a little irritated about with libertarians trying to discuss this or that political issue, as if there’s any rationality in it whatsoever. There’s pompous, windy self-justification, but that’s about it.
So when you become an adult, and you’ve gone through this sort of soul murder at the beginning followed by the substitution of the false self for the true self through the application of vainglorious cultural absolutes, then you are ready to go out into the world and to complete the cycle. What does that look like? As I’ve mentioned just previously, you have this wonderful ability now to come up with fluid rationalizations and justifications for everything that you’re doing, so you’ll never have any self-knowledge; you’ll never be caught in any way, shape, or form; you’ll always have a perfect answer for any question that can’t be argued with, because you’re dead. Emotionally and spiritually, you are a corpse, you are one of the walking undead. You are a blight upon the world, a hatred and hostility to all that is good and true. Your entire purpose of existence now has become the destruction of truth and virtue in others. That pain which we fail to acknowledge, we will always reproduce in others. These unbelievably hateful specimens of humanity – which is, in my experience, most of humanity – claim to be acting for virtue, but they’re doing the complete opposite. When faced with a contradiction they always just have another bull-crap answer at the ready to continue justifying the exploitation of others.
The cycle becomes, emotionally, the agony that we talked about a couple of days ago, at the table of the invisible apples, the agony of realizing that your sole means of survival, which is your capacity to understand things rationally, is under direct attack by those who claim to love you. The horror of facing the fact that you are surrounded by people who are as hoping to destroy your capacity for love, happiness, truth, and virtue; or that you are insane and nobody knows it except you, because they’re all believing that you can see this invisible apple. Of course, nobody really believes the latter. People just know the former. They know that it’s the straight desire to corrupt them and destroy them that this invisible apple is held up, whatever it is – God, country, the family, culture, or whatever. So they know for fact that they’re trying to be corrupted and destroyed, and the agony and terror of that gets suppressed initially and repressed eventually, so that you no longer feel that kind of pain and horror, but that pain and horror still exists in the world. Whatever we don’t permit ourselves to feel, we end up causing other people to feel ten times over. That’s why the sociopath who has gone through so much horror usually in his early life feels no pain or guilt is continually cruel towards others: the pain and horror are facts of reality, and they have to be manifest somewhere, and therefore they get manifest as vicious behavior towards others with no guilt or shame.
If you don’t acknowledge the agony of this early and incredibly successful assault upon your personality and your being, what happens? Whenever you’re in a situation of power, whenever you face somebody who is dependent upon you or who is in your control in some manner, what happens psychologically is you get these faint echoes of that early pillage of your personality, this early rape of your natural faculties. The whiff of that pain – and I’m not saying this happens at a conscious level – but the whiff of that pain causes you to react aggressively. You faced incredibly extreme aggression against yourself when you were young – the worst kind of aggression, which is the soul murder – and then when people are now dependent on you, the subterranean agony of what it is that occurred for you is always manifest when you’re in a position of power. This usually happens with your children, but also can happen if you’re a TA, if you work in a daycare, if you have younger siblings, or you have employees; it doesn’t have to necessarily only occur when you have children.
You’re going to become one of two things. The first is to become compliant in general, in other words you take the side of the abused child mentally and submit, but you also don’t process the agony and therefore you’ll end up having to continually submit so that you don’t feel the agony. You submit in order to avoid feeling the agony of this soul murder, and so you’re going to continue to submit, because the moment you fight back, you’re exposing the true facts of the situation, which is that you were horribly preyed upon when you were younger, and exploited, and people were really out to destroy your personality in order to exercise power over you. So if you cease obeying, you awaken that old wound, it becomes a possibility that you didn’t have to obey, and thus the evil of those who preyed upon you becomes more and more clear.
You end up either obeying, or you end up preying on others. So if you take the second route that we talked about previously, you choose to become cynical and give up on morality. If you take the first route and you try and be a good person, then you’re going to end up having to be an obedient sucker for the rest of your life. If you take the second route, which is the amoral “I give up one on morality and truth,” then you become one of the abusers – rather than a continual victim, you become a continual abuser. You will have no choice, really, but to continue to prey upon those whenever you’re in a situation of power, because if you don’t exercise your power in a horribly destructive way when you’re in that situation, then again what you are going to inevitably be starting to think about is, “Well, if I can get by without abusing those who are in my power, then it was possible for my parents and those around me to do it, which means that they chose to abuse me, which means that they are evil, which means that I was hurt, which means that there is agony.” You’re going to have to make decisions about your family of origin, and have to make decisions about your whole culture and community. No one wants to do that, because it’s painful and time consuming and mental energy consuming.
You either have to perfectly comply in principle (it doesn’t mean you’re always going to comply), or you are going to become an abuser and then commit the soul murderer on others. You have to turn either abuse or victimhood into an absolute, so that you can avoid the pain of knowing that people chose to hurt you when they could’ve chosen otherwise. What we can’t handle emotionally, we pretend are absolutes. If we have been victimized, then we pretend that victimhood is simply the best and responsible way to deal with conflict, and it’s a virtue, and “turn the other cheek,” and blah blah blah. If we take the amoral route, then it becomes “an eye for an eye, vengeance is all, power over the weak is the way to go.” Both of these strategies are designed to help avoid the natural agony of being horribly preyed upon by those who had almost infinite power over you as a child. You can see this line of passivity versus hyperaggression going all the way through most systems of thought. If you look at Nietzsche’s thoughts, his division of philosophy into master morality and slave morality falls very much along those lines.
If you look at the instructions in the Bible, there are these two contradictory instructions. The first is to turn the other cheek and if your enemy asks you to walk a mile then walk two miles, and if he asks for your cloak then give your shirt as well. If you look at that side of things, that’s very much from the side of “victimhood is inevitable, nobody has a choice, you must submit to power.” The other side to see is the Old Testament damning God, with thunder and fire and brimstone and Hell. This is all the amoral “one has no choice but to exercise power over the weak, they deserve it, they are weak and must be toughened up” and so on. You can see this in the more traditional (although it’s not as traditional anymore) male-female approach to parenting, the “Shape up!” kind of stuff which is Sergeant-Major Dad and the more gentle and kind and sympathetic side of your mother. That’s often a kind of split that way.
You also see this in the velvet fist of government. On the one hand, “you chose us, we are your responsibility,” say that politicians. “You voted for us, and this is the system. It’s fundamental value to help the poor and help the sick” (as I was talking about earlier), and that’s the victimhood side of things. “You are responsible for us, and you created us as the voters, so you have to obey.” The second is that if you don’t do what they tell you to do, then they’ll rain down the police and the military on you and shoot you if don’t go along with things. That is the sadism side of the sort of masochism and sadism continuum.
The effects in the long run are perfectly constellated to exploitation. For exploitation to occur, you need two parties. You need somebody to exploit, and somebody to be exploited. So what you really want is obedient people who are in the majority, and a minority of sadistic, cold, hypocritical, and pseudo-moralistic exploiters. These can be either those who do it verbally through politics or violently through the military as a military man or a policeman. This is how the system perpetuates itself, how it reproduces itself, I guess you could say. You have majority – and it has to be a majority of compliant people, because if you have a majority of aggressive people, then the society self-destructs. If you have a majority of sadists, you end up with Nazi Germany, and even then the people that paid taxes and obeyed the government were by far in the majority compared to those who preyed on the population and murdered so many people.
That’s how it reproduces, that’s why I said what I said the other day that all of the all of the evil and corruption and predation within the world occurs in this moment, where this invisible apple is proffered, and you are considered to be a horrible person for hesitating, or refusing, or questioning whether or not is something valid is occurring or whether you’re just being exploited. This is why this moment, this dinner table from hell, is what pushes you inevitably into this. Either you are going to be an aggressive exploiter, or you are going to be a passive-aggressive, self-justified, hypocritical (both sides are hypocritical) victim. All of it is to avoid the pain. The agony that the world is in at the moment is mind-bending. It is beyond description. Even if you take out of the equation all of the horrible countries with theological dictatorships and military dictatorships and juntas and all that, even if you just look at the West, the amount of agony that is in the West at the moment is just staggering. The West is in its death throes of irrationality, but with all of the added bonuses of the products of the rational framework of capitalism, which is the guns and the bombs and so on paid for by taxation but produced by the market or through the products of the free market.
So the West is absolutely is in its paroxysm of death and destruction mentally. This is why nobody’s relationships are very satisfying (except for maybe a few, and if you’ve gotten this far in the podcasts you might be one of the people who has seen through some of this stuff), why the good men are all full of jumpiness and the bad men are all full of conviction. This situation which is occurring, this agony that’s in the world, and the agony that the West through foreign policy is inflicting upon its victims is just staggering. The genocidal impact of foreign policy on external countries, particularly from the West, is just beyond belief. It also beggars description, but perhaps I’ll take a stab at it this weekend.
If you get a sense of the agony of the world, then you get a sense of the horror of this moment around the table, when you’re offered this fruit which has no existence and you are told you must believe in it or die to one degree or another, or be condemned at the very least. The agony that is spread out through the world and manifested across many decades of a man’s life or woman’s life, that is the effect of this unbelievable trail and destruction and soul murder that occurs very early in life. That’s what points people towards these two poles of sadism and masochism, and that is what, at root, we need to oppose. That is what, at root, we need to fight. We need to fight it in ourselves as well, we need to fight it first ourselves, that’s where clarity has to come from: through the acceptance of the agony of that initial moment of ultimate betrayal and destruction. If we can’t accept and fight that within ourselves, we’re not going to have any luck trying to fix and fight anything in the world.
The strength that comes from self-knowledge and the acceptance of the horrors that were perpetrated upon us as children by our parents, by our schoolteachers, by our priests, by our politicians, by our community leaders, by everyone epistemologically or metaphysically, all of that then flows into the corruption that we see in the world. There’s really no point trying to fight that corruption without first being aware of its source within ourselves, and re-experiencing the pain and horror of that early betrayal so that we can become strong, passionate, and integrated, and that way we can have an effect on the world that has never, ever been seen before. Thank you so much for listening, as always; I wish you all the best.
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