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885 Hope for the future...
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Transcript:
Good morning, everybody; hope you’re doing well. It’s Stef, just taking an hour or so off from the reading of the audio book of Universally Preferable Behavior: A Rational Proof of Secular Ethics, which I am most pleased with. And, it’s hard to read though—it’s hard to get the cadence right in these very dense and somewhat technical (on occasion) philosophical paragraphs. So it’s quite an exciting challenge from that standpoint. It takes forever, sometimes, to record a page—[you] put the emphasis on the wrong syllable, and it’s all over; start again! But I’m quite pleased with the recording quality of this new mic, so I hope that you will like it if you grab the audiobook, which should be out in a day or two.
So, I wanted to talk today—there has been a minor ripple in the FDR ecosphere of people who feel a certain amount of despair or despondency about the future of the world, and I sort of wanted to do my best to give you a lift in that regard. Now, I mean everybody knows who’s listening this far, that I focus (try to focus) on helping you to spend your energies on things that you can control, not on things that you cannot control, because trying to control that which you cannot control is not only a form of adult enslavement, but sadly, is all too often an echo of our childhoods - if we had parents who weren’t the best, let’s say - wherein we would try to control their behavior and feel overwhelmed by the power that they had over us. So as we talked about before, the power disparity that we had as children between ourselves and our parents is far greater, far greater than the power disparity that occurs between us as citizens and our friendly, neighborhood State as adults.
The interesting thing is that if you feel overwhelmed by the power of the State, of religion, and of the corruption of those in power—if you feel overwhelmed by that, and maybe it’s accurate, maybe it’s valid, maybe it’s true, but I would take as my approach—the first thing I would do is make sure that I’m not mistaking the world for myself. As I’ve talked about before, the fundamental problem that thinkers have, particularly sensitive thinkers, which most of us in this conversation are, that we can think of course, but we also have a good deal of emotional sensitiivy or empathy, which is good, I think—it’s necessary to be a competent and effective ethicist—but we have this problem, we all have this problem, which is trying to figure out whether or not we are thinking about the world or thinking about ourselves. The fundamental projection that I’ve always talked about is that people take the power disparity and supposed virtue; the real, really corrupt corruption corruption—terrible sentence, let me start again, sorry (Note: the transcriber agrees.)
People take the supposed virtue and actual corruption of the parents and to some degree that of the teachers, that they experienced when they were children, and they then project that onto the State, and onto God. Psychologically, this is called splitting. You can see this, taking the Italian stereotype, and apologies to my fine Italian listeners, but we have these stereotypes from time to time. But to take the Italian stereotype, the Italian man has this sometimes called a Madonna/Whore complex [background noise]. Ooh, we have some low-flying planes today, sorry.
In this Madonna/Whore complex, what happens is that he’s raised by his mother, who is outwardly pious, but secretly angry. All conformity brings anger; breeds anger. Once you’re conscious of that anger, you can change your level of conformity based on that anger. That which does not hurt us, we do not change - which is why people who don’t want to change studiously avoid genuine feelings, through drugs, or through conformity, through cults… through whatever. So, the mom is outwardly pious and compliant, but secretly angry. Why? Because she is oppressed by her ideologies: the cult of culture, the cult of the family, the cult of the nation-state, the cult of religion in particular. What happens is if the son expresses any criticism of the mother, she becomes haughty and withdraws, and tortures him through the threat of neglect, which to a child is equivalent to the threat of murder to an adult. I mean, people say “There are abandonment issues,” or “I have abandonment issues” as if that is not totally valid in terms of how the original relationship goes. I mean, if I was being hunted down by the mafia, I wouldn’t go to a therapist and say, “I have ‘being murdered’ issues.” I mean, no! I don’t have ‘being-murdered issues’, I’m afraid of being murdered!
It’s the same thing with abandonment. Abandonment to a child is a death sentence, and the threat of it is the equivalent of taking a knife to the throat of an adult, but actually closer to imprisonment. So, in this way, we can understand the son criticizes the mother, the mother threatens him because of her own murderous anger, which is a result of her own conformity and lack of authenticity; her enslavement. We either feel the pain of enslavement and free ourselves, or fight the pain the pain of enslavement by attacking and enslaving others. That’s on the board, that’s on my inbox, that’s in the world, that’s everywhere. And so, what happens is, the child grows up with a hatred of its mother but with a need for avid compliance, which is based on fear of attack.
I mean, nobody just wakes up and says, hey, I’m going to give up all my genuine thoughts and feelings and comply with others because it’s fun. I mean nobody really says that and gives up their stuff voluntarily and happily. So, the son conforms to the mother and then as he grows up, what happens to his hostility towards the woman that bullied him to bullying him into conformity towards her own narcissistic fantasies? Well, it doesn’t go away. As I’ve mentioned before, taking heroin for two things, not eliminating the rot, it just eliminates the symptom, which makes the rot worse. Well, then you get this thing called the splitting. And the splitting engenders perfectionism or high standards or irrational standards which can’t be met. Right, that’s the idealization of corruption is the possibility of perfection. So, if I’m really mad at the world, but I’m a chickenshit basically about expressing it, about being honest and open with myself. If I really hate people, but I’m never allowed to express it and I have this template of “high standards” that are really abusive for what I do, if I hate the world, if I hate the peole in the world, is that I set up the standard that becomes impossible for people to meet, and then I attack them with disquietment or with angry with some aggressive or passive aggression mechanism. So, you see this stuff, again it takes a silly and exaggerated, perhaps, example; you have the mafia guys who say, “My mother is a saint!” And they get totally attach-y and crippl-y and angry about anybody who would criticize their mother, and then they treat their lives like shit. This is the idealization—idealization is always the drawing back of the bowstring before the attack. It’s the idealization.
And so, all of the hostility they feel towards their own mothers is then displaced towards all other women who they treat like shit. And they say, “I am just fine treating you like shit because you do not rise to the standard of perfection that my mother has.” And this is all very complicated, but the mother’s anger is thus played out through the son against other women, because women are, to a large degree, if not to the majority, are enslaved not by men, but by other women. Just ask a woman in your life to speak honestly about whose opinion, whose negative opinion she fears more, men or women. And it will be women’s. So the son and his rage against other women becomes part of the mother’s executionary mechanism—part of her attack, a core part of her attack, on the world. So she just becomes sweet and passive aggressive.
So, I wanted to talk today—there has been a minor ripple in the FDR ecosphere of people who feel a certain amount of despair or despondency about the future of the world, and I sort of wanted to do my best to give you a lift in that regard. Now, I mean everybody knows who’s listening this far, that I focus (try to focus) on helping you to spend your energies on things that you can control, not on things that you cannot control, because trying to control that which you cannot control is not only a form of adult enslavement, but sadly, is all too often an echo of our childhoods - if we had parents who weren’t the best, let’s say - wherein we would try to control their behavior and feel overwhelmed by the power that they had over us. So as we talked about before, the power disparity that we had as children between ourselves and our parents is far greater, far greater than the power disparity that occurs between us as citizens and our friendly, neighborhood State as adults.
The interesting thing is that if you feel overwhelmed by the power of the State, of religion, and of the corruption of those in power—if you feel overwhelmed by that, and maybe it’s accurate, maybe it’s valid, maybe it’s true, but I would take as my approach—the first thing I would do is make sure that I’m not mistaking the world for myself. As I’ve talked about before, the fundamental problem that thinkers have, particularly sensitive thinkers, which most of us in this conversation are, that we can think of course, but we also have a good deal of emotional sensitiivy or empathy, which is good, I think—it’s necessary to be a competent and effective ethicist—but we have this problem, we all have this problem, which is trying to figure out whether or not we are thinking about the world or thinking about ourselves. The fundamental projection that I’ve always talked about is that people take the power disparity and supposed virtue; the real, really corrupt corruption corruption—terrible sentence, let me start again, sorry (Note: the transcriber agrees.)
People take the supposed virtue and actual corruption of the parents and to some degree that of the teachers, that they experienced when they were children, and they then project that onto the State, and onto God. Psychologically, this is called splitting. You can see this, taking the Italian stereotype, and apologies to my fine Italian listeners, but we have these stereotypes from time to time. But to take the Italian stereotype, the Italian man has this sometimes called a Madonna/Whore complex [background noise]. Ooh, we have some low-flying planes today, sorry.
In this Madonna/Whore complex, what happens is that he’s raised by his mother, who is outwardly pious, but secretly angry. All conformity brings anger; breeds anger. Once you’re conscious of that anger, you can change your level of conformity based on that anger. That which does not hurt us, we do not change - which is why people who don’t want to change studiously avoid genuine feelings, through drugs, or through conformity, through cults… through whatever. So, the mom is outwardly pious and compliant, but secretly angry. Why? Because she is oppressed by her ideologies: the cult of culture, the cult of the family, the cult of the nation-state, the cult of religion in particular. What happens is if the son expresses any criticism of the mother, she becomes haughty and withdraws, and tortures him through the threat of neglect, which to a child is equivalent to the threat of murder to an adult. I mean, people say “There are abandonment issues,” or “I have abandonment issues” as if that is not totally valid in terms of how the original relationship goes. I mean, if I was being hunted down by the mafia, I wouldn’t go to a therapist and say, “I have ‘being murdered’ issues.” I mean, no! I don’t have ‘being-murdered issues’, I’m afraid of being murdered!
It’s the same thing with abandonment. Abandonment to a child is a death sentence, and the threat of it is the equivalent of taking a knife to the throat of an adult, but actually closer to imprisonment. So, in this way, we can understand the son criticizes the mother, the mother threatens him because of her own murderous anger, which is a result of her own conformity and lack of authenticity; her enslavement. We either feel the pain of enslavement and free ourselves, or fight the pain the pain of enslavement by attacking and enslaving others. That’s on the board, that’s on my inbox, that’s in the world, that’s everywhere. And so, what happens is, the child grows up with a hatred of its mother but with a need for avid compliance, which is based on fear of attack.
I mean, nobody just wakes up and says, hey, I’m going to give up all my genuine thoughts and feelings and comply with others because it’s fun. I mean nobody really says that and gives up their stuff voluntarily and happily. So, the son conforms to the mother and then as he grows up, what happens to his hostility towards the woman that bullied him to bullying him into conformity towards her own narcissistic fantasies? Well, it doesn’t go away. As I’ve mentioned before, taking heroin for two things, not eliminating the rot, it just eliminates the symptom, which makes the rot worse. Well, then you get this thing called the splitting. And the splitting engenders perfectionism or high standards or irrational standards which can’t be met. Right, that’s the idealization of corruption is the possibility of perfection. So, if I’m really mad at the world, but I’m a chickenshit basically about expressing it, about being honest and open with myself. If I really hate people, but I’m never allowed to express it and I have this template of “high standards” that are really abusive for what I do, if I hate the world, if I hate the peole in the world, is that I set up the standard that becomes impossible for people to meet, and then I attack them with disquietment or with angry with some aggressive or passive aggression mechanism. So, you see this stuff, again it takes a silly and exaggerated, perhaps, example; you have the mafia guys who say, “My mother is a saint!” And they get totally attach-y and crippl-y and angry about anybody who would criticize their mother, and then they treat their lives like shit. This is the idealization—idealization is always the drawing back of the bowstring before the attack. It’s the idealization.
And so, all of the hostility they feel towards their own mothers is then displaced towards all other women who they treat like shit. And they say, “I am just fine treating you like shit because you do not rise to the standard of perfection that my mother has.” And this is all very complicated, but the mother’s anger is thus played out through the son against other women, because women are, to a large degree, if not to the majority, are enslaved not by men, but by other women. Just ask a woman in your life to speak honestly about whose opinion, whose negative opinion she fears more, men or women. And it will be women’s. So the son and his rage against other women becomes part of the mother’s executionary mechanism—part of her attack, a core part of her attack, on the world. So she just becomes sweet and passive aggressive.
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