Stefan Molyneux
Stefan Molyneux
  • 2 months ago
In this episode, I examine our emotional responses to negativity, particularly guilt stemming from others' feelings. I differentiate between personal accountability and the tendency to absorb these emotions, emphasizing their irrelevance to us. We discuss the historical “slave mentality” that drives submission to authority and the need to resist this in our relationships.

I highlight the fear of rejection that fuels cycles of submission and aggression, and advocate for fostering equality and understanding, especially in families. I stress the importance of supportive relationships for emotional well-being and the value of focusing on the future to make empowered decisions. Ultimately, I present philosophy as a tool for guiding our choices and cultivating healthier interactions based on mutual respect.

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Category

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Learning
Transcript
00:00Good morning, good morning, everybody. Stephane Molyneux from Free Domain. I don't think I've done these questions. Let's find out, shall we? All right.
00:07Freedomain.locals.com, a great community. Hope you'll join. Freedomain.com slash donate to help out the show.
00:13Hi, Steph. I just wanted to say, despite listening to you for close to a decade now,
00:17I have only recently started to feel comfortable with the idea that other people's negative emotions do not necessarily, and in most cases, have nothing to do with me or my actions.
00:28Including my parents. Logically, I've known this for a while, thanks to you, but it is only recently that it feels like I'm beginning to feel it and believe it.
00:40I actually found humor after initially feeling some guilt about a random angry person I came across this morning.
00:46Well, I think the humor came from my own realization of the absurdity of feeling guilt or anger because of someone else's actions or emotional state who doesn't know me and has nothing to do with me.
00:57My parents sort of fit this category, actually.
01:01For my question, when you encounter scenarios like this, i.e. random angry person, someone calls you rude over a simple misunderstanding,
01:10how is that jolt of guilt or pain or shame halted or sandboxed so it can be evaluated, or is there not even this jolt?
01:18I think there is something fundamental I am missing about this. Thanks a bunch, Steph.
01:23It's a very interesting question. I do appreciate it.
01:26So, here is what I would say.
01:31So, when you encounter negative, destructive, harmful, abusive, whatever people,
01:38one of the things that I find very helpful to remember is that we are mostly bred to be slaves.
01:47Human beings.
01:49We are mostly bred to be slaves.
01:51Now, we could have been slaves evolutionarily, historically speaking.
01:55We could have been slaves because one tribe conquered our tribe and turned us into slaves and took our women or whatever it is.
02:02But we had to survive as slaves.
02:06Another, of course, is that you are a slave or really worse than a slave within your own tribe.
02:16Which is to say that you've got a king, the king needs soldiers,
02:21so the king comes and takes you and makes you a soldier or a sailor,
02:27where, you know, you're more likely to die of scurvy than you are of enemy fire, at least for the British Navy,
02:32prior to the understanding of vitamin C and citrus fruits.
02:38So, we largely had to survive.
02:44I mean, the vast majority of humanity were slaves.
02:46I mean, that's just a basic fact of history and of evolution and of life.
02:51So, we have to be very good at being slaves.
02:57And even if we are not a slave, we can become a slave, right?
03:01So, the mighty fall, right?
03:04Someone goes from the bottom to the top, someone goes from the top to the bottom, ducks fly.
03:10So, we have to have the slave mindset ready at any moment.
03:21And the way that the slave mindset is activated, which is a survival mechanism,
03:27because if your tribe lost to another tribe and you refused to become a slave, you died.
03:32At least if you became a slave, you might have an opportunity to reproduce,
03:36because one of the things that happens in society is that society is really, really destabilized
03:43when you have a lot of young men, in particular, with no particular opportunity to reproduce,
03:51which is another reason why things are getting bad at the moment in escalating ways.
03:57When young men don't have an opportunity to reproduce, they become highly rebellious,
04:04because if there's a structure that is genetic death for them,
04:08they might as well try and find some way to change that structure.
04:11And this is why not allowing free speech tends to get really bad over time.
04:18Because free speech could solve the demographic crisis, but free speech is limited very much at the moment.
04:25And, you know, for the foreseeable future.
04:28So, the way that you know that your slave self gets activated is a wall of propaganda rolls towards you.
04:43And you are portrayed negatively in the media.
04:49And all of these problems of all of society tend to be laid at your feet.
05:01So, in ancient Rome, if the economy of the society is not doing well,
05:05well, the slaves are lazy and rebellious and don't know their place,
05:09and you just get this roll of wave of negative propaganda about you.
05:13And that's a prequel to some, you know, obviously, historically, it's been some pretty ugly stuff that has gone on.
05:21So, this is one of the reasons why what is talked about in society is a signal of whether you can think for yourself or not.
05:35This is very foundational, happens really deep down in our instinct level.
05:41So, most people throughout human history were slaves of one kind or another, serfs or slaves,
05:49or they were impressed, or they were taxed to death, or they were controlled, or regulated,
05:53or just bullied and pushed around by the organs of the powers that be.
05:58And once you understand that most people have a survival-based slave morality,
06:13a slave morality is, I will be strong, not in my achievements, but in resisting suffering.
06:21That's the slave morality is, my virtue is my forbearance of suffering.
06:27My virtue is to keep taking it and taking it and taking it, and managing that suffering is my virtue.
06:37And again, it's perfectly understandable. This is nothing new.
06:40This is somewhat bastardized Nietzsche master and slave morality, but you see this,
06:47that you assume a kind of guilt, and then you assume that your suffering is to purify you of that guilt.
06:57And this is why there are a lot of masochists out there in the world who are very happy and willing to assume that they're guilty.
07:08And that way, the suffering that is inflicted on them is a form of purification from the guilt.
07:18And people are very, very keen and hungry.
07:20And if somebody hands you a guilt narrative, right, then that's an invitation to adopt this mindset.
07:29So, that is human nature.
07:37Now, on the other hand, of course, human nature can also slip towards the master or bully, quote, morality,
07:47which is that the exercise of your will and the control of the world is the good, right?
07:56That's sort of Genghis Khan morality, or, I mean, British Empire morality, and it's happened all over the place,
08:04which is that the exercise of your will and the control of others is your goal.
08:12The capitalist morality is very different, because the capitalist morality is about influencing others and control of nature.
08:20So, control of nature is, I have found a better way to produce automobiles.
08:24I have found a more efficient way to grow crops.
08:26I have found a better way to transmit information.
08:31It's not carrier pigeons and smoke signals anymore.
08:33It's the Pony Express.
08:35It's a mail in airplanes.
08:39It's the internet, right?
08:40So, control over nature combined with influence of people.
08:43Influence of people is advertising and so on, as opposed to direct control.
08:48People are going to try and control others, or they're going to try and influence others.
08:52That's inevitable, and there's nothing wrong with that.
08:54Language was invented for that and so on, right?
08:57So, we're going to try and influence others.
08:58We try and influence a woman to go on a date with us by being charming and nice,
09:02and if we say something mean to our wife, we try to influence her to buy her flowers,
09:10or, you know, well, it's not my particular habit, because as if I would ever upset my wife, right?
09:15But we try to influence others all the time.
09:17I'm trying to change your mind about certain things,
09:20so I'm out here getting my morning sun and trying to influence you,
09:25hopefully to better to reason and so on.
09:28So, we are tribal species, which means we're constantly influencing each other,
09:32and we either have a free market influence or a forced non-market control.
09:38Like, we either have advertising or we have propaganda that leads to war.
09:42All propaganda eventually leads to war.
09:47So, when someone is snappy at you or they're mean to you, they call you names,
09:53there's some sort of dominant personality structure that's trying to –
09:56what they're trying to do is they're trying to activate your slave self.
10:00That's unconscious, we can assume.
10:02Motives are particularly uninteresting as a whole because it's just a form of mysticism you can never get.
10:08The motives of bad people will never be revealed to you because they may not even know them themselves,
10:12and if they do, they're certainly not going to tell you.
10:15If we could get to people's motives easily, we wouldn't need a court system, right?
10:19We wouldn't need any of that.
10:23So, when someone is acting in a dominant manner towards you,
10:28then they are trying to activate your slave self.
10:33They're trying to say, I have dominance over you and you must comply.
10:38It's a sort of shot across the bows, it's a warning shot,
10:42and it's trying to activate the slave self.
10:45And usually that's because for people as a whole,
10:49trying to move from the master-slave paradigm is very tough.
10:55It's very tough if you look at parenting.
10:57This is what Peaceful Parenting – available for free at PeacefulParenting.com –
11:00this is what Peaceful Parenting really is all about,
11:03is trying to remove the master-slave paradigm from the operations called parenting.
11:11Does that make sense? Hopefully that makes sense.
11:15Parents are not masters. Children are not slaves.
11:19You want to teach your children how to negotiate rather than bully and dominate them
11:23and threaten them explicitly or implicitly with rejection and abandonment
11:27and control them physically and grab them and pick them up and jam them down on a stair
11:30and say, you sit here and control their food intake.
11:33Negotiate with them, because negotiation is equality.
11:37Free speech is equality. Free speech is neither of us dominate each other,
11:42we must reason together.
11:44Free speech is egalitarian and those who wish to undermine free speech
11:50are those who cannot operate at a level of equality.
11:54And human beings are not very well constituted,
11:58evolutionarily speaking, psychologically speaking, from my view,
12:01human beings are not very well constituted to operate at a state of equality.
12:07It is like pushing those two pieces of paper together on a table, right?
12:11One of them goes over the other.
12:13Human beings meet and one has to dominate the other.
12:16Human beings meet, one has to subjugate, one has to dominate.
12:20That's how we evolved, that's how most of human history works,
12:22and that's how things work pretty much throughout most of the world.
12:27Let us reason together, sayeth the Lord,
12:30and we either reason together or we threaten each other.
12:34People have to get their way.
12:36We either reason together, come to some sort of accommodation,
12:38some sort of hopefully win-win situation,
12:40which is kind of what a voluntary market transaction is,
12:42is a win-win situation.
12:44Free speech and nonviolence is the only sphere,
12:47it's the only possibility for human beings to both benefit from an interaction.
12:51You can't force people to buy your stuff,
12:53you can't force people to accept your ideas,
12:55you don't use force to prevent other people from communicating their ideas.
12:58Free speech and the free market are the only chances we have to negotiate as equals,
13:03and those who have been seduced into the master-slave paradigm
13:08want to use violence to control the market,
13:10want to use violence to control free speech.
13:14Of course, it's always under the umbrella of reducing violence.
13:19Well, this free speech is going to lead to violence, you see.
13:23Of course, if speech leading to violence was a big problem,
13:26journalists that foment wars would all be the first.
13:30But it's never that way, right?
13:33So, when someone is being snappy and aggressive towards you,
13:39they are trying to establish a master-slave relationship towards you,
13:44usually, I mean, often unconsciously,
13:46and usually they do it because someone has done it to them.
13:49So, this is sort of the leveling concept, right?
13:51So, Bob puts down Dave, right?
13:55And then Dave feels humiliated,
13:57and Dave feels irritable because his status has been lowered
14:00and his slave self has been activated, which is negative for him.
14:05We don't want to be slaves, but it's generally how we used to survive.
14:09So, Bob puts down Dave, Dave is then in an irritable mood,
14:16and is looking to stave off the overtaking of his personality by the slave self,
14:23and therefore, it's like demonic possession, right?
14:26The slave self is activated, it's like a demon that possesses you,
14:30and you have to cast that demon into someone else.
14:32Without self-knowledge, without knowing all these things,
14:34you have to cast the demon into someone else.
14:37So, then Bob puts down Dave, Dave's slave self is activated,
14:41the slave demon comes to life in his heart
14:44and begins his preparations to subjugate him for survival,
14:48and he says, well, I need to prove to my slave self that I'm not a slave.
14:52So, what I'm going to do is I need to prove to my slave self
14:55that I'm not at the bottom of the hierarchy.
14:57I am not at the bottom of the hierarchy.
15:00I am not that last line on the chain of kicking downstairs, right?
15:05So, the only way to stave off the activation of the slave demon,
15:12of the slave self, is to prove to yourself, or prove to the demon,
15:19that you're not at the bottom of the hierarchy,
15:22which means you then have to humiliate someone else.
15:27So, the ultimate slave, like the people at the very bottom of society,
15:32they have nobody to humiliate, maybe their children,
15:34or maybe pets or something like that, right?
15:36But their slave self is activated and becomes permanent
15:41because they have no freedom, they have no power.
15:46There's no need for them to negotiate, so they have to just obey,
15:50and so our will is wrecked for the sake of obeying,
15:55because obeying is the only chance for survival, right?
16:00And so, when Bob humiliates Dave, Dave's slave self is activated,
16:05and he has to then humiliate someone else to escape the spread
16:09of the slave self into the personality and the subjugation of will.
16:15Human beings don't like to be humiliated,
16:18but we'll take humiliation over death, right?
16:21Or, to put it another way, those who chose death over humiliation
16:27did not pass along those genes.
16:29So, we are who we are, and we should be very thankful for all of this.
16:34So, when I see somebody trying to put some whip hand over me,
16:40it is because somebody has whipped them,
16:45and they are falling into an abyss of the slave self,
16:48and they need to throw me in instead.
16:52And, you know, it's very instantaneous, it's very instinctual,
16:56it's very sort of base-of-the-brain stuff,
16:58but I view someone like they're falling because they've been pushed,
17:03and they want me, they want to grab me and land on me,
17:07and then they get up and walk away,
17:09and I'm supposed to be squished in some looney-tuned manner.
17:13So, I look at a sort of big chain that goes back through history and say,
17:20well, we're all bred to be slaves.
17:24Somebody has activated their slave self,
17:26they're then trying to activate my slave self,
17:28so that their slave self jumps from Bob to Dave to me to you to whoever, right?
17:34It just keeps chasing all over the place, right?
17:37So, I hope that helps.
17:40What are the steps I could do?
17:43Sorry, I'm used to somebody saying, what are the steps I could take?
17:47Every step you take, every cake you bake.
17:50What are the steps I could do to become more self-expressed as opposed to self-erased?
17:55I have gone no contact with my family already.
17:58A bit like the 30-year-old virgin caller,
18:00I spend a lot of my time in my head carefully weighing things up,
18:03a mixture of self-censorship and appeasement.
18:06Note that when I separated from my family of origin at the time,
18:09it was more of a knee-jerk reaction as opposed to anything based on reason
18:12and evidence and proper philosophical principles and virtues.
18:16Later on, as I listened to you, big thank you,
18:18I had more language to describe what I instinctively experienced
18:21with my family of origin.
18:23I think the real question is, how do I move from a mode of bomb disarming
18:28slash hypervigilance to a mode of cool, relaxed, creative expression?
18:33Right, so, hey, please understand this.
18:36We are social animals, which means that our emotional processing
18:44is shared with others.
18:45This sort of Randian hero of splendid isolation.
18:48I mean, that wasn't even Ayn Rand.
18:51That's a seductive idea that we can be splendid.
18:55Aristotle said, the only people who can live alone are beasts and gods, right?
19:00So, our emotions are not ours.
19:04Our emotions are shared.
19:07I'll give you a little example.
19:14Why is it that we can learn so quickly?
19:17One of the reasons we can learn so quickly is because we sleep so deeply.
19:20Now, why is it that we can sleep so deeply?
19:22How did we evolve to sleep so deeply?
19:24Well, we evolved to sleep so deeply because we had people who protected us
19:30while we slept.
19:31Now, those people could be immediate and around the fire making sure
19:34predators don't get closer, or they build us walls or shelters.
19:37So, people protect us while we sleep, right?
19:39If you've ever, and I've certainly been in this situation,
19:43if you've ever been sleeping in the woods alone,
19:49you don't get much sleep.
19:51I mean, I can think of twice when this happened.
19:53Once when I went hiking with friends in Algonquin as a teenager,
19:56and we got lost and separated.
19:58We ended up separating for one of our friends was like,
20:02I don't need no stinking water purification tablets.
20:05I'll be fine.
20:06And he got really sick.
20:07And so, we ended up going to get help because this is long before cell phones.
20:13Anyway, long story short, I ended up sleeping in the woods alone.
20:17I had a little tent.
20:18But of course, I'm attuned to every sound, right?
20:20Every sound.
20:21I mean, I hung my food up in a tree in case bears came and so on.
20:24So, that was one time I didn't get much sleep.
20:26Another time when I was working at North Goldpang and prospecting,
20:29a series of events had me sleeping in the middle of nowhere by myself
20:35in a very thin tent.
20:36And there was some animal that was snuffling around my tent,
20:40and I was obviously didn't get much sleep, right?
20:43So, the reason we get sleep is that we share our self-protection with others.
20:50We guard them.
20:51They guard us.
20:52And so, that's how we can get sleep, and that's how we're able to learn so much
20:58and so well.
20:59Language, of course, is collective, and working on the definitions of language
21:03is a challenge.
21:04And so, we inherit language.
21:07We add to it.
21:08We work with it as a whole.
21:10If you look at why are we hairless for the most part on our bodies,
21:14because other people give us clothing.
21:18I mean, we make our own clothing, but even the skills to make our own clothing
21:21have come from other people.
21:22So, our fur is collective.
21:25Our language is collective.
21:27And so, we share our mind, our heart, our feelings, our souls
21:35are all blended together.
21:37I'm sorry.
21:38Like, this is just a fact.
21:39This is just an evolutionary fact.
21:40Why do we have eyes in the front of our head rather than on the side?
21:43Or why do we have only eyes in the front of our head and not, like, all around?
21:46Why do we have fly eyes or something like that?
21:49Well, we have eyes on the front of our head because people are supposed to be
21:52watching our back.
21:54When I said back-to-back, they faced each other, drew their swords,
21:56and shot each other.
21:57It's an old limerick from when I was a kid.
22:00So, we have eyes in the front of our head so that we can focus on what's ahead
22:04of us without worrying about what's behind us.
22:06And why can we not worry about what's behind us is because there are other
22:09people watching our backs.
22:10That's how our entire physiology works on the fact that we share our eyeballs
22:16with other people.
22:17We share our language with other people.
22:19We share our skills with other people.
22:21We can sleep deeply and learn and grow because of other people.
22:25All of the farming methods are usually inherited from other people.
22:28You don't go out into the woods and try and figure out which berries are safe.
22:32You look them up.
22:33You don't try and figure out which snakes are safe.
22:35You look them up.
22:36So, our existence is blended in with other people.
22:40This life of splendid isolation is only attractive because other people
22:48wear us out.
22:50There's a great line.
22:51It was a Deborah Winger has in a pretty powerful movie called Shadowlands
22:54with Anthony Hopkins about C.S. Lewis.
22:57And she's talking about some neurotic or borderline personality boyfriend
23:03she had.
23:04And she's just like, man, he wore me out.
23:05He just wore me out.
23:07He wore me out.
23:09Now, the fact that our minds and hearts are shared with others is,
23:14I hate to be Mr. Cliche guy here, but it is both our greatest strengths
23:18and our greatest weakness.
23:19We are vulnerable to others.
23:21We depend on others.
23:22We merge together, which means that we're incredibly powerful
23:25or we're incredibly destroyed.
23:28Because if you're empathetic, if you care about other people,
23:32if you care about the world, if you have some sort of basic empathy,
23:35almost guaranteed at least once over the course of your life,
23:38you're going to be targeted by somebody who exploits that
23:41in horrible destructive ways.
23:45Empaths get pillaged.
23:48They are a village undefended.
23:51So, that's why you've got to be tough as well as sensitive.
23:57So, your feelings are defined more by your current relationships
24:12than your prior history.
24:15All my feelings, I have this anxiety.
24:17I get this depression.
24:19I feel sad a lot.
24:21I can't relax.
24:23Okay, and we think, well, geez, you know, when I was 5 and I was 10,
24:26when I was 15, X, Y, and Z, and that's not unimportant,
24:29and I recognize all of that.
24:32But your feelings are less to do with your history
24:36and more to do with your current relationships.
24:42And your feelings are not yours.
24:44Your feelings are shared with those around you.
24:48In other words, if you have someone in your life who's chaotic
24:51and stressful and they threaten and they, you know,
24:56like I was reading this tweet the other day from a woman who's like,
25:00yeah, they dated this crazy guy for a while and didn't want to have
25:03anything to do with him, and then I let him stay at my place
25:06and he kind of glommed on to me, and now he's blackmailing me
25:08and like all of this sort of stuff.
25:09I don't know the truth of any of it, but, okay, so that woman is stressed, right?
25:13She has to move.
25:14She can't sleep.
25:15And that's because she has a stressful person in her life.
25:17So, if she were to say, why am I stressed?
25:20She'd say, well, because you have a dangerous person in your life, right?
25:25So people can bring us security, right?
25:28People can bring us security, or people can bring us danger, right?
25:32I mean, the people who are supposed to guard us while we sleep,
25:35they can either guard us well so that we sleep well,
25:38or they can sell us into slavery and let the predators attack us
25:44and tie us up and they can rob us and, you know,
25:48so we're either very safe or when we let our guard down,
25:51which we have to in order to have relationships,
25:54we're either very safe because we have someone watching our back
25:57or the person behind us isn't watching our back but creeping up to stab us.
26:01Stab in the back, right?
26:02They stab me in the back.
26:03This is one of the reasons why that phrase is so powerful.
26:06People are either watching your back or targeting you.
26:09They're either protecting you or they're getting you to lower your defenses
26:12so that they can exploit and betray you.
26:17So steps that you can take to become more self-expressed,
26:23don't look at your history.
26:24I mean, look at your history, but you look at your history
26:28in order to deal with the current situation.
26:32So if you had a crazy parent, if you had a crazy parent,
26:38and that parent caused you stress and sleeplessness and so on, right?
26:45A crazy parent, that's definitely tough and I understand that
26:48and I sympathize with that.
26:51But what's more relevant is do you have crazy people in your life right now?
26:56You can say, well, as a result of my crazy parents,
26:58I got used to crazy people and so now I have crazy people in my life.
27:00Okay, and that's an important thing.
27:02But you know, when I do call-in shows, we don't just talk about the past.
27:04We talk about its past and its relationship to the future.
27:08Self-knowledge is not about the past.
27:10Self-knowledge is about the future, right?
27:16I mean, the Rosetta Stone, which allows people to translate hieroglyphics,
27:22well, that is about translating ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics in the future.
27:27It's not about the past, right?
27:28It's about what we do differently in the future.
27:30If you touch something hot and you get burned,
27:33your feelings can't change the past.
27:35Your feelings are there to change the future.
27:41So the way that you become less self-censored and more self-expressive
27:49is you have people in your life that you 100% trust
27:53will never use their knowledge of you against you, right?
28:00When troubles come, they come not in single spies but in battalions.
28:03But the spies always come before the battalions, right?
28:07So, I mean, an example from history would be a guy who is a great general.
28:14He has a great sort of attack plan or something like that, right?
28:17He's got a great attack plan, but he wants to verify that it can work.
28:21So he has to go to somebody else in the army and share his attack plan
28:25so that he knows it can work.
28:26Do we have the right materials?
28:27Do we have enough supplies?
28:28Do we have enough ammo?
28:29Do we have enough people?
28:30What's the morale of the troops?
28:32So he's got to share his attack plan with someone else.
28:35Now, if he's sharing that attack plan with somebody who's on his side,
28:38the attack plan is going to improve.
28:40But if he shares his attack plan with someone who's an enemy, who's a spy,
28:44then he's going to get wiped out.
28:46He's literally going to get the whole thing.
28:48If they know the attack plan, then his whole army is probably going to get wiped out.
28:51So the stakes of sharing information are very high.
28:54If people are on your side, they can really help you,
28:56and you can do way better by sharing your information
28:58than keeping it to yourself.
29:00But if they betray you, and everyone's gone through this in life at one time or another,
29:03then, right?
29:05So rather than say, well, your history, this, that, and the other,
29:08are the people who are currently in your life benefiting you,
29:11and are you benefiting them?
29:13So I would do that.
29:15It's not just about trying to work with a massage and change the self,
29:22and, ooh, my history, and this, and I've got to adjust this and tweak that.
29:26And that's fine.
29:27But at some point, if you feel unsafe at some point,
29:33it's probably because there are unsafe people in your life at the moment.
29:40You are in danger.
29:41I'm in danger.
29:42So I would say look at that.
29:44All right.
29:47I think that will do for this morning.
29:49There'll be another one soon, but I really do appreciate that.
29:52I should not overly get my morning sun.
29:54So lots of love.
29:56I hope that these responses are helpful to you.
29:58I hope that they help shutter click things into focus.
30:02And remember, philosophy is all about the future.
30:07Philosophy is all about making better decisions in the future.
30:09Don't get lost in the past.
30:10Don't spiral down into the infinite well of history.
30:13You know, there's an old question that I was asked,
30:17and a friend of mine's father was a professor of engineering when I was growing up.
30:22You know, I said these great questions at these social gatherings,
30:24and one of the questions was, if there's a hole all the way through the earth, right,
30:28a hole goes all the way through the earth, and you jump in that hole, what happens?
30:32And, of course, everyone thinks, well, you go down, you go back up, you go down,
30:35you go back up, and then you end up sitting in the middle.
30:38That's not what happens.
30:39What happens is you go down, and you slow down, and you come to rest in the middle.
30:44You're not going down and then swinging up like a big heavy ball on a rubber rope.
30:49You go down because as you go down, the gravity changes all around you
30:53to the point where you simply slow down, because as you go down,
30:56the weight of the gravity above you begins to slow you down, and you just stop in the middle.
31:00That's what happens when you go into the past.
31:02You don't come out the other side.
31:03If you go into the past without saying, I need to change my decisions in the future,
31:08if you go into the past, you just step in a hole, and you end up in the middle of nowhere,
31:13far away from any surface and any productivity.
31:15It's very easy to become overly introspective and to navel gaze and to say,
31:22the purpose of my self-knowledge is to understand this about my partner.
31:25No, everything has to lead to making better decisions in the future.
31:29Everything has to lead to making better decisions in the future.
31:32When I was a teenager, I used to read the Harvard Business Review,
31:35and it helped me a lot, of course, because I ended up in business.
31:38I've always been interested in business.
31:39I ended up in business.
31:40The reason that you do case studies is not to understand the past,
31:45but to make better decisions in the future.
31:47The reason that you adopt a nutrition plan is to make better decisions in the future.
31:52The reason you start to exercise.
31:53The reason you do all of these things is to make better decisions in the future.
31:56Philosophy is not about the past.
31:58It's not about your internal workings.
31:59It's not about personal history or even world history.
32:02Philosophy is about one thing and one thing only, to make better decisions in the future.
32:06That's what it's all about.
32:08That's what our entire purpose is, to make better decisions in the future.
32:12Anything that gets you lost in the past is a way of staying away from making better decisions in the future.
32:18It is a way of avoiding making those better decisions,
32:22because making better decisions in the future rejects the slave self,
32:27because slaves can't plan.
32:29Slaves just get handed out.
32:30They just get their assignments handed.
32:32They're told what to do.
32:33They have no say, no control.
32:34They get sold.
32:35They have to move elsewhere.
32:36They get drafted.
32:37They have to go fight.
32:38Slaves can't make any plans about their future.
32:40So the most foundational thing you can do to fight the slave mindset,
32:44to exercise and dispel the slave demon,
32:48is to use the knowledge of the past to make better decisions in the future.
32:53And once you vow to make better decisions in the future,
32:56the slave self is banished,
32:58because then you have control over your own future.
33:01And once you have control over your own future,
33:03then you no longer need to control others,
33:06because you have control over your own future.
33:08You don't need to exploit others, because you can generate your own path.
33:11And that is like, you know, when the powers that be can't control you,
33:15they will simply try to control other people's perceptions of you.
33:19They're calling you a bad guy or whatever it is, right?
33:21So if you can't be controlled,
33:23then other people's perceptions of you will be controlled.
33:25Rejecting control is making rational plans for your future
33:28and having standards of quality in your relationship
33:31that you're not at the whim of crazy people,
33:34and then say, gee, why are my emotions so chaotic?
33:36It's like, no, your emotions aren't chaotic.
33:38Your social environment is chaotic,
33:40and your emotions are simply responding to that.
33:42The reason you can't sleep is because people pillage you while you sleep,
33:45not because you have some underlying X, Y, and Z.
33:48I hope that helps.
33:49freedomain.com slash donate.
33:50Lots of love from up here.
33:51I'll talk to you soon.
33:52Bye.