0:00 - Community Chatter Start
2:17 - Literature and Philosophical Works
8:50 - Betrayal and Consequences
14:21 - Grief and Loss
22:05 - The Power of Philosophy
25:29 - Ignored Significance
32:04 - Addiction to Outrage
34:36 - Fear of Admitting Wrong
37:01 - The Demonization of Ivermectin
39:29 - Unconscious Defenses and Strong Responses
41:52 - The True Self and Empathy
44:45 - The War Within
49:03 - The Powers That Be and the True Self
50:14 - Exploring the True Self
54:08 - Original Sin and Empathy
56:01 - Ideology and Demonization
57:53 - Compelling Villains and Empathy
1:04:45 - Humanizing the Villain
1:06:52 - Empathizing with the Villain
1:10:00 - The Wise Fool Trope
1:16:37 - The Influence of Unempathetic Parents
1:21:22 - The Impact of Parental Denial on Children
1:28:22 - The Destructive Cycle of Condemnation
1:36:27 - Dread of the Future and Lack of Empathy
1:39:28 - The Importance of the Observing Ego
1:41:33 - The Concept of God for Self-Evaluation
1:43:37 - Reflections on the Infinity War Comic Book
Today, we delved into profound topics circulating in our community, starting with a deep dive into the concept of the death impulse and Freud's ideas of Thanatos and Eros. We shared personal experiences and explored literature references, discussing how veterans, leftists, and PTSD intertwine, triggering inner conflicts related to morality. Our conversation expanded to include historical contexts, societal manipulations of morality, and the power dynamics influencing collective ideologies. We contemplated the importance of objective morality in challenging existing power structures and its role in shaping perspectives alongside philosophy's impact on beliefs and the pursuit of universal truths.
Moving forward, we explored the transformative power of philosophy in societal change, emphasizing the need for practical support like finances and shelter. We touched on the avoidance of controversial ideas like UPB to sidestep confrontations and how rigid ideologies can lead to burnout or a preference for death over admitting fallibility. The conversation dived into the resistance to alternative viewpoints, the defenses against new ideas, and the challenges of altering deeply ingrained beliefs, including confronting unconscious uncertainties.
The discourse then shifted to the doubts people harbor about external control and programming, underscoring the significance of embracing one's authentic self connected to reality. We examined human identity complexities, empathy, and ideologies, underlining introspection's power and the acknowledgment of one's potential for malevolence. Drawing from popular culture like Marvel characters Thanos and Loki, we explored storytelling nuances, moral dilemmas, and the importance of critically thinking and empathizing with diverse viewpoints.
Exploring further, the conversation touched on villainous personas like Heath Ledger's Joker and Macbeth, introducing the "wise fool" archetype in literature and how early childhood experiences shape political beliefs. We discussed the impact of parental empathy or lack thereof on political ideologies, emphasizing the necessity of fairness to prevent an obsession with equality. The complexities of human behavior were spotlighted, stressing the importance of addressing common issues with empathy and comprehension.
In closing, we reflected on childhood experiences affecting empathy, notably parental behaviors and food-related scenarios, stressing self-reflection's significance for future outcomes and its relevance to societal issues like cancel culture. The concept of God as a self-observation and empathy tool was explored, along with the motivation of comic book characters and the repercussions of extreme narcissism. Expressing gratitude, we expressed eagerness for future deep conversations.
[0:00] Yeah, so I had a bit of time today and just wanted to know if there was anything on people's minds, anything that we can run through the community chatty forehead, or anything else. I've got some topics, but I'm here for you if there's anything that people have on their brains. I'm curious about the topics you're curious about. Did you have something? Sorry. No, you got to it first. Go ahead. I'm interested in what topics Steph has on his mind. Death impulse. Impulse? Death impulse. Thanatos, the death impulse. What is the death impulse? So the death impulse, it's something, of course, I read about. I was very much into Freud in my teens before I knew about his life as a whole, that he was a basically introduced cocaine to European society, was a coke dealer, a coke addict, and tried to treat mental health issues with copious amounts of cocaine that fried people's brains that he was half responsible for the death of one or two of his close friends, and just a monster as a whole, outside of his betrayal of children by covering up pedophilia within the local community. But anyway, so he wrote about the Thanatos and Eros.
[1:16] Thanatos is the death tendency or the death impulse, and Eros, the love or the life impulse, pulse the thriving the flourishing the growing all that kind of stuff um i don't know if you guys have any familiarity with this uh it's sort of a it's not quite similar to the apollonian dionysian thing and sort of reason versus passion uh the spark and crook stuff but uh, have you guys heard anything about this do you need a tiny background.
[1:47] A little yeah yeah tiny background would be great i've i feel like i've heard it uh just kind of mentioned passing i have this like grayish image of it right okay yeah fair fair so, i'm not gonna you know explicate the freudian side of things but and i kind of dismissed it because i've always enjoyed life so much that it's like death impulse what are you crazy and Okay, quick round, if you could.
[2:18] How many of you guys have read Atlas Shrugged? I mean, like through the end? I have. I definitely have, yeah, twice. So, sorry for the spoilers for those of you who haven't, but the James Taggart, do you remember what happens to James Taggart at the end? No.
[2:35] Uh, James Taggart. It's been a little while. Yeah, so James Taggart is one of the principal anti-heroes or antagonists in Atlas Shrugged. And I won't sort of get into the details of his ending, but Ayn Rand wrote about how he had this death impulse in him that was very strong. That he basically opposed the life-giving and the productive people in the world because he desired his own death. And I, again, I have a very tough time getting across to that state of mind, to that mindset, this death impulse. Or there's a, I can't remember the poet who wrote a sort of famous line, I think it was a 19th century poet, who wrote about a character half in love with easeful death. And Goethe, the great German poet and writer, had a short novel that I read many decades ago called The Sorrows of Young Werther.
[3:48] And it's about a young man whose violent emotions and artistic thwarting basically cause him to commit suicide. Side and in theater school i was in a play by anton chekhov called the seagull which again has a young man of artistic ambitions thwarted in his life he kills himself.
[4:15] And this sort of death impulse stuff i really do have a tough a tough time with it but i've I've sort of been mulling it over lately. I've never found literary characters compelling. Now, I do understand why some people would want to kill themselves. So if you're in a situation where you're in kind of unbearable pain, it's costing you a lot of money for medical treatments, you're going to be dead in a month or two, there's no chance of a cure, and so on, then, yeah, I can understand shuffling off this mortal coil, as it were, and choosing to exit stage forever. So I can understand that. Now, another thing that I can understand, do you guys, have you guys known anybody with serious addictions? Well, it's a pretty horrible life for them, right?
[5:17] I had to watch them lose their kids and destroy their lives in front of everyone. You're a bit low, by the way. Yeah, it's a terrible thing. And I talked about, in the show a while back ago, Marvin Gaye. Marvin Gaye, the singer. Heard it through The Grapevine and other sorts of songs that he ended up with this terrible addiction. His father said, He said, if you ever lay a hand on me, I will kill you. He's kind of lying in his bed. His touring days are done. He's hanging out with criminals to get his drugs. And he goes and punches his father, who then shoots him and kills him.
[6:03] And instead of struggling to understand that, what I came to was, if you've had so many drugs, then you end up with your pleasure pain system. So I think if you have used drugs to the point where your pleasure pain mechanism in your body is so completely out of whack that you don't really have a chance to have a normal life or get any kind of happiness in the future, then I think you have this impulse towards death. So this life impulse, this death impulse, I mean, I've known some pretty bad people in my life, some pretty evil people, but they themselves do not seem to have had the same death impulse. So the reason why I'm sort of mulling all of this over is.
[7:08] The leftists that are around at the moment, they're not the hardcore ones for the most part I mean they may be cancel culture people they may be vicious people they're deplatforming people, fire you at will people but they're not the out and out genocide people, but they're trying to create the conditions, wherein the real devils come.
[7:35] Now, if they do manage to some of the conditions wherein the real brutal people come, I mean, the soulless Stalin-esque wipe out a million people and barely blink an eye, if those people come along, well, historically, it's always the same situation. You have a system, like what we have now, sort of mixed economy, quasi-democracy. So you have a system, and what happens is people betray that system. So the leftists are betraying the current system, and then they summon these very dark-hearted, black-souled or non-souled people. And then what happens is, well, does anybody know what happens to those who betrayed the prior system when the new devils come along?
[8:33] Yeah, the useful idiots are the first ones to get shot. Yeah. They are the rebellion that must be squashed. Yeah, because they say, look, if you betrayed the last system, well, damn it, you're going to betray me as well. And if you put them in a position of power, you can take them out, too.
[8:50] They don't want that. Right, because the new devils are very much concerned that the people who betrayed the past system didn't do so for any particular ideological reasons. They just did so because they're trolls. Well, they're trolls. They're shit disturbers. Whatever you propose, they will oppose. They're sort of negative people. people and this is so common throughout history and this is every single time like every single time right the mensheviks are killed by the bolsheviks the socialists are killed by the kamir rouge everybody who portrayed the prior system is killed by the beastly summit.
[9:33] Which i guess has brought me to the foundational question i'm sort of open to hear what you guys think of it is it just a death impulse pulse? Do they just not really want to live? I mean, when you bring people into existence who are going to kill you, it seems like that would be a logical explanation. Emotionally, it's a little more tough to figure out, but why would you want to do this? Why would you pursue such a suicidal path? I guess the way I see it is that in a Miko system kind of way, they're not the ones running the show. They're barely even there. If you notice with a lot of leftists, they believe in determinism and nihilism and all of these things. And if you really, really, truly did believe those things, existence is pretty crappy. Or you're not even there.
[11:02] You know, you're just – You know, it's... Seth, can you mute, buddy? Thanks. You see it in their nightmarish art. And if you believe in moral relativism, it's also like believing in the inconsistency of matter and energy over time. Reality itself is just this random chaos. And if that's the universe you live in, deep down, fundamentally, that's what you believe, hell yes, non-existence seems better. I think it's it's a philosophic uh uh curse or not curse but like uh corruption that's what's wrong with them is something philosophic deep down that's what i think other thoughts people.
[11:50] I can't say i don't know any leftists who are genuinely happy and i can see how, that would lead them to either delude themselves into thinking they're trying to bring in happiness through whatever system thinks is going to come or like a sort of projection of their hatred or like depression or anger on the world and like if i can't be happy then no one can be happy sort of thing.
[12:20] Like they create a condition in the world that sort of simulates their own self-attack, like they create cancel culture because they're incredibly harsh with themselves? Yeah.
[12:31] That makes sense in the ecosystem sense. If they're not even the ones running the show, it's just a part of them that's leading them towards this destruction. Well, then there's going to be another part that's going along with that in this acting out kind of way and make everyone else miserable. So they notice my pain. So now they have an interest in solving this problem. Well, the leftists I've known have a bit of a different take. They're zealots who believe in the victim mindset that all their failures, faults, and weaknesses are someone else's fault, right? So they think that by supporting this new system, we can get rid of the source of my problems. Therefore, things are going to get better. So I don't think it's necessarily that they're seeking self-destruction. They're just foolish enough to believe the lies, and they're very good at self-deception. Well, if they were just foolish, though, then they would not be going all in the same tendency, right? You know, if people don't know where to go and they're deep in the woods, they'll scatter in random directions. But if we're all going in the same line, then you can't say that it's just foolishness, right? Because there's that conformity. That's a power of propaganda, though. They're being pushed downstream. Well, that's not foolishness, then. Sorry, go ahead.
[13:45] That's just conformity for comfort, right? I mean, they don't know there's any other choice, so they just conform because they're afraid or it's comfortable for them. I think that's giving them too much of an excuse. For some of them, sure, that's the way they're headed.
[14:02] I'm not saying the extreme, but I'm saying the bulk majority. I believe the bulk majority, they know something's wrong, but they don't know what to do about it, and then they just go with the flow. because it's just easier and there's no pressure and they see what's happening to everyone who steps out of line. And then one other thing, the death impulse, what about a broken heart?
[14:22] Because I've seen lots of people die of grief. So I don't know if that's covered in death impulse, because some people don't have the will to live if they've lost a loved one.
[14:33] I mean, look, you could be right. I've never actually lost a loved one. So I speak very theoretically here. But people who die of grief, I think that's almost like a death impulse coming from the one who's dead. Like, join me. Because if you lose a loved one, you should celebrate their existence. If my wife dies, she won't want me to die. She wouldn't want me to die. She would want me to enjoy my life as much as possible and all of that. So people who die of grief, I don't think it's coming from loss or sadness. It could be coming from regret. Or there could be a death impulse or a murder impulse coming from the deceased that's hitting them unconsciously. I always hear it as like a daughter or a son dies. and they tried everything they could to save them and they still expired. So I always hear it in that way. I don't necessarily, sometimes you hear it. That's very rare though, right? I mean, children dying is extraordinarily rare.
[15:39] I don't think it would explain any mass phenomenon. So I kind of have a theory that ties together veterans and leftists. Something that I've seen very common between them is a conflict in morality within themselves.
[15:59] And honestly, I would say most of PTSD, from what I've seen, has more to deal with the conflict of their own morality and the things they've done, rather than the actual actions that they've taken go on i think that just adds i think that just adds up to the point where your your brain and your body is telling that you that you're continually doing wrong or that you have done and when you can't figure out how to correct it i've just seen people dive into depression both on the left and in veterans and it was it was when i went undercover cover kind of looking at a lot of these lefties that went from these pretty young women into drug abusing quite literal whores and then they just put on all this weight and it's like this spiral downwards where the depred like people call it depression and all this other stuff but kind of when you talk to them it's it's almost like one bad decision after the other where they know they've done wrong but they just continually try to chase something that they've done wrong to make it better and it only makes it worse there is a tipping point for sure in doing wrong you know like walking up a seesaw you tip over go down the other side that you can turn back somewhat easily early but as you keep going it gets more and more difficult to turn back and then there's an accelerationist thing that happens maybe that's what you mean well simon the boxer right ptsd is simon the boxer like you don't know how to fit into healthy culture and you're only alive in.
[17:27] Traumatized culture so you seek out trauma even if it's subconsciously you just find yourself in those same dangerous positions well i've often thought that sorry go ahead i was gonna say a lot of what i've kind of seen is that that definitely comes with it but i think more than anything some of the worst ptsd is is a conflict of morality um like there's the obvious uh physical reactions which we kind of know of like the the loud sounds triggering stuff and whatnot and that kind of makes sense but like when it gets down to the consistent stuff the stuff that just doesn't go away it always seems to be a morality problem the ones who've killed kids the ones who, To your point, if I recall correctly from the research I've seen, the soldiers that do have an ethical system, or a consistent ethical system, do tend to suffer PTSD less.
[18:28] Well, I think that's after they discover it. I think beforehand, a lot of the conflict is what causes it. When you don't know what's causing the pain and all that, that's kind of what I've seen at least. Because you're right, once they find an ethical system, a lot of them, if they get into religion more, it lessens the burden of them because they find a way to be more moral. It always seems to be the am I good or am I bad, and they don't know, and they just know they're doing bad things here and there, and they can't answer that question for themselves. Well, okay, so hang on a sec. Sorry, I just, as you know, there was much less PTSD after World War II than after Vietnam. But of course, the reason why, for the most part, was because the communists were very happy about World War II because the West was allied with communist Russia in fighting fascist Germany and Italy and Japan and all that. And so the soldiers were serving the needs of the communists, so they were praised as heroes and ticker tape parades and statues and all that kind of stuff. But of course, in Vietnam, they were fighting communists and therefore they were baby killers and the trauma and all of that, the PTSD, had a lot to do with the moral castigation that came out of the communist media in the West. You know, you fight the same thing with Korea, right? You fight communists and you're a baby killer. You fight fascists and you're a hero.
[19:54] What do we call that on like a collective scale where the left taps into that and just like social metaphysics on a collective scale? Well, until UPB, all ethics were social, right? Because there was not a proof. There was not a universal proof, right? So it's very easy to – and of course, the powers that be and the influences, they all want a morality that can be manipulated because it's a way of punishing people. I mean, that's the racism argument or the racism attack now, right? It's a way of punishing people where you can just make up magic spells to harm their conscience and reputation, and you don't have to run anything through any kind of rational analysis. So, it's great for the powers that be, right? I mean, this goes all the way back to Martin Luther and even earlier where, you know, I've made this argument a number of times before, you know, Martin Luther says, oh, an eye for an eye, that's if you wrong the king and the king is punishing you. Turn the other cheek, that's if the king wrongs you and you feel like punishing him, right? Right. So you have a very subjective morality that can be manipulated to serve the immediate needs of those in power or those who desire power.
[21:07] And war, again, there was no need for America to go into World War One. There was not much need for America to go into World War Two. But the media pushed it because it was allying with communists, at least in World War Two. And, of course, in World War I, although I don't think it could have been predicted, America's involvement gave rise to the conditions wherein communism took over in Russia and turned it into the Soviet Union. So, yeah, the relationship between war, you know, it's always the case it's a noble war if it's against someone you hate and it's baby killing if it's against someone you like. And this moral manipulation is one of the reasons why people resist UPB so much because it's taking a massive weapon away from the elite so they can just define morality and use it to whip up a mob to punish whoever displeases them.
[21:55] It's also pretty dangerous, too, because when you're taking that away from them, they've got a significant interest in stopping that.
[22:05] Right. Right. Yeah. I'm finding myself conflicted because I'm really pissed that UPB hasn't taken off more because it is. It's incredibly significant. You have an objective way of proving universal objective morality. But at the same time, if it were taking off like wildfire, what would we be seeing in response? I think we'd be seeing a whole bunch of unmarked people listening in on this call, which, you know, may be happening anyway. But yeah, no, it's it has, you know, it has the same danger to the state that the Sun-Centered Solar System had to Christendom, right, which is it does take or to the aristocracy. So, yeah, it's I don't mind if it stays underground for a while, I suppose. Yeah, I find myself thinking about this whenever sometimes we focus, in my opinion, too much on crypto being like the end-all, be-all solution and being like, no, no, no, no. We showed up here because philosophy. Philosophy is the solution.
[23:04] And I remember you saying years past, you know, philosophy is more powerful than an atomic bomb in terms of changing the world. Yeah, but philosophy got to eat, right? Philosophy got to have shelter. And so I think the crypto stuff is fine, too. For sure. I'm not saying, no, of course it is, but it's like, we're here for philosophy, and crypto's a tool. Well, there's also a thing that happens with something like UPB, wherein it's ignored in the hopes that the people who advocate for it will look at themselves as ridiculous for continuing to do so, and thus it will be dropped without having to be confronted. That's quite a common, you know, ignore it and then the people feel stupid, right, for pursuing it or upholding it. And so that blank out tends to occur. And, of course, it's not just the government. I mean, it's religions, it's, you know, particular cultures as a whole, it's all of the people.
[24:08] Uh who uh all of the groups that profit from a particular form of morality that does not you'd be compliant it's like every single group even parents and all of that and so it's like there's nobody that it doesn't oppose in a sense other than the you know the real truth pursuers and so on there's almost nobody it doesn't oppose and so and and the fact that it is ignored is um a great compliment because if it was easy to disprove then that would have been done and we would have refined it and we would have improved it and we would have fixed it but the fact that it is so widely ignored is actually it's a great compliment because it means that you know it can't be disproved i mean even that guy stephen wood dirt or rationality rules and so on you know big debate with the guy and you know rape theft assault murder he's like oh yeah they can't be upb compliant and then he had some fussiness about some little bits of the text and it's like you just gave away the whole thing what do i care You know, you think it should have been a different font or something as far as all of that goes. So, I mean, in 12 or 13 years, nobody's being able to overturn it. And therefore, like, what was it? The guy from Mises, I can't even remember his name now, who wrote some crappy article about it, just completely missing the boat on everything.
[25:21] Yeah, that's a great compliment that it's ignored. Even though it, of course, is having a significant effect on people's individual lives.
[25:29] It's really the foundation of peaceful parenting and so on. so yeah the being ignored is something I take as a kind of a fireworks show.
[25:38] But as a minor tangent, and you're talking about how it is incredibly inconvenient for almost every dimension of society, parents, and all these different groups, it does make finding a wife rather difficult who's compliant with UPB. Well, sure. But I mean, if you're looking for a blood, like if you're looking for, I don't know, what's the rarest kind of diamond? I have no idea. If you're looking for the Cullinan diamond or whatever, then you want to know all the places that it's not going to be, right? Because, you know, if you're looking for something rare, you need to have a very efficient mechanism for sorting this out. And we will get to that. I know you talked about the round table regarding that. We will get to that. But yeah, it does make it hard. But of course, you don't need to find a UPB compliant wife. You just need to find a reason and evidence woman, and she'll get to you pretty quickly. Amen. Yeah, that's true. Yep. So, yeah. Sorry, go ahead. I was going to say, my wife puts it as stop fishing for bass in a cart pond.
[26:35] Yeah, that's a, yeah, or a parking lot, right? So, because it's all about the bass, about the bass. Yes. So, yeah, so regarding this death impulse, I suppose, you know, what is it that could lead someone to get so weary of life, but so, like, okay, to me, if you're weary of life, you don't want to live, you know, I don't recommend it, but seems to me the logical course of action would be just, you know, throw yourself off a bridge or, you know, whatever you'd say. Say, but I think the way it goes is...
[27:13] It's sort of living a life of judgment and hatred and unease and misery and, you know, I can't be happy until everyone is equal, which means, of course, you'll never be happy because even if you can make people somewhat equal now, there are new people with great capacities and great deficiencies being born all the time, so you can't ever be happy. So, I suppose you have a choice, right? And the choice is something like, okay, I can give up on this rancid fantasy of infinite equality. I can just, I can look, I just, it was a mistake. I shouldn't have done it. It's making me miserable. It can't ever be solved. And I can't ever be happy because I've created standards for myself. Yourself full not just of judgment but hatred and vengeance and you know punishment and you've kind of made your life into a kind of hellscape right i mean it's just a miserable i can't imagine just a miserable existence like here in canada there's some new laws are coming out from the government i think only affecting about six percent of the workforce and it's like women in canada are only earning 89% what men are earning and therefore, of course, you need all these laws and you've got to review people's hiring and payment practices and all this sort of stuff, right?
[28:42] And imagine sort of waking up and being like significantly frustrated and angry that there's an 11% wage gap between men and women. I mean, personally, I honestly could care less because I'm like a free market guy. If people want to work for less, if they want to accept lower wages, that's their choice, right? I mean, if the women are worth more and don't bargain for it, well, I thought women were strong, independent, empowered creatures. And also, they should be bargaining for themselves rather than running for the government. But just the idea that you would be, you know, fussed or frustrated or upset or angry or feel this raging sense of crusader injustice because, you know, there's a relatively small wage gap between men and women. I mean, it doesn't ruffle my feathers even in the slightest. And, you know, if somebody published that information to me, I'd be like, oh, that's interesting.
[29:34] I guess people are making different choices or, you know, well, it's injustice. It's like, I don't know that. that and if it is injustice then why don't you run a seminar teaching women how to bargain for higher wages because that would be empowering to them as opposed to you've got to run to the government and force those mean men to give you more money yeah and there's also there's also that part which which isn't measured like how much is the wife consuming and resources that the husband's providing and that's a kind of income yeah it's like uh how they never measure the carbon footprint of yet another law or yet another politician but they want to finger wag about pollution right but i mean so so this kind of stuff where you say oh there's this disparity and i'm like to me it's interesting and i think it's worth looking at disparities and trying to figure them out like i published something uh the other day a friend of mine sent me about mental health gaps between men and women it's like over half a million women over the entire world and women are significantly more unhappy and the higher a country's GDP gets, the more women become unhappy. And now, is that because men are stealing happiness from women and it's a grave injustice and we need another law? I don't know. I mean, of course, not another law or anything, but to me, it's like, well, that's interesting.
[30:50] That's interesting. I think it's worth talking about. I think it's a phenomenon worth exploring. So maybe we should do that, That's interesting. But the idea that it would be something that I would be really fussed and bothered and terrible, I can't believe this is happening. And of course, if you're a leftist, that's everywhere. Everywhere you look, there's some homeless guy and you're like, oh, that's so terrible. That's so horrible. There's some single mom. Oh, that's so terrible. She's struggling. She's hard. There's some poor black family. Oh, that's so terrible. everywhere you look everywhere it's just this sandpaper on the gonads dissatisfaction with the world so I can see that.
[31:36] Burning you out i could see that just like frying your your your dopamine system because you just constantly it turns it turns breathing in into ptsd and by that i mean present stress disorder present traumatic stress disorder not post it's like everything that you see around you one one tree is taller than the other oh it's stealing the sunlight is you know it's so it's so unjust and all of that.
[32:05] And my God, I mean, that would be, to me, that's similar to a kind of drug addiction where you're just burning yourself out. I mean, you really have, for me, I really hoard my outrage. I have to be very selective with outrage because outrage can be very addictive, right? I mean, we know that from, like fear can be very addictive, very addictive.
[32:25] So, and drama, right? The drama of the pandemic can be very addictive. So, So I try to really hoard my outrage and make sure that it's sparingly applied, so to speak, because it's very easy to get addicted to almost all extreme emotional states, I think, carry with them the potential for addiction, which is why I always try to recenter myself and get back to the Aristotelian mean and so on. So I think if everything about reality offends and upsets you and you are beset and surrounded by racists and Nazis and white supremacists and whatever and injustice is everywhere and exploitation is everywhere and you kind of live in hell and everything you read is poking your outrage. And like that's that burns out your adrenals like your fight and flight mechanisms constantly.
[33:21] Constantly deployed and I think people really do burn out and I'm a little bit older now to have seen what happens to leftists in the long run it's like was it Allen Ginsberg or one of the guys who was involved in the Chicago trial just killed himself and of course if everything is injustice and everything is wrong and everything is bad and everybody's an exploiter, and you and you You can't fix it. You can't fix it because you need to create disparities in terms of power from the government. You need to give the government lots of power. So you need to create political disparities to deal with economic disparities, and political disparities are far worse. And so all of the structures that you create to try to deal with disparities end up much more unjust than that which you were trying to solve. And so you get into this death spiral. And I don't know why this happens, and I'm certainly happy to lean on the collective wisdom of the community, but what the hell's wrong with just admitting you were wrong? I don't understand what on earth is so bad with just saying, oh, you know what, this infinite equality thing, it's not working. It's making me miserable. Yeah.
[34:36] Oh, I think I just have to let it go. I don't know why, because the only other explanation that I see as to sort of why these leftists are courting these devils is that they don't want to live anymore, but they don't want to admit that they're wrong, and so they will just create conditions that will cause their downfall. And that way they don't have to live in the horror that their ideology has created but, they also don't have to repudiate the ideology and they would rather choose death than correction if that makes sense i i think that's totally it like they've done they've created they've gained such a debt a moral debt that uh it's better to just to die than to correct it or from their perspective that's what they they choose ultimately well i'll say this it It is far easier to live as an evil person than it is to live without purpose. But if they admit that they're wrong, they're not saying that there's no such thing as purpose. They're just, you know, if I turn around in my car, I'm not saying there's no such thing as direction. I'm just saying I was going in the wrong direction. I could change it.
[35:49] But when you've contributed to contributed to it for so long you're likely all your life's choices your social circle all of that to to admit you're wrong or to correct that, it comes with such a like okay so i'm trying to think back to like when i i had a big like transition in my life and wanting to be a better person and a big push back against that was like uh it's gonna take me like a decade to fix what i've fucked up do i really want to do this you know and so if you've done it if if if your conclusion internally is like i i i don't oh sorry steph i see you're talking but i don't hear you uh no i'm off i was listening go ahead, oh sorry sorry yeah so it's i i guess at some point whenever you get um if you've done so much and that internal calculation says i could i could work at this for the rest of my life or maybe it's just 20 30 years and it ain't worth it to you you're like i'd rather you know grasp aspect, whatever minor pleasure I can get in the next two or three years before I end up in the gulag, so be it. Wait, wait. Sorry to interrupt, man. I think I might got it. I think I might got it. Not grammar or anything useful like that. Okay. Okay. It is the price you pay.
[37:01] For demonizing others. So recently, an article in The Guardian came out, and one of the studies with regards to ivermectin, which some claim is a good, not just a treatment for COVID, but also a prophylactic against, right? So if you take it, it can help prevent you from getting COVID, according to some, right? And one of these studies was found to have a flaw, and The Guardian article basically said, you know, ivermectin study crashes and burns. And then it's like, ivermectin is a right wing conspiracy theory. Like it literally began by identifying any acceptance of ivermectin as being a Nazi, right? As opposed to massive, untested medical experiments on large populations. Totally not Nazi. but apparently ivermectin which is a anti-parasitic that's used to treat i think worms or something in in india and other places but it's off patent and very cheap and has been used on tens of millions of people with almost no side effects so in this situation they couldn't say ivermectin has taken a blow you know or this ivermectin study has been challenged and so on and the meta-analysis is that if you take that study out of the large number of ivermectin studies regarding COVID.
[38:27] Mortality prevention drops from like, I don't know, 54% to 45% are still very good, right? So it's not a huge deal with regards to ivermectin. But what's happened, of course, is when you demonize people, like everyone who disagrees with me is a Nazi. And maybe this is why they choose death over correction, because correction is evil. In other words, to reverse your position and to allow for a peaceful meritocracy rather than, coercive imposed egalitarianism because what you've done is you've demonized, people with different opinions you've cut off your escape route for being wrong because if you're wrong then you just join the far-right extremist nazis because and that's the price you pay for the demonization it's the only way out is death so you've internalized the value so deeply that to correct your errors is evil or wrong, that, yeah, you've lost that as an option for yourself. Yeah, that makes sense.
[39:30] Sorry to interrupt, but this whole thing about these quite strong responses reminds me of the fact that the defenses of the unconscious in my limited experience can be extremely, extremely strong against the incoming impulses. Like it's a difficult thing to explain or a difficult concept that I want to put across. But it seems also almost like to me that they have these unconscious defenses up against the concepts they encounter. And it's not even rage or outrage that we are encountering, but just a self-defense mechanism that is not recognized. And the more it is not recognized, the stronger it gets. And so we sort of end up in this death spiral situation of calling everybody Nazis and the like that we are in right now. Well, I also think that the degree of castigation of the enemies is directly correlated to one's deep uncertainty in the belief.
[40:42] If you are following a particular pursuit that's not organic to you, but is the result of propaganda, your true self is constantly saying, eh, really? How do we know this is true? How do we know this is not just something that we are told? And of course, everybody has some exposure to history and knows that propaganda and all of this kind of stuff is incredibly common throughout history. And so, I suppose what happens is the true self, which doubts the truth of the propaganda, doubts the truth of the belief system, you have to externalize that and give it a little mustache, right? Like, you have to externalize your doubts.
[41:23] Because, I mean, any belief in ivermectin is a doubt, not in the efficacy of the vaccine or the shots.
[41:34] It's not a doubt in the efficacy of the vaccine, but it is a doubt. I mean, any belief in the effectiveness of a prophylactic or good clinical treatment for COVID eliminates the entire justification for the emergency order of the shot, right?
[41:52] Because the shot, the emergency order of the shot can only be approved, well, on two conditions. Number one, what's happening is extremely dangerous, extremely dangerous, which, of course, for most people it's not, and certainly for children it's not. I think your child is more likely to die of being struck by lightning than of COVID. So it has to be extremely dangerous, and there has to be no existing treatment for the ailment that works. And so the ivermectin thing, why are people calling those who have some belief in ivermectin? And again, I don't know whether it's true or not, but the logic is that if there is a valid treatment, and if there always was a valid treatment, because I think Trump was talking about ivermectin sort of early last year, if there always was a valid treatment, then that leaves people to go down this rabbit hole of hell, right? Because then they say, well, wait a minute, if there's a valid treatment...
[42:54] Then why would the vaccine be approved? Or if the valid treatment was suppressed, that means they really wanted to approve the vaccine against a valid treatment. They had to suppress a valid treatment. Okay, so why do they want to get this shot into everyone's arms and all of that? And then it leads them down to the whole Nuremberg thing, informed consent, medical experiments, you're not allowed to bribe people to take experimental treatments or punish them for not doing so, and like all of this sort of stuff.
[43:20] And so the doubt that exists in people's minds about the true virtues of what like maybe i am just being controlled maybe i'm just being programmed to be an attack npc for the powers that be so that they can further enslave the world or something so that doubt is extremely inconvenient of course to the powers that be because doubt brings uh the break in the hypnosis and matrix of propaganda and so they have to take that doubt externalize it and all who doubt are evil right all who doubt are evil now they can't use a generic term called evil because that's not really strong enough and of course people don't people who aren't religious or secularist i mean often they don't even really believe in evil but you have to demonize doubt or curiosity or questions and so i think this is why you see something as truly insane as a newspaper article talking about the technical issues in an ivermectin study immediately politicizing the science because what they have to do is they have to say well anybody who thinks that ivermectin works is a far-right extremist well i don't want to be a far-right extremist so i'm gonna like it's so anti-scientific it's ridiculous but i think I think it's a fight against the self because we all doubt, we all think, we all have reason to be suspicious of the powers that be.
[44:46] But if all doubt equals Nazi, then that really does cut people off, and it's their true self that doubts, and then they're at war with themselves, which is a horrible place to be. I don't know if you guys have ever been seriously at war with yourself, but dear God, I've only had it once or twice in my life, but it's a horrible state of mind to be in wherein you really can't see a future and you don't know your place in the world. And it's like this existential horror that seeps into your freaking bone marrow and turns your entire day's air to ashes.
[45:24] But that's supposed to be a pretty temporary phase of an extremity that needs to be resolved.
[45:32] And it's one thing to run from a bear for five minutes. It's another thing to run from a bear for five years. I think that kind of burns you out, especially when the bear is you. So maybe that's where they just get so exhausted that they have taken their true self of doubt out in questions they've externalized it they've turned it evil they've attacked it and i think that just creates such a split that there's nothing but a hollow shell left that doesn't want to live because the true self is kind of the life impulse i think death it's it's been a while i'm sorry if this is a bit too basic but it's been a while since i've heard you define the true self uh i think a lot of new listeners might benefit from that oh yeah sorry it's a very good point So the true self, I mean, the key is in the word true, right? So the true self is the most honest. The true self is the most honest. So the true self is that which directly connects through the senses to the empirical, objective, material world around us, right? So the true self is the one, like, I mean, just take a silly example, right? So a woman who wears a low-cut top, she gets lots of male attention, and therefore, maybe some guy will take her out for dinner. Some guy will take her out for dinner. But if the woman goes into the woods with a low-cut top, she's not going to get dinner.
[46:57] She'll get maybe some extra mosquito bites in her cleavage, but she's not going to get dinner. Because the cleavage thing might get a guy to ask her out for dinner, but it doesn't actually affect the material universe in any way. she performed. So if she goes out in, sorry, silly example, struck me, but if she goes out into the woods with a low-cut top, her breasts don't become giant fruit magnets that pull raspberries to her cleavage, right? It doesn't affect the world at all. So the true self is the part of us that has an uncomplicated relationship to objective reality. And we can't get rid of that. I mean, to get rid of that is to be clinically insane. That's not hyperbole, that is. It's called a psychotic break when you no longer are processing reality, that you believe that the trees are demons and the clouds are sky angels that are hunting you or something. Like you have a genuine hallucinatory and by hallucination i mean it can be audio it can be visual it can be tactile it can be just about anything but you have a complete break from, sense data sense reality like a full-on schizophrenia attack or a psychotic break where.
[48:11] You believe that the lampposts are trying to rape you or something like and you not like you have this as a belief but like you see them jumping after you like you're in a waking dream so the The true self is that which connects directly to reality through the senses. You can't ever get rid of it except by going completely insane. I mean, even some politician who manipulates for a living needs to show up to a particular place on time for some political meeting or some fundraiser. So he's got to have an empirical connection to reality through that. So the true self is the no bullshit direct connection to reality through the senses.
[48:44] And it is both necessary for the powers that be. In other words, you have to have a true self to the point where you'll go to work and earn money and put it in the bank and be available to be taxed and produce things that can be stolen. Because ruling a nation of people who are schizophrenic, florid schizophrenics going through psychotic breaks or something, well, there's really not much to rule.
[49:04] There's nothing to rule, really, because they're not producing anything. In fact, they will consume far more than they will produce. So the powers that be need to split you. They need to have your true self, which goes out and plants crops or types into a computer or, you know, digs ditches or whatever is going on that makes you productive. So you have to have the true self dealing with reality through that. But you also have to reject your true self whenever the powers that be need you to. Right? So, I think that's probably a decent enough explanation, but it's that hardwired part of us that interacts with reality, and to lose that is to go insane. But morally, things are much more controllable. You know, there is no ought in the is, and so the is can't really be manipulated.
[49:57] But the ought, the morals, are much easier to manipulate. And if you can get people to be economically productive and then believe that it's a virtue to give you their money through taxation or something, then you have the best of both worlds. So I hope that's a reasonably good brief intro to it.
[50:14] That's wonderful. Thank you, Steph. I'm curious, like, what is the – I'm sorry if this is too off-topic. Like if one's not – if there's the true self, what is the rest of the individual like my ego or my – like what is other than the true self?
[50:31] I mean it's that line from the Pink Floyd song, you know, everyone you meet, everything you eat. It's the language. It's the culture that you're in. It's the moral values you're exposed to. It's your mother. It's your father. It's your teachers. It's everything you've internalized. I mean, we are very complicated creatures.
[50:52] We are entire cities and countries to ourselves within our head. I mean, I probably met, over the course of this show, 10,000 people at least. And all of the people I've ever had, like everyone I've ever had a conversation with, this one included, has changed my brain. Yeah. So that's, you know, the I, the identity, there's no singular, right? It's literally like, what am I? Well, I'm a complicated amalgam of language, influence, original thought, derived thought, arguments, effects, rejections, and, you know, a couple of trillion atoms gathered together trying to create life or succeeding in creating life on the residue of star explosions from a couple of billion years ago. Go and so the i is to me the the me is not a singularity i mean i can pretend that it is but that's a reductionist argument that means that i can only ever be one thing which reduces the complexity needed for wisdom and also if you make yourself a universe of one not that i'm suggesting you want this but if you make yourself a universe of one then you kill your capacity for empathy because empathy and complexity are the same thing if i'm a universe of one then there's no way i can and picture what it's like to be in somebody else's shoes.
[52:09] But empathy and complexity are the same thing. For me to imagine what it's like to be in somebody else's shoes, to live somebody else's life, I need to have the capacity to internalize something that's not me.
[52:21] And so not me is empathy. And so you have to have complexity and you have to accept disparate parts of yourself in order to have the basic superpower called empathy, which is why the people who get reduced to like one thing or a couple of things, at best ideology reduces you to one perspective, which kills your capacity for empathy. And this is why ideology and cruelty tend to go hand in hand right so if uh like a communist looks at um a business owner and sees exploiter that's it right evil exploiter there's no complexity there's no you know maybe he likes his workers maybe he's done some good to his workers maybe he's the only guy in the environment or the village who's skilled enough to be a good manager, a good boss, create a good company. There's no complexity.
[53:15] Maybe the workers are exploiting him as well a little bit. Maybe he works extra hard. Maybe he works too hard. Maybe he's lost his relationship with his kids because he's working 16 hours. Whatever, right? There's no complexity because communism is an ideology that reduces the world to a single perspective, and all perspectives that tempt it into depth, complexity, and therefore empathy are evil to the ideology because it would undo it, and that's why they have to destroy all other perspectives, because it's always tempting you back down the path of potential empathy, which would destroy the addiction to ideology. Hey, that was actually pretty good. Well, that's how every cult works, right? They need an explanation for why people who disagree disagree, and they find some canned answer to demonize them.
[54:03] Yes, yes, yes. Well, and that's what's great about Christianity, of course, right?
[54:09] As Christianity says, the evil is within us. That he who is without sin cast the first stone. It allows for, in fact, insists upon the very first possibility that the evildoer is within your own skin, right? I used to hate the idea of original sin until I encountered on a regular basis people who had no capacity to look inwards for the source of evil. And so original sin, while technically you could say a rather unjust concept, is incredibly powerful in creating empathy because the first place you look for immorality is within. And that is undeniably powerful. And I think that helped generate the empathy that gave the great Christian revolution of anti-slavery and more equal rights and so on such impetus. The people who never imagined that they could be the bad guys, well, they're always the worst among us, right?
[55:02] Right, because for them, the original sin is in someone else, right? If you're the Christian to a communist, you are the reason why we don't have utopia. That's why they're so angry and violent, right? You're the only thing in the way. Rights yeah yeah you are blocking our path to paradise and and i think that they no more really think of the virtues or values or moral problems of eliminating their opponents than i remember when i was working up north was driving to a pretty distant site to get our soil samples and you know a tree had fallen across the road so what did we do well we had chainsaws an axis and we chopped up the tree and moved it out the way and kept going. And of course, I know I did not think of the moral implications of hacking up the tree because it's just an object in the way and that's what ideology does to those who oppose you.
[56:02] You just become a tree in the way and although the tree may complain, it's for the best that it get out your way.
[56:12] I'm sorry. Sorry, go ahead. Is my microphone too loud, by the way? No, you're good. I think something you notice in certain movies where the death impulse is most prominent is that the writers, I think, who are affected by this, they tend to position the villain as the one with the death impulse itself. I'm sorry, is there any way you could move a little closer to your router or something? I'm getting a lot of burbling from your mic. I'll get a little bit closer uh the best i can do i can uh we can make it out so yeah go ahead.
[57:02] So uh basically in in movies like um infinity war with thanos uh he's the guy with the death impulse essentially and i see this kind of character all the time in fiction now actually And I think what generally happens is they are putting their, the writers, that is, are putting their own death impulse into the villain, oftentimes in these stories. And they're trying to give them that complexity. They're trying to empathize with their own selves and put them in characters. And those are the characters presented in those narratives as having the complex thought or the thing to empathize with. You see their pain, you see Thanos' pain, but the heroes in these stories are often the ones that take the more simple stances and aren't actually given the complexity.
[57:54] City we aren't made to empathize more with heroes beyond the more uh shallow kinds of instincts that we have um someone probably feels sad but we don't really get the heroes to articulate their beliefs or counter the death impulse itself yeah i mean um superman is boring but lex luther is interesting and in the same way batman is boring but you know one of the great modern villains is heath litcher's.
[58:22] Joker right from batman returns or whatever whatever it was and i i barely even remember who played batman in that movie could be i think it wasn't michael keaton uh it was not uh val kilmer it wasn't george clooney i can't remember i can't even remember who played batman in that movie but i vividly remember the joker and in fact i would say i would argue that the joker as a character because i know heath ledger who was you know fairly poppy actor he was in 10 things i hate about you he was in um a knight's tale and you know did some fairly poppy stuff uh getting into the darkness of the joker which i know he spent like a month or two in a hotel room writing journals and pretending he was the joker and really getting himself into that dark and nihilistic but eerily accurate savagery of the joker now it's a fantastic villain it's a fantastic it's like I mean, in Crime and Punishment, Raskolnikov, the murderer, well, he's got some pretty good arguments to make. And when you have an argument that is unacceptable to the powers that be, you simply create a vivid villain and you give your argument to that villain.
[59:33] I mean, what Raskolnikov says when he's being cross-examined by the policeman, Raskolnikov is a guy who kills an evil pawnbroker and intends to distribute the money to the poor and to put himself through law school so that he can help the poor and so on. And he says to the police chief who's examining him, he says, so let's say someone got killed. Right. I mean, in a war, you will take diseased bodies and catapult them over the city wall if you're doing a siege, and hundreds of thousands of people will die, and those people get medals and pensions. So why would you give a jail sentence to someone who kills for a far better reason, to liberate hoarded savings from an evil woman and use them to help the world and the poor, because he uses some of his money to help a woman get out of being a prostitute? So I do some money I do some good with the money I'm not just taking orders from a general and killing civilians because he wants to color a map a certain color I'm paraphrasing but that's a pretty damn fine argument.
[1:00:37] And I don't remember the exact speech that Joker has but the speech about the plan you guys remember that like people don't like my violence because it's not part of the plan, you start a war or, and you drop chemical weapons on villages, people don't care, because that's part of the plan. But my violence, people go nuts, because it's not part of the plan, it doesn't fit into the mindset. And the comparison between private crimes and public virtues, such as war, all of that, I mean, I remember as a kid, I think everybody goes through this question at some point, which is, you kill a guy without a uniform, you can get put to death. You could get hung, electrocuted, shot. You kill a guy in a uniform, you get a medal and a pension. Uniform makes it magic. And everybody has that question. And comparing private crimes to public crimes is one of the essences of trying to understand the world, and really understanding the amount of propaganda that we are fed, that if it's an initiation of force that serves the rulers, it's virtuous, and you're a hero. If it's the initiation of force that harms the rulers...
[1:02:00] Then it's evil and you must be punished. It's all very relativistic. And so, what's the name of the character? Thanos? Which is actually kind of funny because it's close to Thanatos, which is the word that Freud used for the actual death impulse. I haven't seen the movie. Is he a complex villain with some decent arguments?
[1:02:23] I would say no, actually. but um it's like the the people that like him think it's a complex argument but it's actually a pretty basic but it's a general kind of myth about overpopulation uh driving that character and him believing that there are too many people not enough resources in the entire universe he wants to kill half the population to alleviate the suffering of half the people oh so yeah boring Boring Malthusianism. Okay, so that's not. And it's a shame, too. I do remember watching one of the Marvel films. I saw a clip, Tom Higgleston or something. The guy who plays Loki has, I mean, of course, a massive amount of charisma. And so I thought, oh, Loki is a trickster god, right? And a very interesting mythological creature. creature loki is the mutation of society right he's the one who opposes like nietzsche he's the one who opposes strongly and cleverly opposes the values of his existing society to put them to the test to burn away the accumulated rubble of historical momentum and bad ideas and all of that like you know the forest every now and then has to burn down in order to replenish itself and to take down the over covering and the forests which don't burn down become extraordinarily dangerous.
[1:03:44] I remember seeing some when I was traveling with my wife and daughter, we went to some, where was it? Australia, maybe? We went to some.
[1:03:54] Uh imax movie about natives or the indigenous population who would literally set fires at their own forest to burn it down it's like that seems a little counterintuitive but then they point out that if the forest doesn't burn down on a regular basis it becomes extremely dangerous which is of course what's been going on on the west coast in canada and america all of these forest fires are generally the result of governments not doing any preventive burning or forest management and that's why it's all turned into a giant tinderbox, And so I thought, oh, Loki could be an interesting character, could be a cool character, could be someone who comes up with some really thought-provoking arguments. Because if you have no sympathy for the devil, right? And this was, of course, the genius of Milton, who portrayed a devil that you could have some sympathy for.
[1:04:45] You know, one of the older stories of the devil is that God sent him down to tempt people with wrongdoing. And the devil at some point was like, this job sucks. This is terrible. I'm in a virtually omniscient, omnipotent being.
[1:05:00] And God is sending me down to tempt mortals who have a great tendency towards immorality. and so I'm basically, with my powers and powers of persuasion, I'm condemning people to hell and God's really tipping the scales and this is really unfair and God's a bit of a tyrant. You know, like, whether you agree with the arguments or not, you can at least see the perspective of the guy. And what I liked about the joke, Heath Ledger's joker, as opposed to, say, Jack Nicholson, Jack Nicholson's joker was just insane because he fell into a pit of acid, right, and got that weird twisted face. One of the great things about.
[1:05:35] Heath Ledger's Joker is his origin story kept changing. Like, where did you get this weird smile from and why do you wear this makeup? Well, it was answered in the Jack Nicholson Joker by the vat of whatever he fell into. But with Heath Ledger's Joker, the story kept changing, which meant that it could be existential. It could be belief-based. It could be something that you could inhabit yourself if you listen to the character, right? You couldn't become the Jack Nicholson Joker because you hadn't fallen into a vat of acid or whatever it was, but you could become the Heath Ledger Joker because nobody knows where his beliefs came from, and therefore you might just fall into his mindset. It made him much more immediate and much more present. And therefore, if you create a really compelling villain, what's fantastic is the viewer of the audience, like the audience, can actually imagine being that villain. It's the same thing with Hamlet, right? Sorry, with Hamlet, not a villain. Macbeth is a villain, right? And so with Macbeth, it's one thing I remember when I was having big arguments with the director about this. Macbeth, he starts the play by walking in from a field of battle where he's probably hacked down 50 largely unarmed peasants. You know it's like that's great but then he kills one old king and it's oh my god the entire.
[1:06:53] Unity of existence begins to rail against him and curses him with a lack of sleep and you know it's like why why is the one old guy worth infinitely more than the 50 peasants he just hacked to death while being overarmed and overtrained and on a big horse with armor and all that because i needed a macbeth i needed to play a macbeth and somewhere there is video of this performance um i know that but i i wanted to play the macbeth in a way that people could kind of understand why he did what he did where his wife's saying look you could become king do you think the king became king peacefully no the king just told you to go kill a bunch of people to maintain the power of the king why not just kill one more person called the king and become the king it's not a not the worst argument in the world and so if you can get people to To... Empathize to some degree with the arguments of the villain they recognize that the villain can be within them and then they're less likely to condemn others which raises their empathy so it's yeah it's very complicated but when i did watch the loki uh movie or the movie with loki in it oh he was boring i mean actors acting was fine but he was uh he was just completely one-dimensional intentional and uh boring and all of that so i didn't uh end up uh enjoying it but i really was hoping but i guess you can't do that kind of stuff anymore because if you put any good arguments.
[1:08:12] Into the mouths of your villains these days well you can't show anything in china right so it's uh it's just the unfortunate globalism thing is that everything gets diluted sorry end of rant hey steph i have a question um actually it's a question for the whole group um is there a channel on the discord that shows like great videos that have or great movies that have these kinds of excellent themes and um good acting and all that stuff i don't think so i think we should make one and i'm also curious to see uh if you've heard of the movie or watched the movie sling blade, i have both heard of it and watched it what did you think do you remember it uh Billy Bob Thornton, right? And Dwight Yoakam? Did I get that right? I can't remember who played the woman, though. I don't remember who played the woman either. But yeah, Billy Bob Thornton. So if i remember rightly and correct me if i'm wrong of course uh it has something to do with the story has something to do with this which is that billy bob plorton sorry billy bob thornton or as he's otherwise known mr angelina jolie he plays a guy who's severely mentally retarded.
[1:09:26] And there's a woman he befriends who has an abusive boyfriend and he ends up killing the abusive boyfriend is that right, Yes. Yeah, I mean, I don't remember it massively other than Billy Bob Thornton was very good, as he's a very, very good actor. You see him in Goliath. He's also very good, although the show itself is horrifyingly nihilistic, but he's a very good actor. So I think it's the wise fool, right?
[1:10:01] It's an old trope in literature as a whole. You can look at this. You see this, of course, in Forrest Gump. It's sort of one of the most obvious ones. It's a terrible meme, but eerily accurate about the woman, the female played by, oh God, what's her name?
[1:10:21] The woman from Princess Bride. Robin Wright, thank you. I think that was just my brain talking to me. Totally. Yeah, that's it. I remember. Anyway, so yeah, Robin Wright, what's it? He falls in love with her, but she won't have anything to do with him. And then the meme is she's looking out the window and the meme is, bye, Forrest. I'll be back when I have AIDS. I'm a single mother and you're fantastically rich. So yeah, that's kind of chilling. so the the wise fool and you can see this of course in places like uh king lear and so on so the wise fool is somebody who is too dumb to be propagandized and therefore never relinquishes his true self and it's a way of i mean if you look at someone like forest gump he sails through the 60s immune from all the propaganda he has simple pleasures and desires and direct and forthright ways of communicating. He doesn't dissemble. He doesn't lie. He doesn't manipulate. And it brings us back to our sort of simple animal wisdom. So if you look at someone like the character in Sling Blade, I can't remember his name, the Billy Bob Thornton character, well, he befriends this woman. He has loyalty to her. Someone is harming her. And so he kills the guy.
[1:11:38] And it's not complicated. It's not a massive amount of jurisprudence. He simply sees something that is harmful and kills. And, of course, you compare this to someone like Kyle Rittenhouse, and you can see how complicated sort of the modern phenomenon has got.
[1:11:57] And I think for people who are enmeshed and bewitched and bedazzled by propaganda, they look at the wise fool and say, well, ignorance is bliss. And ignorance isn't bliss because you don't have a clue what's going on. Ignorance is bliss because you can act from a simple animal standpoint without this sort of Hamlet overlaying of conscience and possibilities and considerations and doubts and fears and so on. And so I think that it's kind of an insult to the true self to have it manifested in art as a retarded or mentally handicapped person, but that level of essential integrity and honesty where you have a direct pathway from your mind through your senses to the world, and you're not set against yourself by propaganda. Nobody bothers to propagandize you because they consider you too unintelligent, but you see particular truths that other people don't. And the fool is allowed to tell the truth, right? This is, again, an old, and in the same way that the villain is allowed to make Nietzschean or good skeptical arguments against those in authority. The fool, like in King Lear, King Lear is a pretty terrifying character.
[1:13:20] And yet the fool is allowed to say to him you shouldn't have been you shouldn't have gotten old before you became wise you idiot like you shouldn't have gotten rid of the only daughter who told you the truth and given your half your kingdom to the daughters who lied to you and flattered you right you shouldn't right he's allowed to tell the king the truth and he follows the king into the wilds during the storm scene.
[1:13:46] And the king himself says his man no more than this, a bare forked animal, right? Like basically the lollipop drawing that kids make with the forked legs on the bottom. The reduction to the essential, that's down to the true self. So if you strip away, and I'm watching at the moment with my family, we're watching the 1995 BBC version of Pride and Prejudice, which is very good, by the way. And Jane Austen has the same thing. There are people who are honest and direct, without artifice, as the phrase goes. And then there are people who are manipulative and false. And this is the big battle between honesty and manipulation. As I've talked about recently in two shows recently, the only way to resolve human conflicts is sweet reason, manipulation, or violence. And in Jane Austen's world, it's the battle between reason, sense, and sensibility, which is the other movie we watched recently, the great one with Emma Thompson and Hugh Grant, but also beautifully directed by, I think, Ang Lee. I don't know if he was, he's an Asian guy and did a fantastic job with British material. So I would say with Sling Blade, you have someone who is an uncomplicated moral force precisely because of his lack of intelligence.
[1:15:09] And it raises very interesting questions about how much propaganda we get about morality to the point where we can't act in simple defense of others without feeling bad about it, like we all racked with conscience, like this sort of Hamlet stuff. Again, it's been a long time since I've seen it, but I remember those being the thoughts.
[1:15:28] The thing about this is that ignorance is only bliss, though, if you are not in sync with both your unconscious and what you call the true self, in my opinion. Because if you manage to get in sync with both of that and avoid attacking yourself for trying to find out the truth about yourself or even the people around you or even the world, I don't think that ignorance is bliss. But I think that maybe, just to get back a little bit to the topic of the extreme left, so to speak, that maybe those who take on these positions, maybe they are stuck at the stage where they are in a constant war with themselves. Between either the true selves or their conscious selves or their unconscious and their conscious selves.
[1:16:30] And so this war sort of gets projected to the people around them, if that makes any sense.
[1:16:38] Well, I think that's very true. And I think that the first split generally occurs with unempathetic parents, right? So you see this all the time with kids where they say they're at a store and they want a piece of candy or they want a candy bar or something. And so they'll go to their parents very sweetly and nicely and charmingly and seductively, almost in a non-sexual way, but just attempting to win someone over. Oh, mommy, can I please? You know, I've been so good. I haven't had candy in three days. Can I please, please? Oh, please, please. You know, and they're very charming in a way and all of that. And then what happens is if the parent says no, then the child has a temper tantrum. They turn. Oh, come on. You know, I've been so good. I've been asking nicely, just like... They get really angry, and so... This process of viewing the parent as the source of a good, of a positive thing, of the candy, to then viewing the parent as somebody who is denying the child what the child justly deserves, and therefore is an enemy and a bad person, that flip is.
[1:17:50] I think, where, like, the flip in Bichromatic. They're really, really good. They're wonderful. They're going to be fair and just and give me my candy. They're not giving me the candy I deserve and I'm owed and therefore they're bad and I hate them and all of that. And you see this. So that level of, and that's really early, right? That's like maybe 18 months, maybe two years, two and a half years and so on. So that's really early in human development where it's called splitting, where the same person goes from really good to really bad, right? And you can see this, it's sort of cliche, where the woman is trying to get the guy, the wife is trying to get the husband to do something, and she's very seductive. And then when he doesn't do what she wants, she just gets angry and snaps at him and storms out of the room and so on. He goes from somebody who's positive to somebody who's negative with no transition, right? And it just, that's manipulation. That's what manipulation has you view people as very good and very bad. I actually remember this Justice Jeanine Pirro was her name. I saw a couple of her, I've never seen a whole show of hers, but I've seen a couple of her intros over the years. And I remember when James Comey first took over, I think, the Russia thing or the Russia investigation, she had these long speeches about, you know, James Comey is a stand-up guy full of integrity and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, because she wanted something from him. She wanted him to pursue the claims of Russia collusion justly and to dispel them and prove them false and so on.
[1:19:19] And so he was...
[1:19:22] Dudley Do-Right, the best guy ever in the history of government. And then when, of course, it turned out that he was not quite that, to put it mildly. He was then a terrible guy, he's been corrupt from the beginning and so on. And so the flattery punishment with no in-between is, I think, where a lot of this leftist stuff comes from. That they'll praise, and then when they don't get what they want, they'll just condemn utterly. And that comes from an unempathetic parent. parent and what i mean by that is that if your child has had too much candy and they want more candy then the first thing that you should say is i want more candy too right as a parent i mean when my daughter would be in the grocery store and they put all of these brightly colored fruit flavored fruit colored candies right at the kid's eye level at the checkout counter because they're evil well not evil but it doesn't make things easier when you're shopping but it works then Then when your kid is like, I want candy, then, hey, I love candy too. I'd live on candy if I could. Creme brulee, man. Creme brulee and carrot cake with cream cheese icing, my two great weaknesses. Although a little bread pudding is not the end of the world either, although it is for my teeth.
[1:20:37] But you say, oh, man, do I ever want some candy too? I could eat this whole row. Which row would you eat? I would eat the top row and then the bottom row. I don't care that much. Oh, I'd eat the middle row. And you both talk about what you want. And then you say, well, but I, you know, I can't have any candy because, or at least I shouldn't have any candy because I had some candy yesterday or two days ago or whatever, and I got to wash my teeth. And you show the child sort of that self-restraint and so on, right? And then the child says, I want candy. It's like, yeah, I can really see that. I mean, you want candy. I want candy. We both want candy. The question is, should we have candy? Is it a good thing or a bad thing, right? And maybe what we can do is we can buy some candy, but we won't have it right away. And that's actually, it's not a bad way to do it. If you're, you know, just buy a little and, you know, put it in the glove box and maybe they'll forget about it. Maybe it'll melt in the sun or whatever.
[1:21:23] But if the parent gets angry at the child for wanting something, then the anger transfers to the child, the child demonizes the parent, and you get this split it that goes on. And, of course, the source of the problem is the child's desire for candy. But if the child believes that the source of the problem is the parent's denial of that candy, then they can externalize what is actually internal and attack the external. And they do that, of course, in the hopes that if they have a tantrum.
[1:21:53] Maybe they'll be appeased in the moment and they'll get the candy. But, of course, the big purpose of the tantrum as well is the long con, right? The long game. And the long game is, well, if I make it more and more uncomfortable for my parent to refuse me candy, I will get candy on a more regular basis, right? That's the long con, so to speak. And it's pretty effective because if you're overworked as a parent, you're tired as a parent, You're too busy as a parent. You're overextended as a parent. You don't have many resources in your mind and heart for big combat with your kids, so you tend to appease quite a lot.
[1:22:34] I view the leftist stuff as sort of a very early, undeveloped. And of course, kids, particularly younger siblings, and it would be very interesting to know how many leftists are younger siblings, but younger siblings are, for obvious reasons of evolution, obsessed with fairness. Obsessed with fairness because if you're not getting your, you know, the older kid is faster and stronger and will get to the food sooner and will be able to eat more. And so you have to be obsessed with fairness as a younger sibling and if your parents enforce the fairness then you don't have to be so obsessed by it anymore right if your parents make things fair right i mean the typical example is there's a piece of cake to be split by two kids right the the mediocre parent well the bad parents lets them fight it out the mediocre parent cuts the cake for them and the good parent says okay one of you cut the other person chooses the first piece Right, and that way, And so if the parent is enforcing equality, the kid can relax, knowing that the equality thing is taken care of. But if the parents aren't enforcing equality, then the kid has to fight like hell for equality, and inequality feels like death. And then what happens is the politicians start talking about inequality, thus triggering the early memories of potential death by deprivation for the younger siblings, and it opens up a hole to totalitarianism, if that makes sense.
[1:24:00] Like i really like what you shared just then about how you actually address the example with the child who wanted the candy in the candy store and it's funny to me because i never actually thought of that right like as a as someone who's hoping to become a parent in the near future like i was actually thinking about well how do i address that problem right like how do i address us a problem if don't you like candy candy i love candy but the thing is is i never thought about empathizing with how they feel about it like hey i know you want candy i want it too and and i'm like why it's a problem we share it's a problem we share not a problem that you're bringing to me yeah but but what's weird to me is like when you said it i was like oh oh, duh, like, that's so obvious, right? But why didn't I think of that, right? Because, like, my wife and I, oftentimes, we talk about, I better close the door, I'm being too loud. Like, my wife and I often talk about is, like, how do we solve these kinds of problems? Like, oh, what happens if our kid wants to eat stuff that they shouldn't? And, like, we talk about it and stuff, right? But never did it occur to me about, oh, like, actually, no, yeah, I want the same thing as you do as well, but sometimes- Don't we all battle with eating better? Everybody battles with eating better, right?
[1:25:19] And so the thing that's really weird to me is like, because I never had that level of empathy growing up, right? My mom would just yell at me and smack me if I wanted something that she didn't want to give me. Like in the middle of the supermarket aisle, I'm sure a lot of people have seen that before when you're walking around a supermarket and there's like a kid on the ground, you know, kicking and screaming, chucking a tantrum, and the parent just turns around and like whacks someone across the face, right? Or just hisses and threatens and drags them from the store or, you know, whatever. I mean, it doesn't have to be physical striking, but it certainly isn't empathy. Oh, but absolutely. And I'm like, well, why didn't I think of that? Right? Because like, we've talked about this scenario before and I'm like, well, that's because, you know, like, when you mentioned it, it's so natural and obvious and intuitive to even think of it that way.
[1:26:14] It's actually bonding over your love of candy together as opposed to it being an enemy and you're modeling you're modeling saying no to candy rather than enforcing saying no to candy yeah yeah yeah i have to i have to say no to candy every day like every single day oh man i love candy too well here's another thing too i've actually seen multiple i'm sure everyone has i've seen multiple instances where a mom is saying no to the kid for some food that's got a lot of fat or sugar or whatever, right? And the mom is obese and the kid is not.
[1:26:51] And it's like, you've got to be kidding me, lady. You can't say no to food, but you're mad at your kid for wanting food when your kid is slender and you're not. I mean, that's truly crazy. I mean, then the kid doesn't take long for the kid to figure out, well, mom's got to be a midnight eater. Mom's got to be eating way more than she needs. But then she gets mad at me for wanting extra calories.
[1:27:12] Though I do wonder sometimes, though, whether that is somehow not as bad as making the child obese as well. Because at least, in a way, they're still thinking, hey, that's not good for you. I've just got no self-control, but I want to try to at least make you better than me. Well, but then they should be saying that. That's how they think about it. Yeah, they should be saying, you don't want to look like me, and I didn't say no to candy, and look where I'm at, right? Don't do this, right? Yeah. Well, there is also the fact that in that situation, you have to consider that maybe the mother is taking out her own anger in relation to food on the child, if that makes any sense. So maybe the mother is trying to sort of regulate herself through denying the child food, but of course it doesn't work that way. Well, yeah, she's angry at her own desire for more calories, and then she projects that onto the child and attacks the child. But the attack upon her own desire for more calories is why she's overweight, because the more that we attack, the more we reinforce, the more we're savage with herself. Like, you know, all cruelty, all violence, all aggression achieves the opposite of its stated goal.
[1:28:23] So if you just get mad at yourself for eating too much, all that will happen is you'll just end up eating more, because we defy authoritarianism on a regular basis. Particularly this group, I hazard a guess to say.
[1:28:37] Exactly. It's the same paradigm as getting mad for the child for wanting candy. It's essentially sort of inciting the child, I want to say, to have a revolution against the authoritarian rule of the parent. Because then the child just puts in the child's mind, or at least that's the way I see it, Suddenly, wanting candy becomes a bad thing. So not knowing how to handle that emotion, they start to project it to the parent and has the tantrum. Yeah. And also, if you don't internalize why you shouldn't eat too much candy, then when the parent's not around, you just sneak your candy. You go over to some friend's place, you just steal candy. You sneak candy. You hide candy. You put the wrappers in the vents. Whatever. I mean, because you haven't internalized anything. anything you've just uh you know hey parents not around now i can eat all the candy i want which is why kids go like my my daughter i mean she loves her candy as do i you know we go out for halloween and you know 11 months later we have to throw out half a halloween stash because she never ate it right because she's internalized that now she likes her sugar just as i do so it's not perfect of course right nobody's perfect and perfection would be kind of boring because Because, well, frankly, good tasting food is kind of a pleasure in life.
[1:30:00] But, yeah, that stuff is really, really unhealthy. And, I mean, of course, as more aggression, as parents have become more stressed and more aggression has risen in eating and in parenting, you see, of course, that the population is simply getting more and more obese because they're just not. And the other thing, so here's another, I guess, if you want to do, I guess, one sort of more parenting tip. Another thing is to explain this, and I did this with my daughter, right? So once a friend of hers was over and said, I want to use your chalk for drawing on the driveway. And my daughter is, you know, maybe it's an only child thing, maybe it's a Northern European thing, maybe it's just a her thing, but she's not very big on the sharing.
[1:30:53] But she, you know, oh, she's a friend, so she can use my chalk. And then the friend, very unfortunately, drew a very complex drawing that ground down half of her chalk to nothing. Thing and my daughter of course she she hit it fairly well but afterwards she was just outraged you know that that her chalk had been destroyed by her friend who shouldn't her friend have more sympathy for her chalk and not ruin it in that way and perfectly perfectly sensible right perfectly sensible so with regards to food i said so if someone like do you remember when that your friend borrowed your chalk and then kind of wrecked everything right so borrowed something and and wrecked it and you were really really mad at that right and i said so like you understand you're borrowing your body from the future right like you have to deliver like it's our job to deliver your body to your adult self with a decent amount of health right and so just as you know you're borrowing the chalk from your future self just as your friend was borrowing the chalk from your future self and your friend wrecked it you got really mad like so if you're 18 and you're overweight or your teeth are bad or whatever then you're going to look to us and you're going to say you know that's terrible i can't believe you guys let that happen and you'll be right because you know you you get to be an adult you get to be independent but you know until you become an adult.
[1:32:11] We're at least some degree responsible to deliver your adult self a healthy body a healthy mind and all of that and and if you've got something vivid like every kid lends something out it gets wrecked and then they're mad when it comes back and just point out that that's sort of the relationship with the body in the future yeah exactly and with that example you are teaching her self-empathy which again to get back to the leftist topic is something that these types probably lack and so they can't even accept the fact that they might may be wrong or that their argument may be wrong And their self-hatred is as such that they just project it outwards.
[1:32:55] Yeah, and this is part of the leftist thing around condemnation, right? The reason you don't set up a country called condemnation is because someone's always going to be able to condemn you about something, right? Like, I don't know if you've been following this sort of Chrissy Teigen saga, but this is a woman who tangled with me quite a bit back in the day when I was on Twitter. Twitter and was pretty aggressive and mocking and somewhat abusive and all of that and was condemning people left, right, and center. It turns out that she tried to convince an underaged kid, if I remember rightly, to kill herself or something like that. Sorry, underage kid's a bit repetitive, but.
[1:33:34] Um, so, you know, the reason why you don't want to be too harsh in your condemnation of everything is that nobody's perfect. And again, this is the Christian argument. Nobody's perfect. Let he who is without sin cast the first stone that we have to pull back on or the self-righteous, aggressive, violent, abusive mob, because, you know, it could be you, right? Could be you and all of the people. So Chrissy Teigen was very big into cancel culture, and I'm sure she cheered when I was canceled and all of that. And now she's being canceled, right? And this is such an obvious thing that it's the free speech thing. Like, yeah, there's lots of people I disagree with. It'd be great if they didn't say anything, but I don't want to have a censorship thing because it's going to hit me. It's just a basic common sense thing. And if you don't have complexity and you can't empathize with your future self, then you will simply project all of your unwanted bits onto everyone else, attack them and think that you solved a problem and all you've done is created a potential for backlash that's going to take you down, which I guess brings us full circle back to the beginning. Like, why would the leftists summon all of these people who are going to destroy them? Well, I think that their lives have become not just unbearable in the present. I don't know if you guys have this. It's this sense of what does the future hold? And if all the future holds is more misery more attack more shame more abuse more aggression more.
[1:34:56] Dissatisfaction you know more being used for sex or maybe it's drug abuse or something it's the marvin gaye thing like if the rest of my life is simply going to be, fighting a losing addiction and being miserable and and or not sleeping and like if that's going to be my life i don't really want it but i can't admit that i'm wrong so i will simply create the conditions wherein i will be destroyed and that way i don't have to own any change of course i don't have to admit that i'm wrong i don't have to make restitution i would rather and i think it has more to do with restitution i would rather die than make restitution i would rather die than, not just admitting you're wrong is part of it but of course admitting you're wrong without doing anything about it is really an insult to to your victims um you know i mean i made this example in a show the other day some guy borrows your car and then puts a big ding in the side and then says man i'm really really sorry and then walks away you're like dude i mean the apology doesn't mean anything how about you you fix my car at least pay me the money it takes to fix my car or whatever right but just saying sorry and walking off and i think it has to do with the restitution thing and maybe if you've projected enough of yourself onto others and attacked and work to destroy them it just there's no capacity for empathy left like you've simply burned it out The burden has become too high for repayment, if that makes sense.
[1:36:16] You might as well declare bankruptcy. It's one thing to pay back $1,000. It's quite another thing to pay back $10 million if you can. You might as well just declare bankruptcy, which I guess is summoning your own destroyers.
[1:36:28] Yeah, I think you make a really good point. From my perspective, though, looking at the future and feeling like a sense of either dread or elation, I think that more represents your relation with your unconscious and your unconscious desire. So if you feel dread towards the future, I think that might be because there is something deep in your unconscious conscious that you haven't resolved or you maybe you have not empathized with it enough to understand what it is i'm not sure if that makes sense i think it does but you know the one the one thing that blinds us as a community and i don't think that's a bad thing but the one thing that blinds us as a community is we don't have anyone around who's got a really bad conscience like we we don't have access to that information i i've certainly been imperfect at times and and bad in my life but i you know i don't i've not done anything particularly bad and i've made apologies and restitutions where were possible uh i'm pretty good conscience but you know i can't think that there's anyone on this call and if there is you know please feel free to share.
[1:37:37] I did have a call i can't even remember if i released it i have so many calls that i haven't released yet but it was a call with a guy who was a troll like who was actively attacking the community and so on and looking back into sort of what was going on with his life i mean the guy had horrible head injuries and was going through a horrible fight with a woman who'd absconded with his kid and like just a miserable existence. But we're always theorizing about, or at least I'm often theorizing about, oh, this would.
[1:38:04] Be the results of a bad conscience, but there's very little empirical evidence because the people with a bad conscience almost never end up in these kinds of communities or communicating with us, if that makes sense.
[1:38:18] Yeah probably because they lack the empathy with themselves that would enable them to look critically at the situation or it may be that it's impossible for them to have empathy with themselves because they've burned that part of themselves out in the same way that if you've been i don't know like a drug addict for 20 years will you ever have a stable measure of happiness seems hard to imagine because you've just burnt up your whole system in a sense oh yeah if you if you if we liken it to drug addiction then it is entirely entirely possible to literally destroy the part of your brain or the part of your unconscious or even the part of yourself that is responsible for either empathy or the functions of just questioning, your own actions yeah i mean one of the things that gets burnt out with people who have quote quote, mental illness, which I think is a lot of times just a bad conscience.
[1:39:13] One of the things that gets burnt out is the capacity to observe your own actions, right? They call it the observing ego, or some people call it the third eye, which is, you know, how I talk about free will is your capacity to compare proposed actions to ideal standards. But that means you have to step out of yourself.
[1:39:29] You have to step outside yourself. Oh, it's that old line from a police song, stepped outside myself and felt so cold, right? Because I think he's a bit of a narcissist as well. Like, it's just cold and empty outside of yourself. There's no people there, which is one of the things that good performers have. They're just not self-conscious because there's nobody there but themselves. The audience is just imaginary in a sense deep down. But to be able to step outside yourself and evaluate your own actions and compare them to some standard, again, that is part of the power of Christianity is to say.
[1:40:06] You've got to judge yourself by the standards of God or Jesus or the Ten Commandments, which means you have to step outside yourself and compare yourself to ideal standards. And of course, Muslims do this as well. They say, well, what would the prophet do? Or the prophet says this is okay. Does that mean you disagree with the prophet or whatever it is, right? They at least will step outside themselves and compare their actions to an ideal standard, whatever we think of those various ideals. Obviously, I prefer the Christian one vastly. But one thing that I've noticed with the people who've acted really badly is they simply do not have that capacity to step outside themselves and observe their own behavior. They're always with inside manipulating and they cannot like an out of body experience. Like, I don't believe that I have astral travel powers. I don't believe I can half nap on a couch and travel to Borneo, like for real, like float above myself. And like, I don't believe that. I don't think that's, I can imagine, but I can't actually leave my body. And for solipsistic or truly narcissistic people, they don't have the capacity to observe their own behavior any more than you have the capacity to observe yourself without a mirror or a camera. Like you can't step outside your own body and look at yourself. They can't step outside their own minds and view their actions. And because they can't view their actions, they can't compare them to any standard. And I think then it just becomes immediate survival, which leads to moral decay.
[1:41:34] Just as a side tangent, I wonder if God originated as a way, or the concept of God originated as a way for people to have an easier time of observing themselves from the outside, like you said. I think so. Just a side type of standards. I think so. Yeah. I mean, I think so, and I think that this is why religious...
[1:41:56] Again, I'm going to sort of swing back to Christianity here as the only universal religion that I'm really familiar with. But comparing yourself to universal standards is a good thing. And this is what Christians say, like, what would Jesus do? Which is a way of comparing their proposed actions to an ideal standard. And it is a great way of breaking the solipsism or narcissism of pure self-involvement. And it is a way at least of, if you view yourself from outside yourself, it's easier for you to empathize with others. Because that's what other people do, is they view you. View, right? So, what would Jesus do is another way of saying, if Jesus was looking at me, what would he think? Or if he was looking at me doing this thing of the future, what would he think? So, viewing yourself from the outside in is a way of empathizing because that's what other people do is they view you from the outside in. Like, I mean, I've occasionally thought about this over the course of the years with my wife who's like a cozy five foot one and I'm almost six feet tall, you know, that she spent, like, what would it be like if I spent most of the marriage, looking up, you know, get a kink in my neck or something, right? Just trying to think of what it's like to live with someone who's like close to twice your size in terms of weight and muscle and all that. It's a pretty, pretty wild thing, right? And that's really, really important. So, yeah, I think, I think, I think we got some.
[1:43:09] Some useful stuff out of this. And by the way, I really do appreciate everyone. I'm going to close things off now because I got to eat, but I really do appreciate everyone dropping by. I'm sorry that it's so long between these kinds of things, but my wife and daughter had a tidy outing today. So I thought I would do a little bit of extra conversations, but yeah, really, really helpful. Really great. So what do you guys think? Useful stuff? Should we do more of these?
[1:43:32] Well, yeah, thank you so much. It's been great. Yeah, I agree.
[1:43:37] I agree. Yes, I really like them. Yes, Steph, I just wanted to make one comment, though. Because y'all talked about the Infinity War and Thanos. Come on, folks. You can chime in. And what was his motivations. And the motivations that he had in the comic book were really different than the movie. In the movie, he's actually trying to increase people's standard of living. I guess peer pressure isn't that effective amongst anarchists. Hmm yeah no i i think that usually the uh movies uh are really reduced from from the books themselves which is a real shame but i have no doubt yeah yeah i just i i don't even know where to get the comics but uh i know that's funny because i know that unauthorized.tv that um, vox day is publishing a whole bunch of comics in a sense designed to sort of work against some of this stuff uh some of the woke stuff which i think is a good thing to do sorry go ahead oh but as i say in the comic book his motivation is really like far out like death is actually a woman that he perceives and he's in love with her and then he's trying to kill half of the universe like literally just so he can win the heart of death and marry her.
[1:44:54] It and then also in the comic book he's he's bullied a lot his mom is horrified by him and stuff so he's like abandoned and beat up like a lot as a kid so then so there's a lot of trauma in his past so then he grows up to be this person that like right is in love with death so wanting to marry death uh yeah wanting to marry death is uh tis a consummation devoutly to be wished as hamlet says or half in love with easeful death or summoning the communists who are going to destroy you uh i think that that wanting to marry death is is part of the uh like no no living person will have you so you might as well um marry marry death all right well thanks everyone so much have a great evening i really really appreciate your chats and yeah let's just do this more often it's really uh really nice really good all right have a great night one last 10 seconds go man, if if you wanted to talk more deeply later about people like severe narcissism i've actually worked I've worked with a few of them, and I don't know how much I can give you glimpses into their thoughts, but I can tell you what they've done. Okay, let's put that as a bookmark for next time. I really appreciate that. Yep. All right, thanks, guys. That sounds really interesting. Take care. Bye.
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