0:03 - Introduction and Christmas Wishes
9:30 - Dreams and Their Meanings
16:08 - Censorship and Free Speech
In this episode, I explore the implications of subconscious influence in our lives, prompted by a listener’s experience of an unsettling car crash. We dive into the profound question of whether our subconscious minds can steer us toward self-destructive behavior to escape harmful situations, particularly in relationships rife with abuse. I offer my perspective on how people's trajectories can be altered by their subconscious urging them toward injury as a means of breaking free from toxic environments.
Delving deeper, I reflect on the concept of alternate universes in our life choices and relationships. I share a personal anecdote about my wife and how serendipitous moments can shape our destinies. The discussion reveals the complexity of human relationships and the often-unseen connections that lead to significant transformations in our lives. I emphasize the importance of philosophical inquiry and self-awareness in preventing life choices that can lead us toward deep regret or unfulfilling paths.
Moving on, I examine the relationship between personal injuries and the demonstration of care from others. I argue that experiencing setbacks can clarify who genuinely values us and who may only appreciate our utility. I use metaphorical logic to illustrate the dynamics of give-and-take in relationships, underscoring that the true depth of care can often emerge in times of need, especially when we find ourselves unable to provide for others.
In addressing another listener's dream where they mourn a brother who is alive, I unpack the symbolic meaning of death within the context of conscious thought and free will. I draw a parallel between living under oppressive circumstances, such as abusive family dynamics, and the withering of one's moral and conscious state. This leads to a broader discourse about the constructs of free will, identity, and the societal pressures that can impede personal growth.
As I conclude, I touch upon the wider implications of my thoughts on moral standards and their effects on relationships. I highlight the necessity of having higher ideals against which we measure our lives and the lives of the people around us. This thought-provoking episode raises essential questions about our mental models and the influence of social relationships in shaping our destinies while emphasizing the critical importance of conscious choice and self-reflection.
[0:00] All righty. Good morning, everybody. This is Stefan Molyneux from Freedomain.
[0:04] It is 9.30, 6 a.m. Thursday, December 26, 2024. And we have some questions from freedomain.locals.com. Great community. I hope you will join us and I hope you had a very, very Merry Christmas.
[0:20] Somebody wrote, Hey, Stef, I recently got into a car crash on the way to my parents' house. I went into a median and flipped on the ice. I've had this recurring creeping thought that maybe it may have been intentional by my subconscious. Do you think that the subconscious can influence us to do things that are even life-threatening to keep us away from abusers? So that's the first part of the question. Yes. Yes. So if you are, I'm not saying you are, right? If someone is in a relationship, where the continuation of that relationship is going to have you not want to live. You know, I look at this alternate world, this alternate path, this other universe, you know, if you look at, for me, if I look at the chain of causality, like all the dominoes that had to fall in order for me to meet my wife, and through meeting my wife, transforming my life. And it's funny, because it wasn't like I was introduced to my wife by someone in particular, but the couple who was responsible, in a way, for me meeting my wife. In other words, I met my wife playing volleyball. The guy who said, let's go play volleyball.
[1:39] They don't even know we got married, that couple, right? We had a ruckus in the relationship, it doesn't really matter what. And we stopped talking to each other. And so they were responsible for my wife and I meeting. And they don't even know if we got married. It's pretty wild. Anyway, so I look at that alternate universe where what else would have happened, right? I mean, I would have, I'm sure, continued to date. I might have got married. Honestly, I can't believe or I can't imagine any way that it would have gone better than the way that it's gone. So I sort of look at that alternate universe and maybe I'd had a couple more relationships, maybe married for a while, maybe still married, may have kids, may not have kids. But if I sort of look at that alternate universe where I didn't get married and have kids and was in my late 50s, oof, it would be.
[2:41] I mean, it would be really depressing, to be honest. It would be really depressing. There would be this weariness, what's the point, missed the boat, made the wrong decisions, made the wrong choices. And, you know, there's a particular level of almost cruelty within the human mind where you only figure out your bad decisions when it's too late to fix them. You know if you're doing something terrible like drunk driving and you only really realize how bad it is when the police or sirens are in the rear view mirror and they're demanding that you pull over.
[3:20] I mean there are lots of people I've talked to over the years who woke up on their honeymoon, realizing they'd married the wrong person it's pretty challenging and pretty awful that this happens, but it really does. And this is why philosophy is so important, because philosophy can help you avoid that. There is a kind of set of wiring that connects to your bad decisions only when it's too late to fix them. And this is the women in their 40s realizing they do need men, and they do want kids, but it's too late to fix. And so I think there's something that happens sort of deep in our brain. If we're heading towards a life which is going to have us be absolutely miserable, then I think it is possible that our unconscious can guide us to an injury. An injury will disrupt the system. An injury will disrupt the situation. And an injury will also help you figure out how much people care about you. If you're in a relationship with really selfish people and you're being exploited, it. Well, you can't provide resources when you're injured. In fact, you need resources when you're injured. Injury can be, or sickness can be a really great way to figure out who cares about you and who doesn't.
[4:47] I mean, if there's some woman and she's a real looker and guys date her to parade her around and to be high status and so on, and then, you know, she's unwell, well, she can't provide that service. And how much are people interested in her? When a woman ages out of her youthful beauty and fertility, how much value does she have for men? Oh, she's gained in wisdom, perhaps, or resources or money, or she has a house, but how much do people actually really care about her? So, I mean, it is a, it's the basic polarity in relationships. You're in a relationship because you gain some material or emotional value out of that person. Or you're in a relationship because you intensely admire that person's virtues and they inspire you to better virtues yourself. I mean, that's all there is.
[5:42] Either, that's a great phrase that used to be referred to as sort of capitalism, right? That people don't treat each other as genuine human beings, but rather instead they have these dry calculations of mutual utility. Dry calculations of mutual utility. But of course, that has a lot to do with how people have relationships, right? You know the old meme that if sexual availability wasn't on the table, men would realize how many women weren't actually very interesting and if money wasn't on the table women would realize how little men had to offer and i think there's some truth in that for sure i think there's some truth in that for sure so if you're in a relationship where you provide value status resources you know you you help people you babysit their kids you watch their house when they're away, you do all of these great things for them, but it's just kind of one way. Well, what happens when you're sick, when you need resources?
[6:44] So, if you're heading towards certain misery that might even end up involving self-destructive tendencies, like more serious, if you're heading towards misery, you will risk injury to avoid misery. Because in that way, your unconscious may do that calculation. This is just my opinion, of course, I have no proof of any of this. It's just my opinion based upon, I mean, some fairly decent data in the thousands of conversations I've had with people over the years. But I think your unconscious will say, well, if we're heading towards certain misery and we are not awake as to how we're exploited, we will create a situation where people have to help us. And it is really remarkable. I remember, I won't get into the relationship in details, but I very clearly remember when someone I knew was going to have his first kid, I spent the entire, I spent an entire long weekend helping them clean their place in preparation, you know, there's this nesting instinct, right? And I just remember thinking afterwards, I remember thinking afterwards, you know, there's no way that this guy is going to be over at my house for a long weekend if I ever have kids cleaning up. Like, it's just not going to happen, right? I had, when I first, when I produced my first play called Seduction, I gave the script to another guy I knew to read it and give me some feedback. Never did.
[8:07] I, when I wrote, he never did. I, when I wrote my first novel called The Jealous War, I gave it to a friend of mine who was stationed in a very remote location for the entire summer. And he said he never got around to reading it, even though no TV, no internet, and he had nothing to do for eight hours of the day, right? Eight hours sleep, eight hours work, nothing to do. He just, you know, never. So just that level of interest, right? When I first started doing what I do now, there were people, of course, in my life that I really wanted to listen to what I'm doing, give feedback and so on. And it was virtually non-existent. So when you are not providing resources to people, but instead asking them for something.
[8:48] Well, you find out how much you're valued, how reciprocal things are or are not. And it's really, really important to go through that. So I think as a whole, I'm sorry, should I do this next question? Will it tie in? I think it might. So the guy goes on to write, additionally, sorry, let me just go back there for a second. Sorry for skipping around, but as a point I forgot to mention, it's the old thing that But if the plane you're in is going down and you'll jump, because to stay on the plane is certain death. So you'll jump. Maybe you'll land in a swimming pool. Maybe there's water down there. Maybe there's some sloping roof that you can skid down and land on a hay wreck.
[9:30] You'll have a chance of survival by choosing something that's immediately dangerous and avoiding a certain destruction. So, yeah, I think if you are in a situation where you're going to be exploited and.
[9:46] Miserable. And if you have like really bad parents, like sort of unrelentingly bad parents, that conditions who you can get married to, right? Because if there's a high quality woman, she won't want to spend time around abusive, neglectful, destructive, exploitive people, right? She won't want to raise her kids around that. She won't want to be part of that whole family situation. So it's not just your relationship with your parents. It's that your relationship with your parents, if your parents are really bad, is keeping good people away and the only people that you have available to marry, the only women you have available to marry are, equally corrupt and dangerous and destructive or massively appeasing and therefore you won't respect them kind of women. So I think it's a dice roll saying we got to get to a better place. The guy goes on to say, additionally, my nightmares have been more consistent than ever lately. I have had back-to-back nights where I dream of my brother being dead, and I am mourning him. In reality, he is alive and well, and lived with my parents. What does it represent in a dream for someone to be dead who is alive in real life? Thanks again for all you do. You're welcome. freedomain.com slash donate. If you find these answers helpful, I would very much appreciate it.
[11:00] So, if you look at what death is, physical death, right? So, physical death is you have no conscious thought, you're beyond free will, and you are decaying. You have no conscious thoughts, you're beyond free will, and you are decaying. So when you say in reality he is alive and well, the word well, right, since your parents are abusive according to what you say, alive and well. But if he lives with abusive parents into, I assume, into his 20s or later, because you don't say that he's very young. And if you, and you don't say that he's, you know, that it's unusual that he lives, sorry, that it's normal or natural that he lives with your parents. So I assume that he's in his twenties or maybe older, but let's say twenties lives with my parents.
[11:49] I mean, as you well know, a lot of people die young, but it takes 65 or 70 years to bury their bodies.
[11:59] So, is your brother alive? To be alive is to have conscious thoughts and to have free will and to be growing in strength and virtue. If your brother has no particular conscious thoughts, In other words, if he's like an NPC, if he's programmed, if he's reactive, if he's hiding out from life, if he's taking the path of least resistance, right? I mean, the reason we have conscious minds, morality, and willpower is so we can do that which is very hard to do. That is why we have these capacities. We have to do, why do we have muscles? We have muscles so that we can not have inertia, right? You think of those sort of ragdoll physics, some character dies in a video game, there's bounce down a mountainside, they don't have any motive power, it's just boom, boom, boom, right? So we have muscles to overcome inertia. And we have muscles because we have the will to choose what we do. The muscles in our mouth to choose what we say, the muscles in our arms to choose what we move, the muscles in our legs to choose where we go. And we have a muscle in the mind called morality that has us overcome the inertia. The ragdoll physics are bouncing down the mountainside of inevitability, right, and to choose and will something.
[13:22] And so, to have conscious thoughts in the moral realm is to have a higher standard of virtue that we strive to achieve.
[13:32] If your brother is enmeshed in NPC ragdoll physics, if he's just bouncing down his sort of hillside of circumstances, not making any choice, then to dream that he is dead, which is to say he has no conscious thoughts, he has no free will, because if he has no higher standards that he's striving for, then he has no free will. Free will is not granted to every human being. Free will is the result of having a higher standard that you aim for. If someone is overweight but believes that they are healthy and beautiful and everyone around them tells them that they're healthy and beautiful, do they have the choice to lose weight if either they don't think they're overweight or they know that they're overweight but think that it's fine, healthy, and beautiful? Well, no. In order to have free will, you have to have a standard that is different from what you're doing than who you are. It's literally like an animal. Animals don't have higher moral standards. They just respond to instincts and hunger and lust and the programmed parabolic protection if they are mothering and fathering types of animals.
[14:40] So, we only have free will if we reject what is for what should be, not even what could be, what should be, right? So, if somebody genuinely believes that smoking is not harmful, and they love smoking and everyone around them smokes and their doctor says smoking is fine, are they free to quit smoking? Well, no. The propaganda is there to strip you of free will.
[15:06] Now, if someone knows that smoking is really bad for him and that he needs to quit in order to be healthy, well, that person has the choice to quit smoking. So if your brother does not have a higher standard that chafes against where he is and encourages him to try to break free of abusers, to move out, to, right? Because again, it's one thing if you're enmeshed in a relationship with abusive parents in terms of like limiting your dating prospects to people who are intensely low quality and probably abusive themselves. But if you're actually living at home with abusive parents, you are as unattractive to virtuous women as you can possibly be. So if somebody is pursuing a life path that will not allow them to marry a virtuous woman, then their bloodline is dead to morality. In fact, If he's going to produce anyone, he's going to probably produce people against morality.
[16:09] All right. So here's a long question about why I live in Canada and the First Amendment in America. Well, I mean, maybe you live in the world of words. I live in the world of what actually happens. And if you look at the companies that censored me, you figure out the geography and so on. It's not super complicated. Okay so those are the questions i really do appreciate it if you'd like to do a call then of course freedom.com slash call to do that it would be greatly deeply and humbly appreciated and freedom.com slash donate to help out the show would also be gratefully humbly and deeply appreciated have yourselves a wonderful day merry christmas again i'll talk to you soon bye.
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