In mid May, someone, somehow, somewhere sent me a link to Freedomain Radio (‘FDR’), and I feel like my life got turned upside down. I talked about this website a little bit in my last podcast, but I’d barely scratched the surface of it at the time, indulging in a few intellectual debates about anarchism, property rights etc. Underneath all that politics though is a conversation about the philosophy and psychology of the personal, about our relationships with each other and with ourselves. I started listening to FDR podcasts in which stupendously bright people from college age to middle age and beyond, talk openly and honestly about their dreams of intimacy in friendships, relationships, and with their parents. The dedication shown by these people in working their way towards the truth of what was really going on for them below the fog of psychological defences and childhood conditioning was profoundly compelling and shocking to me.
I felt that they were avidly pursuing an honest intimacy with the world that I had myself once dreamed of, but long since allowed to die in my heart. Well, but for a little flicker perhaps. The mantra of the site (run by one Stefan Molyneux in Ontario, Canada) is ‘reason leads to virtue leads to happiness’. The latter part is perhaps the more straightforward: A virtuous man can be happy, a corrupt man will find it almost impossible. The more a person deludes themselves about their true feelings and motives, the more they create a false self framework of conditioned reactions rooted in irrationality and self-justification. So when someone does or says something that reminds me of my mother or my father and makes me angry, am I really aware that my emotion is rooted in my childhood, or do I blindly lash out and then chastise myself later for not being able to control myself?
I feel like I’ve been doing the latter for most of my 38 years. It’s not like I wasn’t aware of it, but I just didn’t see any way out of it. In my late twenties I began to deal with my anger by dissociating from it. I never really questioned why I was angry, I just set about trying to fix the symptom. I tried to tell myself my negative emotions were not just, not deserved. No one is really to blame for anything: it’s all just one big clockwork universe and if the rain soaks me through, I don’t blame the sky as if it were personal. Just meditate and let the emotions pass…
But what I was missing with all this relativist/subjectivist stuff, what I still found most attractive in my life, what I had always found most attractive, and what I’d always felt was entirely absent, was the pursuit of virtue. I’m one of those people who just point blank believes in right and wrong, in virtue and corruption, and when I see people drift towards the latter, I get anxious, upset, angry. Now if you’re being raised in a home where obedience is the highest virtue, and if you don’t happen to agree, then pretty soon you’re going to find the weight of physical punishment coming down on you to force you back into line. And as a child, if you’ve no way to express your disapproval and anger, then the only thing you can attack is yourself.
So I spent my teens and twenties beating myself up, attacking my own failures remorselessly. I made myself miserable. People told me I was aloof, but really I just saw no point in communicating. Nihilism beckoned! And then in my thirties to escape all this I started to project to others what I thought they wanted (or were willing) to see. Nothing was really right or wrong, everyone was equally to blame and therefore no one was to blame. There’s no such thing as a true self, just an endless onion layer after layer of conditioning, so why bother with intimacy? Why bother with honesty? What is honesty? Even kindness is selfish.
And yet somehow throughout all this, I still yearned for virtue. I was jealous of the Christians and the Muslims with their clear objective morality and their focus on right living rather than making meaningless money, but I couldn’t join them, because I couldn’t submit to the irrationality behind their belief system.
The truth is though that everyone subscribes to some form of morality in some parts of their lives. They just tend to apply it inconsistently. Murder is always wrong… unless you’re wearing a soldier’s uniform. Bombing our land is evil, but bombing their land is virtue. Spousal abuse is wrong, but… maybe I brought it on myself. Hitting people is wrong, but … sometimes children have to be smacked for their own good. No!
I’m no longer sure it even matters where morality comes from or whether it’s cultural or objective – what matters to me is consistent application between myself and others. If I refuse to blame my father for beating me because he was part of another generation and didn’t know better, then I don’t get to hate myself for being worthy of a beating as a child. If I forgive my boss for being a jerk, I must also forgive myself for letting him take advantage of me. There’s no virtue in blaming the world and claiming perfection for myself – that’s hypocrisy. And there’s no virtue in forgiving the world and cursing my own lack of self-mastery.
So instead of sinking into this morass of self-blame and inconsistency and suppressed emotion (because, let’s face it, you can’t suppress moral anger without also suppressing kindness and empathy), I’m seeing a new path open up to me. I can use reason and self-compassion to analyse my emotions as I feel them in the moment. I stay curious: what was I thinking just before I started to feel angry or sad? Is there some trauma in my youth that could have made me susceptible to such triggers, or is all the emotion rooted in this moment? Anger is like an antibody against corruption, against immoral behaviour. To suppress it is to deny all morality, objective or relative. But to express it is a dangerous responsibility. Just because I’m feeling anger it says nothing about where the fault lies! Whose issue is this, really? Mine? Or Theirs? Both? Or neither?
This is why reason is so vital in the pursuit of virtue. Irrational emotional outbursts are like tracer fire from a dead man slumped across his machine gun. If I don’t have the self-knowledge to understand the cause, I can’t possibly appropriately direct the emotion, and if I can’t direct the emotion, I’ll just hurt the innocent, or let the guilty escape unchallenged.
And here’s the key point: It’s not enough to simply feel the emotion. We have to express it, to own it. We have to say what we’re feeling. If someone makes me angry or sad or happy or joyful, neither of us learns anything about ourselves if I sit on my emotion and stew in it. Keeping silent is not the way to intimacy. Keeping silent is not the way to self-understanding, because we can’t get there all by ourselves. We need the curiosity of our friends to help us see into ourselves. And better still, we need the insights of the trained professionals – the therapists – to show us what we would otherwise spend a lifetime blinded by.
So while ‘reason leads to virtue leads to happiness’ seems so pithy and simplistic, it’s actually completely alien to my way of thinking over the last three decades, and could just be the stepping stone to a completely different approach to life for me. And, I hope, a happier, more intimate one, as I let my emotions live again after a lifetime of shutdown, suppression and self-attack.
Just one more thing, before I sign off. The people on FDR are just AMAZING. I’ve just never before encountered hard core rationalists and atheists who are so insightful, gentle, open and willing to practice what they preach. I love to go deep into my unconscious motivations, and can discuss the weirdnesses of the mind like a champion, but it is so rare to find a whole tribe of people willing to accompany me along the journey of self-discovery, and not only that, but curious about my every experience along the way. I love it.
‘When people lose compassion towards others, I know they’ve lost compassion towards themselves.” – Stefan Molyneux.