Jeremi

Hi again Wanderer, I had a lengthy response written out for you, but some kind of forum error made me lose my entire post so this version will unfortunately be far more hodge-podge than the first one. It sounds like in spite of the pain you feel now, this was a really good breakup for you. By good breakup I mean one in which many of your past illusions were shattered or at least reexamined and you can now do the work needed to begin to find the kind of relationships that will be compatible with your proclaimed virtues (not just romantically but with everybody in your life). The part you mentioned about him being babied by his mother and overall dependent on his parents came across as a big red flag for me and it might help to reflect on what kind of relationships (apart from their relationship with you) you would expect someone who you consider virtuous to have. My last ex used to say that she really couldn't stand her narcissistic, uncaring mother but on the other hand wanted to continue to have a strong relationship with her because "she's my mother and I love her". Thankfully that relationship didn't last long, but is it not amazing how quickly we abandon our rationale when emotional dependencies and sexual lust take over? Which is exactly why self-knowledge must come first so we don't get trapped repeating a lot of the same dysfunctional patterns we may have had in previous relationships. I understand the shame you might feel now but the more you reflect the more you may come to appreciate the clarity you've gained from this experience. I am certainly thankful now for what my last relationship taught me and I would just as soon throw a girl out on the street than ever succumb to the same type of emotional manipulation I experienced in the past. Anyway I'm happy to share more of my personal experiences if you want but this may not be the best place for it. I'd also seriously taken into consideration what Markus has said, he has courageously walked the path of self-knowledge as much as anyone I know.

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Yes don't be a Joan of Arc, she was burned at the stake after all.

Wanderer, I'm glad you have been able to reflect on this and gain some clarity. It goes without saying but I would caution you against selling yourself short again or settling for a guy that you can "mold" into what you want. It's one thing if both people are committed to personal growth in a mutual framework of honesty and integrity, it's quite another when one partner is trying to drag the other into greater virtue. Good luck!

Hi Wanderer, I'm just getting caught up in this thread and thought to offer my view if it is at all useful. I see your anger as completely justified, as it more or less seems his virtues were just more a function of how he wanted to be seen by you, rather than likely much of anything he actually holds as a real principle in his life. Still, I don't know enough about this man to say for sure, but it certainly seems to me like the initial impressions you might have formed about him were skewed not just by inexperience but the fact you found each other in a foreign country. In the same way that you might go out of your way to greet and converse with another American (or Canadian or whatever) that you happen to run across while submerged in a far off foreign country, this might have heightened your sense of attachment for him in the initial stage which otherwise might not have been the same back home. I concur with what previous posters have said now about taking the time to refine your criteria for the future and letting introspection be your guide moving forward. After all, how can you expect to trust a man with the most intimate details of who you are, if you have not yet taken the full time required to discover them yourself?

I don't think any IQ test would posit any kind of correlation with future economic output or success of any kind. That's not really the point of testing IQ, it is more just an assessment of analytical intelligence which may or may not be applied by that individual in the future. In general I think a lot of extremely high IQ people tend to end up working in rather mundane professions. Rick Rosner for example was a waiter in LA for many years before breaking into television writing. Christopher Langan was a club bouncer for decades. IQ is clearly not enough to forge the drive and purpose needed to achieve great things. But that is not to say it is not in itself a useful rubric for determining how well a person might understand advanced concepts and solve for complicated problems.

Why are you equating a wedding with marriage? Just go to a courthouse and sign the form. If she wants the wedding then that's a separate issue.

Sorry to hear that Violet. I can understand the temptation to want to heal these old wounds but it can only work when both parties are really truly ready. Let us know if you want to talk about this further.

Anytime someone has done great wrong to you, any apology after the fact needs to be approached with tremendous suspicion. This is difficult to do because you are deeply emotionally invested in him of course and you want to believe in the best. But look at his apology carefuly, this is a very, very common tactic for narcissists or others who lack real empathy: "I'm sorry for what I did but I had to do it because of x, y, z." Do you get that that is not an apology? It's what Stef likes to call a Bullshit Non-Apology. Real genuine apologies require a deep level of empathy, patience to listen and understand what the person went through when the offense was committed, no backing out or offerring excuses for it. True empathy would be to not let the ones you love drown, no matter the burden or cost. And further he knows the hell that you have gone through and continue to go through and that makes it all the more terrible. I don't know your brother, I am only trying to give you a point of view of objective skepticism. You have to ask yourself whenever long-absent people want to return to your life: "Am I able to disconnect from the emotional draw of the situation and view the facts objectively or am I so emotionally invested in this person returning in my life that I have to believe he/she has really changed?". If he really has learned some level of empathy for you, then you need to put that to the test immediately before going further. Get him on the phone again, talk about all your concerns and fears, talk about the pain you felt. See if he can handle it. Don't allow him to make excuses or try to censor you in any way. His reaction will tell you everything you need to know. I'll share with you this poem which has been deeply meaningful for me. I hope it resonates with you as well.

This is a topic that I've been pondering for a while now. It seems to be that often times the "Frontline" of attacks against most MRA related content and events has a core of rabid Male Feminists. These Men usually lob the "misogyny" bomb with great frequency and trumpet the "check mah priviledge" style of Feminist indoctrination. Perhaps so many Men are involved in the battle against Men because a large number of them were raised by single mothers, or (as in my case) present but weak Father figures. One also cannot ignore the liberal/leftist connection to Feminism which necessitates Men on the left preserving the "party line" so to speak. I wonder then what others think can be done in the short term to empower young male feminists to pull them out of the estrogen based Junta and into freedom for their mind and balls?

Good video but I felt it needed more focus on the militarization of police in America as that is another poignant issue that this shooting has brought the foreground.

Putting aside for the moment the issue of being inside the Lion's den so to speak, are you comfortable with being 27 and having no income or mounting work experience that would eventually leave to you achieving independence (at least not that I gathered in your post)? This I think is the more pressing question, since the issue is more than just you continuing to live there, but you continuing to live there with zero apparent mechanism for reversing that. You are 27, time is not your ally in this equation.

It does not even follow that what the majority of people choose would even logically benefit them. The majority votes quite often for things that harm them in the long term, or even short term.

I think given his recent death due to heroin overdose, it would be interesting to see a video on actors that overdose (i.e. Heath Ledger, Chris Farley, River Phoenix, Belushi, etc.). It may also be worth noting that Hoffman was a father of three. I personally have a hard time feeling too affected by deaths like these coming out of excess and a complete surrender to vice over virtue. Stef's take would be interesting in any case.

If you have the time, I think my dream post in this same board may offer some insights into your relationship with your father.

Where I give a backdrop to my self-knowledge journey so far I suppose my journey over the last few months has reached something of a full cinematic conclusion within my dreams, one of which I have not previously experienced in my life. I don't experience lucid dreams, and this one surely wouldn't qualify as one, but it was at least tangential to a lucid dream in its intensity. I should start by saying that I was raised in a life of fear. My parents through their carefully crafted manipulation put me through a gradual process of transformation from a curious and outgoing young child into a shell of a person by age 11 with a crippling panic of public interaction rendering me nearly catatonic when it came to simple tasks such as checking out at a cash register. I was changed countries 3 times, I was relocated through multiple states and cities, I changed schools nearly every year from age 4 to 12, having to adapt myself to each new public school prison and its corresponding juvenile inmates. Empathy and love never existed in my childhood, only from a few good teachers and older models did I learn any sense of a faint echo of what these things might be. My mom was and is a narcissist, she learned this from a childhood of poverty surrounded by 5 older sisters who would strangle the life out of her and dominate her will, something I assume she resolved to never allow to happen again in her adult life. Consequently she sought out to only find those she could exercise control over. Not a big surprise she became a staunch leftist. She was and is full of feminist venom and malice, though she would never say as much in words. To her I was the distant reflection of an alcoholic absent father who might leave again (which ultimately lead to the one thing she feared in any case). She was a master manipulator, she developed a method of affection and affection withdrawal that would leave me constantly seeking her good graces. If at any early age I did not demonstrate any consideration for the "error of my ways", if I was not apologetic, she would escalate the situation by increasing my punishments until I relented. My mom loved to echo socialist rhetoric in a manner, it was always for what was "good for the family as a whole", especially the last move we made at age 12 when I was finally starting to make friends at the school I was at in the suburbs of Chicago. The entire family moved for the last time to South Florida, for "the good of the family" which was in actuality nothing more than her desire to live in warmer climate, there was zero economic reason to move otherwise, my father did not change companies, he just transferred offices. She was also very fond of forcing me to apologize to her or my sister or anyone regardless of whether I agreed with her reasoning or not. This was the most vile brainwashing of all, having to affirm something I did not believe over and over. Consequently my inate intelligence which far surpassed anyone else in my family became subdued and I behaved aloof and brutish, like my father. My father was and is a shell of a human being. His childhood from what I can gather from uncles and hearsay, was incredibly violent. So violent that he refuses to discuss it. He was my mom's enforcer. When I was "misbehaving" she would send me to my room and then send my father late at night upon his return from work to give me the verdict and the threat of escalation if I continued disobeying. This threat dominated my entire childhood. He rarely hit me but it was enough to issue these threats in his aggressive tones to continuously keep me at bay. I wanted to have nothing to do with him and really despised him as a person, his cowardice disgusted me to my soul, but I did not know to what degree I felt this until recently. He enjoyed humiliating me at public gatherings he had with office workers or his mom's friends. Always cracking a joke at my expense when I felt the most vulnerable as a forced social introvert; the betrayal would tear at me and make me feel like I could die. On one occassion I was dreading giving a speech in class that had been offered as an extra credit opportunity, and I decided to seek his advice the night before to see if he'd reassure me it would be ok to not do it. It was an extreme rarity for me to seek any sort of counsel from my father but I was so terrified of the speech I thought I might convince my father it would not be necessary. He responded with rage at the idea of abandoning the chance to marginally improve my grade and when I told him I didn't want to do it and I would not do it, he threw the chair he was sitting in at me. It was a plastic lawn chair and didn't really hurt physically, but the sense of sociopathy and betrayal of confidence echoes within me to this day. At times I would feel so exasparated and hopeless from the complete lack of understanding of my feelings I would explode with rage within my room lashing out violently at any inanimate object I could find until my mom would knock on the door and threaten to make things worse for me if I didn't stop, and so I learned that I must resign to be a slave and live passively within that existence or else not survive. Even at the age of 13 they managed to subdue me; the first overwhelming passionate rebeliousness when puberty was hitting me hard and all my understanding of the world was being flipped and inverted. The threat of sending me off to military school was sufficient in that case. Is it not bizarre and yet completely logical how that which deeply repulses us the most as a child is what we come to depend on the most to exist? At age 20, still living with my parents, I developed severe and devastating panic attacks. They would often last entire nights and leave me in complete fear for my life and drained and exhausted once they had passed. Eventually I went on antidepressants for it and subdued all these feelings for a time, but I had to increase dosage as time went on to continue to subdue the feelings. After a time the antidepressants had me so sick I could barely digest food or get out of bed. It wasn't until later on when I had changed my dietary habits, quit the meds, and left my parents' home that I began to slowly recover. Unfortunately, that was not until 26 years old. I was somehow stuck within the cycle of abuse and dependency at home, I became the same as a prisoner who had grown too institutionalized to exist outside in the real world on his own. I went to the local university though I had plenty of opportunity to leave. I took trips to Europe to try to escape them with some faint dream of finding a job with my EU passport and never coming back. Inevitably I would come home after only a week suffering from a depressive meltdown of loneliness. My mom had bred dependency in me to the point I was a cripple without her presence. I did not keep romantic relationships and my parents had no problem with the state I was in so long as I remained submissive. I could not talk to strangers or even make a phone call to a business without difficulty. In time I managed to become more independent but it was with great difficulty. Fast forward to two years ago, I discovered FDR and began to examine very critically everything I'd been taught. After reading On Truth and RTR I began to seriously question the falsities behind my family, but it still took me a great deal of time to unravel just how deep the trench was. 6 months ago I began a relationship with a girl who was a self-proclaimed libertarian. In the initial period I told my mom about her and she immediately went snooping on her facebook profile to try to dissect her, subsequently telling me she might potentially be trying to use me or kidnap me. She was actively trying to sabotage my relationship before it had began and this from an entirely different state. Incidently she has repeated this pattern in the past and yet I allowed for her abuse and manipulatition to continue in order not to upset her. Unfortunately my ex was not at all what I had initially expected (though for entirely different reasons than my mom's initial paranoias), demonstrating serious irrationality steming from a fire and brimstone strict Christian childhood. When things inevitably broke apart between us I realized at the time I had really just been trying to replace the affections of my mom with someone else, not actually solving any of my own problems or exploring self knowledge in any meaningful way (in spite of the material I had read up until then). For the first time in my life I was honest about what I wanted out of my relationship with my mother: Nothing. I told her I didn't want to talk to her anymore and blocked her everywhere I had her as a contact online. She of course sent me a pitiful narcissistic email about how I spent my whole life trying to run away from her in spite of her best efforts. It's important to note here that I did not defoo my father. At that time I was so angry with my mother and the realization of how deep her manipulation was, that I felt some pity for my father as this empty shell who was being driven around by her for decades. I had the naive view that a sense of empathy still might inhabit my father and upon a confrontation he might feel remorse for the past reign of fear and bullying and humiliation he had exposed me to. So I kept communication with on a very casual basis by phone only discussing the bare minimum until he came into town last week. Where I confront my father and all illusions are destroyed The entire night before my father and I were scheduled to meet outside a Panera Bread near my house I was filled with trepidation and enormous fear. I felt as if I might arrive at the meeting and die right there on the spot, such was the intensity of the fear. When I got there he was sitting in a table outside the restaurant with the family dog, a tiny perfectly groomed Maltese who my mom had molded into her perfect specimen of affection and loyalty.. He'd dropped off my mom beforehand at a mall to go shopping, thankfully she had no desire to see me either. I was immediately emotional and it took me at least 5 minutes stewing in fear to finally mutter anything of significance. Finally I broke loose. "Do you know the difference between sympathy and empathy?" "Yes, of course," he said. "Well, I have been thinking about it for a while, and I don't think there was ever any empathy in our family" My father rolled his eyes, "Why does this matter, why do you bring this up?" "Because there was never any consideration for my feelings, no curiosity as to why I felt a certain way, why I was acting out, nothing" "I wasn't a psychologist, I was your father, I wasn't responsible for you feelings, only for raising you" (wtf?!) "So you mean that my feelings didn't matter to you, you had no interest in learning about them?" He dodged the question, "when you turned 12 years old you started to despise us and think we were terrible people, I have no idea why you decided we were terrible people but I think we were very leniet with you considering your attitude in that time." I get indignant, "did you never stop to think how destructive it is to change a kid from a school every year for 8 years in a row, did you not think it would have been helpful to understand what I felt about that?" "So what if you changed schools? I don't see a problem with that. My responsibility was to be your father not to fix the whole family around your feelings." "Was it your responsibility also to humiliate and make fun of me at your private parties with friends, to throw a chair at me when I came for your advise the one damn time I had the guts to do so?" He laughed nervously and pathetically. "It's not funny, I said, half in tears. My father became all of a sudden tranquil and with a very seemingly introspective tone he blurted out the following abomination, "you're right about me throwing a chair at you, that wasn't right, but let me tell you, in that time I really feel that I should have hit you more to teach you respect back then, you were out of control and we let you get away with it then." My illusions all suddenly ended with that exact moment. How could I possibly still be afraid of this pathetic human being? He'd not only not shown any empathy but actually doubled down in spite of seeing me in clear emotional pain when expressing these things. "Ok," I said. "I see that you don't get it." I immediately stopped feeling overwhelmed and calmed down pretty quickly. I resolved to reserve my inevitable and unavoidable defoo with him for some other time and continued with some petty small talk for a few minutes more, which was all I could stomach before getting the hell out of there. It is amazing how greatly illusion and mythology can obscure the truth about relationships. In spite of all the self knowledge work I had already done, in spite of all the reading and journaling and exploring of some painful subdued emotions, I had not been aware of how disjointed from a logical perception of reality I was when it came to my father. I realized that my father for me had just been a sort of last chance desperation for me to salvage and reconcile my past. I had known all along that my father was completely unfeeling, but I simply hadn't been ready to accept it. The fear was too enormous and crippling. After the encounter I had very little fear left of him at all, it was all relegated to remnants of past fear and emotion. It was within this context that I had an incredibly powerful and vivid dream only 10 days later. A true gem of a dream. Where the dream happens and I discover my rage I was in the kitchen inside a strange home I did not recognize. I was sitting at a table apparently waiting for dinner to be prepared while my father and mother were actively cooking. My dad was holding a knife and actively cutting away at something imperceptible. I apparently muttered a comment which irritated my dad and he feigned a motion with the knife in his hand as if he was going to throw it at me. This seemed to me to be something I had seen him do before but I could not place it. I immediately reacted with unusual anger and blurted out "Why don't you try it you fucking coward?!" Incredibly, this enraged him so much that he actually threw the knife at me but missed. I was initially shocked and appalled that he'd gone through with it but did not let my anger subside, "I can't believe you did that, I'm calling the police immediately!" Suddenly my father and mother seemed to grow panicked at the realization of what he had done and my father started throwing other knives at me. As I dodged them I ran out of the kitchen and up a flight of stairs I did not recognize to the second floor. I ran into a room and in a panic tried to lock the door behind me but it would not lock. I looked around the room for something to use to defend myself and found lying next to the bed my warhammer. A warhammer is an enormous medieval hammer used for piercing and brutal blunting of armor piercing. In an era where swords would not penetrate armor with ease, the warhammer was devastating. This was the only object in the entire dream that I recognized, because I own one in real life and also keep it next to my bed as a home defense tool. As soon as I grabbed the warhammer my fear of dying ended, I felt suddenly empowered and ready to face the attack. I discovered my rage. My father burst into the room with a baseball bat and swung at me but missed. I walloped him across the torso hard with the blunt end of the hammer and he went down. I then ran from that room onto a balcony and resolved to jump but just then my mom popped out from behind me and started firing a cross bow. She missed me and I turned and knocked the crossbow away from her as she was loading another arrow and pushed her away. I then finally jumped out of the window and began running as I hit the ground. Decades of fear began to fade away. I woke up calm and relaxed, though tired. As I type this I am smiling and still reflecting upon the complete relief at finally escalating to the point I always longed for in past confrontations before the pang of regret would hit, the inevitable realization that the threat to my life would be too much to bare, the resignation to slavery. No longer will I be slave to ghosts or the living dead. I know now I am so much stronger than they, that their decades of abuse could not enslave me. I am free. The warhammer is still propped up next to my bed and it will stay there.

"Change we can believe in"

I sympathize with your disenchantment in modern cinema. The reality is that modern movies are absolute garbage in general with rare exception. They focus very little on narrative and mostly on cheap effects and mediocre to poor acting. I'd suggest if you want to see what movies can really do then start watching some classics from the early age of cinema. You really are missing out on a tremendous amount of deep and profound stories, dynamic acting and characters that communicate a wide range of emotions and ideas. One of my favorites is "On the Waterfront" with Marlon Brando, an exceptionally acted movie with strong character development throughout.

This is what convinces me you're just trying to avoid confronting my questions. I never said you didn't understand what slavery was. I am quite confident you know what slavery is in the "classical" definition of the word otherwise I'd scarcely expect you to be able to tie your shoes, much less participate in this forum, the problem is you extending that definition where it does not apply.

I don't say this to disparage you in any way, but I get the impression you don't know what ad-hominem is. Ad-hominem involves deconstructing someone's argument by attacking their person or character, I am not sure where you see that I in any way did that to you? I was merely expressing my irritation with what I saw as an unwarranted redefiniton of slavery. Perhaps I had an emotional reaction to the claim given the incredible harm real slavery has done and still does today, but an accusation of ad-hominem does not follow. It's also false that I said you had a character flaw, I was simply conjecturing upon a larger trend based upon personal experience amongst groups that advocate non-monetary societies where this feeling of "slavery to abundance" might arise form. By the way, have you have listened to many podcasts Stef makes on the subject of why people become collectivists/ancoms/etc.? Because he makes the same conjecture. If I'm wrong that your view of slavery does not arise from an abundance of choices then you should make your own argument, not try to claim my conjecture is an ad-hominem.

What conversation? You didn't contest any points I made. Where is the ad-hominem? Why are you so resistant to answering the question?

It's really disappointing that you completely ignored my point and are just reiterating the same thing over again. I'd like to know if you think the "work or death = slavery" line applies to a non-industrialized primitive culture? Again, by an overwhelming majority most of them had a tremendous amount of leisure time compared to industrialized society. If you accept that it is the height of absurdity to try to convince an Inuit tribesman he is a slave to his subsistence work, then you must recognize that your propagandistic redefinition of slavery in the modern world arises from a higher threshold of choices. What it sounds like to me is that you are really saying that you feel like a slave to an abundance of preferences. That your "slavery feeling" arises when the possibilities of modern society make primitive subsistence no longer preferible. It's exactly this overabudance of preferences that constantly accumulates into each subsequent generation that makes a resource based economy completely impossible. Does this society claim to attempt to develop an understanding of what a general preferred form of healthcare should be? I personally resent that implication because I would be dead right now had I not pursued alternative forms of nutrition/medicine on my own. Can this society claim to have any understanding of what is universally preferible in terms of goods and services? Then you can proceed to abandon atheism as you've created a new omnipotent god and religion.

No offense but I find your definition of slavery incredibly insulting to an actual definition of slavery which is still to some degree occurring right now in Third World countries. By your reasoning you would go to a primitive tribe removed from the Industrialized world and present the argument like this: "Fools! Don't you see that your hunting and fishing for subsistence is no choice at all, how are you any different than slaves?" Of course, given the anthropological prehistoric and contemporary record of hunter-gatherer tribes demonstrate that leisure time was overwhelmingly greater in their societies than ours, your argument would come across as absurd. If you then try to claim that this "work slavery" only appears on Earth at the moment we industrialize and adapt ourselves to technology, then your redefiniton of slavery is basically pointless. I don't understand this feeling like a slave because you can be in Timbuktu within half a day or surf the internet to look up endless information online that would've required someone in Ancient Europe traveling for weeks to reach the library of Alexandria which even for its time would only have a petty amount of archived information of the era. I think the only reason Zeitgeisters and especially Anarcho Coms (I used to be one) feel that market interactions fundamentally lead to slavery (even when completely voluntary) is because their past and present relationships make them feel like slaves. I certainly experienced this in overwhelming fashion in my interactions in the An-com community 5-6 years ago. I literally did not know a single person who did not feel at that time as if some aspect of their personal lives and families were a form of prison, so the way to resolve this problem was always to find the fault in the voluntary interactions in the market, voluntarism that they never ever had themselves since they were infants. The point about creativity is a total non-sequiter, the reason we have an abundance of art and music now is because of the leisure time created by technology within the free market.

Never have I heard such grandiose locution equate to so little. Frankly, the first Zeitgeist debate was far superior to this, at least that guy did not engage in multiple argumentative fallacies coated in advanced vocabulary. I'd like to suggest to Stef that he stop fielding debates that don't have moderation because the outcome is really a tremendous aggravation to both him and the listener in a lot of cases. Also, he needs to stop commencing debates by defending his position and instead insist on making his opponent defend his. So Peter has demonstrated he refuses to draw a distinction between the free market and what we have now inspite of all evidence to the contrary. Well, then arguing in that realm over and over is pointless, instead go on the offensive and make Peter justify his system and try to have him square the circle of excluding force and involuntary participation in his long hard road towards Star Trek society.

Since Stef has recently lambasted Matt Damon's latest work Elysium, I think it would be interesting to do the long awaited review of one of the movies early in his career that he did get right. I know Stef is a big fan of this movie as I'm sure many of us are and a review on it would surely be insightful even if belated.