aleles

Hi everyone. I'd like to share my story to get some help understanding roots of my problems and ways to improve.My parents divorced when I was 3 and I spent my childhood with my mom. I never asked much about what happened, I think I was a little bit afraid to ask, but I'm catching up now. My parents live in Russia and I will go there soon to talk in person. My mom said that my father didn't want to spend time with me. He said that he'll do the "knowledge transfer" when I get older and until then it's my mom's job to take care of me. He has been married 4 times and has 3 children, all from different wives. I am his first one. My mom is always bitter speaking about my father calling him stingy. He showed up a few months after the divorce in the middle of a hot summer and took the fridge that he bought before the marriage. It was really difficult to buy major household items like a fridge or furniture in the Soviet Union. You had to know someone or get on the waiting list which was booked months and months ahead.I remember having lots of fun playing with my mom. She would go far and beyond as we dug and crawl snow tunnels and did other fun active things. We didn't have much money, so she had to work a second job at night cleaning streets, which I enjoyed helping her doing especially shoveling snow in winter time. My mom had another relationship when I was in middle school. We had good time with the guy once in a while, but he had drinking periods. It got worse over a few years and he ended up beating my mom and leaving. She got married again about 15 years later and she and her new husband look happy now.I don't remember much aggression in my childhood. I was spanked a couple of times and yelled at rarely. Although, I did have to stand in a corner quite a few times "to think about my behavior" which typically lasted 10-15 minutes until I gathered enough courage to go to my mom and apologize which always felt humiliating. Hugging, kissing, saying "I love you" was mostly missing from our relationship. My grandparents who I had a good time with didn't express love to each other neither. I remember feeling anxiety about touching someone even as a social interaction all the way till my first romantic relationships that I think fixed it. I still feel unease to say "I love you".My romantic relationships seem all follow the same pattern. I fall in love and I'm really passionate during this initial period that lasts for a few months. Then it cools down and I just go with it. I don't feel like maintaining exclusivity is necessary or desirable. My hypocrisy is that I wouldn't offer my girlfriend polyamory, I would just secretly cheat on her. In my inner dialog I would excuse it as a form of self pleasure without the moral context, lying somewhere in between of playing sports and jacking off.I got married 6 years ago and this relationship repeated the pattern. I think it lasted that long because we spent lots of time being long distance due to visa regulations for studying/working abroad. We would see each other rarely, but every time we meet was fresh and exciting after several months of separation. During the periods we lived together we enjoyed doing things, but we would also argue often. A few times I thought about ending the relationship. I was selfish, hypocritical, and tried to dominate her. She wanted me to be more open and share my feelings, but I didn't know how. She was getting older and wanted kids. Something scared me in that idea. It could be the responsibility, uncertainty in our visa situation or lack of a deep and meaningful relationship. She asked me several times and I would simply say I am not ready for kids yet. We tortured each other. I kept dragging the relationship, she would poison it with frustration. When we were apart I sometimes had sex or short relationships with random girls. When she moved to the US she left everything behind to be with me, career, friends, family. I feel so much pain writing how I treated her.About a year ago I found FDR and it changed my life. After months of listening I started applying RTR. First time when I wanted to tell my wife what I feel at the moment when we were arguing, I got so anxious, I couldn't speak. When I eventually told her, she got it right away. She expressed sympathy with me, we stopped arguing and started exploring our feelings. It's been a few months and we have never argued since then, except for one heated argument about philosophy that we resolved speaking what we felt. It has been the greatest time in my life! We spent hours and days cuddling and talking about all things in the world catching up on 8 years of emptiness. Then it struck me, I have to tell her about my past cheating. I felt terrified and I couldn't share my fear with her. At first I wanted to forget the past and enjoy the new life, but I couldn't. It started bothering me more and more. I became bitter inside and started attacking every antirational post on facebook. The past weekend we had a lovely time together biking and chatting about philosophy, it was the last drop. I was so much in love and wanting children, but this black hole was sucking me from inside. I told her that I have a dark secret and I can't live any longer not being completely honest with her. The fear paralyzed me and I couldn't say a word for a while, she looked at me and guessed it "You have another woman". "I had several" I replied. She broke down in tears and pain.She wants to divorce. "You are a monster that builds trust and hits right in the core. You don't have emotions. A lost unhappy person. I don't believe you can change, you are running your RTR experiment on me." she cried. I don't know now if she really understood the philosophy we talked about last few months or she just went along asking questions. I haven't seen her for a few days since.What's wrong with me? Do I lack an ability to bond? Did I not have an example of a true romantic relationship? Was the pain worth the truth? Could or should this marriage be saved?

Thanks Kevin. Can you please post more info about Neitzsche talking about Socrates?Stef introduces this theory in the two podcasts on Happiness, however I am looking for a more formal reasoning.For example, if someone defines happiness as having a house, a family and having a good time with their friends without thinking about philosophy, governments etc. This eliminates them from appealing to much reason and virtue and still be happy. How can we prove that happiness just like health is not subjective? Can we refer to psychology to measure some objective characteristics to determine the level of happiness just like we can do with health? If I want to rob a bank, I can use use reason to prepare a sophisticated plan. Then I can use reason for vice, right? I don't think you can by completely happy with total uncertainty. This is the reason why kids learn the physical reality with an amazing speed. Imagine a universe that is not consistent which is "total uncertainty", your monitor randomly turns into a monkey that punches you in the face. When we are a few years old we already have a very good theory describing the behavior of the surrounding reality to the degree with interact with it. We also don't need to have the complete theory, Newtonian physics is sufficient if that is the degree we interact with reality.

I'd like to start a new topic even though I found one with the wrong order of the three words that I think matters because of the meaning of the equal sign here. http://board.freedomainradio.com/topic/33098-reason-happiness-virtue/?hl=%2Breason+%2Bvirtue+%2Bhappiness I think I heard in one podcast Stef saying a different version "Reason + Virtue = Happiness", but I can't find it. How do you understand this? Reason leads to virtue which leads to happiness. Is this a more accurate version? Is it possible to use reason for vice? What are the definitions of reason, virtue or happiness? Is it possible to prove any part of this statement? Here are my thoughts on why reason (or truth) is at least necessary (may be not sufficient) for happiness. A person who has a valid theory describing the surrounding physical reality is happier than the person who doesn't have such theory or has an invalid theory. The reason for this is that if your theory is invalid (or you don't have one) then your expectations on how the reality behaves are inaccurate. You don't know what to expect or the reality regularly produces not what you expect. Uncertainty could be dangerous and also leads to frustration making you less happy. For example, people not knowing the theory of weather may pray and offer sacrifices and still have gods sending them bad weather. People having an invalid theory of government may often get upset about the political process and poor economic outcomes.

Ryan, thank you for the podcast. I highly recommend it to anyone interested in polyamory and the childhood trauma traits that may lead someone to it. Stef as always shows his amazing ability to pinpoint such childhood experiences. Not to spoil the podcast, I'll share one statement. If your parents had a deep and happy monogamous relationship that you loved and you want to have a happy relationship, why would you do something near opposite? tjt, here's a short clean summary of UPB that I really like http://www.economicsjunkie.com/universally-preferable-behaviour-a-rational-proof-of-secular-ethics/

@tjt and Wesley I agree. The reason I put theoretically/practically in the question is it feels like in theory there can be a network of people having romantic RTR, but in practice, like you outlined, there are numerous complications. We also need to account for the fact that the number of people who know/practice RTR is limited, so when a new person is added to the network he or she would need to learn and accept the fundamental principles. What do you guys think about a scenario, mathematically speaking, with non equal weight on the nodes in such romantic RTR network? For example, the main two partners maintain a deep RTR and they want to bring a third person with whom the relationship could be anywhere from occasional dates for sexual pleasure (similar to bringing a sexual toy) to a more serious near RTR. I wonder if it's even possible to bring a person as a sexual toy. I feel like if you experience the beauty of a romantic RTR, then you won't accept anything less. You either won't have a desire to bring the third person, or you will want to know them as much as possible and establish an RTR before turning it romantic. As far as UPB, if all relationships are voluntary, it shouldn't have a moral context. I don't think it even falls in the category of aesthetics since polygamy/monogamy is not a universal preference. Thanks Ryan, I'll listen to the podcast and post here.

http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-04-30/the-people-have-voted-and-nasas-new-spacesuit-design-is-hot

Is it possible theoretically and/or practically to have a deep sincere meaningful romantic relationship with your partner which is an open relationship at the same time? If yes, what would the outer relationships be like? Can they also follow RTR principles and be honest and meaningful?

I think I know what you are talking about. Some people like to feel allegiance to a special club and to be proud of it, it's like patriotism. I like open source myself, but historically my commercial projects tend to be more Microsoft oriented.

Haha, yes, exactly, bringing pink back to men's fashion! I agree, improving communication methods should be one of the top priorities with the focus on practice. Stef has some good info on it here and there, but I think it's not enough (or I haven't got to it yet). People who find libertarian ideas get excited and eager to talk about with everyone. Here's where they get shut down. I can think of numerous cases that I could have presented much better with the "curious" approach rather than "this is all state propaganda and here's how the reality works". In Russia we didn't have Computer Science as a separate major, it was a specialty of the Math major. I graduated with a degree in Math but in reality it was a Computer Science degree with an extensive math background. Currently I mostly work with asp.net mvc, but I spent a few years with c++ and java in the past. What kind of consulting do you do? Do you work as a contractor?

Thanks Tony! I agree, all parties are fundamentally similar in their methodology. They also claim to have similar end goals such as improving the standard of living, growing the economy etc, however they often offer completely opposite solutions to achieve the same goals. What baffled me is that it feels like a lot of people believe that opposite solutions can still lead to the same goal. They think that none of the solutions is objectively false and they don't question how opposite solutions officially coexist and attract great numbers of supporters. One challenge that I particularly enjoy is to have empathy for all people and don't slide into bitterness thinking that we are surrounded by morally corrupt idiots who don't understand basic logic. I had the best success in conversion so far with my wife (lucky me). Out of my few close and 500 online friends I found some who respond well to libertarian ideas. Another challenge is to maintain a relationship with business partners. I'm excited to join the board!

I'm interested in how others do it in any language. It'd be a good example on how to approach this massive task of starting FDR in a new language. I assume mentioning FDR when you podcast closely to the original Stef's ideas would suffice... along with sending all bitcoin donations to Stef

Thanks guys! I'd like to translate FDR materials to Russian and I agree it will take as many years as it took to create it, so the books or some other synopsis of the core ideas would be a good start. I see a "Best of FDR list" here http://emergingrenaissance.wordpress.com/best-of-freedomain-radio/ Is this the only such "best hits" list? Is there a torrent to download them all at once? I haven't decided on the form yet. I am leaning more towards a resource with the content adapted to the Russian history, politics, news etc. Do you know what would be the proper way to reference FDR if for example I produce a podcast in Russian based on Stefan's ideas with my own thoughts added?

Hi all, Are there any FDR resources that are translated/adapted to other languages? Or maybe there are friendly international groups that mirror the content? I am specifically interested in the Russian market. For best results it would require dubbed or native videos (no CC) and VK (Russian Facebook) for social promotion. Thanks, Alex

Hi everyone! I couldn't pick one location so listed all three I spend most of my time in. I'm an entrepreneur, software engineer, co-founder of a few start-ups and kiteboarder! I have gone from almost no interest in politics to "why there is so much corruption in Russia and people are protesting" to "hmm... it's not much better even in the US" to Libertarianism. Then I read "Everyday Anarchy" and it all clicked! Right now I'm going at 1.5-1.7 speed through Stefan's podcasts from the beginning hoping to catch up asap and also applying the new knowledge to my relationships. The results are fascinating! Being a mathematician I was always baffled why there are so many political ideologies, parties and movements that almost all claim the same final goal, but propose opposite solutions. Feel free to ask me anything, I hope to meet many interesting people here. Cheers! Alex PS My phone looks like this now, creepy lol