Spenc

What do you guys think of [usually hypocritical] judgmentalism? Like a driver who isn't paying attention t the lights when they turn green and you sit behind him and get really upset.....even though you have done the same thing countless times. Or someone who didn't pick up dog poop in the park, even though you know you've not bothered to scoop the poop several times when it was late and you were tired or it was raining..... I feel like I have a defense of denying compassion or curiosity to strangers in an effort to shut off my curiosity and compassion towards myself. I'm not sure that this is the truth of the matter though and wonder if other people here have different theories as to why they fall into these automatic thoughts.

Elizbaeth, I just wanted to point something out that maybe hadn't come up (I read a lot of the thread but not every long post)....... What happens when boys (people in general) become teenagers/reach sexual maturity? They will lose interest in their parents and begin to emphasize peer-bond relationships and courtship......How do you feel at the prospect of your boys growing up and fleeing the nest more and more? I wonder what the development of the bond you have with them now was like for you emotionally. I remember reading another post by you that they aren't very old and that you breastfed, correct? So you may be feeling some pain at the thought of that bond loosening, and protecting yourself from feelings of rejection and isolation by instead invoking judgmental expectations on your sons. Coupled with some of the things you mentioned about your family history, there's a lot of material there to see why sexuality might have been the easy scapegoat--your sexually successful but loser-y dad, prudish but ambivalent mother, christian and social status upbringing, etc......there's a lot to work with there.......

what is your actual experience of being 'a blank page'? is your mind silent and empty? spinning in circles that lead you to nothing useful? what actually happens and what type of response do you normally have toward yourself once this blank page experience does happen?

there is someone in the community working on this type of idea presently. if you join the Discord server, you'll surely interact with him.

" All therapy has ever done is to break me down and the only way for me to survive is to close myself up again. " When did you reach your low point through therapy? How many times have you tried? What rational analysis did you come up with that a) caused you to close up, b) to remain closed up, c) to not try again since your last effort? by rational analysis, i mean like a list of pros and cons or cost-benefit analysis that you ran through in your mind to justify or determine your choices for closing up and retreating form therapy.

Sorry if I'm just kind of jumping in with things that were already discussed, but once all the text block quoting started, it got hard on my eyes to try to follow everything so I'm jumping in............. 1. Have you read the book "Real-Time Relationships" by Stef? (or "On Truth"?) If so, have you shared RTR with your husband and discussed it together? 2. I am relistening to older shows and currently just finished 1106, which was a group discussion about striving for total honesty (with the self, primarily. With others as they can be trusted.) Now, if you've read Real-Time Relationships, you would understand I am talking about honesty of your feelings in the moment, not 'speaking your mind' in sense of dispensing conclusions at people, which are usually a way of acting out one's emotions instead of honestly expressing them. That would also include not censoring yourself. i.e. if you want to say something, but decide to remain silent, you are not practicing RTR, or honesty in the moment. So with that in mind.....what percentage of your time interacting with your husband would you say you are being honest in expressing yourself openly and actively in the moment? (Or being curious in the achievement of his own honest expression) What percentage of the time would you say you are being honest with yourself? i.e. do you catch yourself in an emotion and become curious about it instead of forming conclusions and acting out or suppressing? P.S. Real-time Relationshis is free adiobook: https://freedomainradio.com/free/ I could also direct you to some podcasts from when it was released that would help you discuss it in depth with your husband and understand the challenges and some techniques or methods to get past them.

I think you wrote a perfectly good letter. Remember that if you have closure and are ready to extract yourself from the FOO, then your actions and statements should be in line with achieving that goal. You're done trying to communicate with them, explain your perspective, etc. so your letter is ONLY to get you out with as little blowback as possible, right? I think you've done a good job of this. 1. You've given the the opportunity to place the blame on you: YOU 'have fallen back into old patterns'. 2. You've given them indication in the past that they can just come back in 6 months in the future, and now you're calling it a 'break' and that you will contact them at some indeterminate time in the future when you;re ready. So you've bought yourself months of freedom to get yourself fully away. 3. You seem to be a young man, so you should have a relatively easy time moving, getting a new phone number, switching e-mails, etc. as you see fit to make it so they have no means to waltz back in 6 months expecting to see you again I hope it's all going to plan since you posted

It's fascinating that OP had some anxiousness towards a potential conflict with his partner.....so he came to talk to the FDR board about it. OP, go talk to your partner about this! Also, I may be taking this out of context but "has to be my genes" seems to be an ultimatum to me. I think this may be the source of your stress around opening up this conversation.

These two statements contradict each other. My whole point is that you have no evidence that people are persuaded by you and seem to believe that people view you in quite the opposite light. So if that is the case, that means your pursuit of these conversations/debates is irrational. Now if you just say that you enjoy it and it 'turns you on' or however you worded it, fine. Have that as a hobby if you want, although to me that indicates some pathology. But as soon as you state a motive of changing minds and correcting errors, etc. you are behaving irrationally because your own feedback tells you that you are not achieving those goals.

I would say unless you have some unique record of being super-persuasive in these situations then you are behaving irrational, and thus your being fueled by the irrationality of others and your drive to point it out to others is projection and delightfully ironic of course. Why do you think you have a drive to push back at irrational people or irrational assertions? Did you face a lot of invalid truth/moral statements as a child that you were not free to question, criticize or correct? If yes, how did you feel in these situations?

Hi I enjoy watching your videos. I looked around Self Knowledge Daily and Youtube for a bit of background on your education and experience. Your Youtube bio lists some of your background, but I was wondering if you could expand a bit more on that. For example, I'm not familiar with the term Certified Peer Specialist and what that actually means in practice. More specifically, your education and experience in the topic of narcissism since that is your main topic you speak on...

Closure is about certainty, not forgiveness. So it seems like you are pretty certain this woman is not good for you, so your continued thinking, stalking, etc. with this woman are not to do with her or your relationship with her. Most likely you are uncertain and unclear about yourself in some way. You have not developed the knowledge and wisdom that would lead you to a better (or good) relationship, so you stay fixated on this horrible relationship because it is safer for you to stay fixated on her than to throw yourself into the deep end on some new horrible woman where you lack the conscious knowledge that she isn't right. That's my theory anyways. Explore your own self and your family patterns and try to find wisdom there and establish certainty and closure from there. Again, without closure about yourself, you;re never going to find this great future wife. So current YOU cannot fathom closure about your past behaviours, you still judge yourself on these actions and thus you imagine all other people would be right to as well. And until you gain the wisdom and closure to get past it yourself, other people will see that you are not past it and they will judge you. So that is why you cannot fathom being honest about yourself in the future, because future YOU is the only version of yourself that can even fathom honesty and closure

Wat does your son think of going to school and sitting through each class and respecting his teachers and elders and parents all the time? What does your son think of sitting through church services and being stuck in religious instruction and activities? How does he like doing soccer practice and having multiple weekly commitments on his limited free time? If he's used to being forced to do things that are boring or undesired on a regular basis, and being compliant, I wouldn't say it is an inconsistent behaviour for him to play with Bob even though Bob is a bit of an asshole.

Hey, I sometimes have the same thoughts about myself. In my previous relationship, there were moments or even certain days where I felt truly 'in love' with her. But it wasn't a persisting feeling at all. ANd like you, I find myself to be a generally pretty content person. I don't stress on things too much, I have a generally positive or optimistic outlook. So I don't get great spikes in excitement or happiness. One thing I've realized abut myself is that my family had mechanisms to erase enthusiasm. Enthusiasm and excitement, when i was a kid, was often framed as "being silly", "seeking attention", and otherwise treated as if i was wasting people's time to draw their attention or embarrassing myself, or something like that. I'm wondering if this connects with you at all? Also, you 'accepted', at least for argument's sake, the definition of love as "involuntary response to virtue from a virtuous person". Thus, you have defined both yourself and your girlfriend as virtuous people. Do you mind stating your case for these conclusions? What virtues do you both possess? And finally, in the relationship with my ex-girlfriend I had told her I love her when I was feeling it at the high moments, but when I was kind of stuck in the baseline contentedness of my persistent pleasant state, I also professed feelings of love for her, which I'm not sure was a right and honest way to express myself, given that I was not in touch with the same high moments any longer. Which isn't to say you need to be bursting with joy and pleasure and love 24/7 in order to profess love for someone, but perhaps fleeting moments of a loving feeling don't equate to a true persisting love for someone. I'm curious, how do you describe your feelings to your girlfriend? Do you tell her you love her? Does she tell you she loves you? Have you discussed with her what you have told us about yourself here in your post? What level of honesty and integrity about your feelings have you achieved with her in this regard? I hope some of this is helpful for you to delve deeper.

One thought that was occurring to me earlier today--I was serving a client who had previously created various difficulties for me and my staff--was that people will try to project into you their own emotions. So I obviously have no evidence to the contrary, but I find it interesting that you just assume the other person in your story was unaffected after your exchange, whereas you were still stewing for an hour after. It occurs to me that this person is so vain and insecure that they were going to be perpetually re-experiencing the embarrassment of their inarticulacy that they were similarly trying to produce a negative feeling for you that would fester for a long time as well. In regards to Drew's experience, I am thinking an apt metaphor might be like a snowball, where it has been accumulating for a long time and then a single roll further adds one thin layer more of snow on the surface which draws your attention and conceals the greater mass of snow beneath that has been packed together for a long long time. You look at this hefty mass and the only part visible is the surface layer which is overall insignificant to the full mass.

i actually just listened to an interesting podcast Stef did from his car in Volume 2 (about FDR400 timeframe). he talked about how people with principles aren't concerned by minutiae, whereas people without principles are slaves to minutiae. Like, if we raise the minimum wage, is $1 too little, is $5 too much? what about the student minimum, how should that be changed in comparison to the regular minimum wage? Do you phase it in over 2-3 years or just set a January 1 in-effect date? So much bullshit to exhaust yourself with, but if you have a free market principle you don't have to argue about $5 being too high and trying to prove that $3.50 is the optimal increase with intensely detailed graphs and projections.

which are those, and how are they distinct from the principles of the first 200?

Sorry I think the bold lettering caused a confusion as to what information I was seeking. It was RichardY who bolded "concern trolling" and that was not the part I was asking for clarification on. I was actually wanting him to clarify the first part of the post about having a footbal/soccer league/clan system. I have no idea what he's talking about with that comment.

Could you clarify this? I have no idea what you're referring to.

Like I said, if the goal is to equip people with the ammo to defend against the lies of the mainstream media or something like that, it is useless by Stef's own previous core assertion: that people do not determine their sociopolitical ideologies based on reason and evidence adn therefore they cannot be argued out of those beliefs through reason and evidence. It's like equipping people with NERF ammo. We may want to fire it off, we may run out and re-stock, but we're going to be forever firing it without significance because it's just NERF and has no capacity to inflict impact on the enemy.

Naturally, we get callers into the show like that guy a couple weeks ago who talked with Stef for a pretty long time about the virtues of stability in Christian families and then made up a bunch of bullshit about spanking being fine and how the studies were flawed (when he didn't seem to know that there were close to 100 studies collated) and couldn't retrieve his sources, etc. He also accused Stef of conflating terms in order to tie 'spanking' to 'hitting', when he was doing the exact same thing, trying to conflate it to 'swatting' a fly. Is this person participating in philosophical discussion, or is he just a right-winger who likes that FDR has been home to criticism of the left? In 2006-2012, maybe even into 2014, Stefan would argue that you can't change a person's mind with facts and reason when it comes to issues of freedoma nd politics because they are just acting out their family traumas in broader society. But lately, there's hardly any discussion on personal freedom issues and a whole shit ton of podcasts/videos in "The Truth About..." series detailing an exhaustive chronology and collation of facts and reason. So has Stefan recanted his position on that issue in the past couple years? I've heard him recant about participating in politics and accepted that it could be useful and valuable at this point in time with this particular candidate (Trump). I have not heard him go back on his claim that facts and reason do not change people's minds though. If someone is a conservative, and Stef is going to enter the political realm and produce videos to criticize the left, the right will join in and follow. But they wont be imbued with principles and philosophy, and as soon as the worm turns and criticism is targeted against the right, those people will turn on FDR, Stef and "philosophy".

In the beginning, Stefan used the forums to reach his audience and build his brand. If you're saying that Stefan doesn't need the forums anymore in order to grow the show, gain donations, etc. I think you're likely correct. However, in terms of the forums serving a purpose for discussion among all people serious about ideas, I don't believe social media has supplanted the forums' necessity and purpose at all. On Reddit, r/FDR is very quiet. The facebook group is an alt-right shitposting disaster. Even to the extent that there are some interesting videos and articles posted on occasion, the format of how comments are displayed on facebook is garbage compared to simple forums like this for making lengthy posts and having them easy to read, find, respond to, etc. Twitter isn't even worth mentioning, as 140 characters is not sufficient for exchange of philosophical ideas. The Discord group is pretty dead as of last week when I checked in on it.... Where exactly are people having great philosophical conversations on social media that I'm not aware of?

If you're interested in more focus on the content of the earlier shows, I had made a topic a month ago or so about starting a skype chat (or similar group chat) and reviewing and discussing the earlier FDR podcasts, from FDR001 and working our way thrugh the whole catalogue of classics. I had 3 positive responses, of which one person gave me a skype SN. I added and messaged him to state who I am and why I added him. No response. Another person seems like they might be interested, and a third person was interested, contingent on how much time it would take to listen to old podcasts. (Really, listening to the podcasts in advance of the chat would be ideal but not even necessary to contribute to a discussion that extrapolates from the ideas covered) I'm still willing to coordinate a skype chat, or google hangout or whatever, but I need people to show me that they are actually going to give it a serious shot. I wouldn't even mind if I was the only one to listen to and summarize the episodes, as long as people commit to the chat times and show up for the discussion based off of my summaries. I think that would at least be a productive starting point.

I'm not overwhelmingly confident about this. According the what is implied in the show, anyone can (with a reasonably articulate e-mail) get on as a call-in, and they are dropped into the queue. People who want to argue a counterpoint to Stefan are the only people who move up in the order. Since the call-in show is drifting away from the 'personal freedom' issues,as well as the videos/podcasts that they produce, the content isn't there to create a feedback loop wherein those people out there looking for that sort of content won't find it in FDR because it is not featured here anymore. Thus they will not listen, will not call-in, will not join the forum, etc. And thus the shows will reflect less of these concerns in a constant feedback loop. So I hope if there is something you want to hear on the show, that you get in line as a caller, otherwise you probably won't be hearing it.

How do you know that it is your father that is the "at least one parent" you would like to have a relationship with?