"The False-Self views the Truth-Self as naked and insane and defenseless ... because, of course, the False-Self is created when the Truth-Self is utterly defenseless, usually when it is at the mercy of parental power, such mercy of which, of course, is not forthcoming."

Comment: Guest: 'Absolutely simplistic and typical of people who don't "think" beyond what other people tell them to think. Imagine yourself as the Minotaur. Born as a creature no one wanted, born from the lust of a goddess to a bull, hated from conception to birth. Instead of given pitty or love when born, was imprisoned in a horrible place with no human contact other than the ones he fed on. What choice did he have, eat something that didn't look like him, or starve to death. He was born without education of morals or philosophy. He was treated as a monster, so he behaved like one to the eyes of other humans. To him, he was just trying to live, fearing his whole existence, surviving on, yes, instinct. And one day a "hero" comes to kill him. For the Minotaur, he probably was scared beyond his imagination. Something stronger than him was trying to kill him and he didn't know why. One has to ask, how long was the Minotaur in the maze, why were only children sent down there. Most likely cause the Minotaur was young himself, and probably lame. The only thing I read from this myth was that of a deformed outcast who was lost, weak and fearful, to be only killed by someone who was "normal" and be called a "strong and powerful hero" for it.' -- When you cut the throat of the abyss...

'The narcissist ultimately starves for love because he or she can never get enough in the present to compensate for the past. -- Pathological narcissism is related to narcissistic rage: a furious, reflexive, unrelenting need to repay any perceived slight or insult. Neurotic narcissism starts out as normal narcissism, a healthy, natural childhood need for attention and appreciation which, when continually frustrated, becomes fixated and pathological. Neurotic narcissism stems from inadequate, insufficient or traumatic parenting and resulting narcissistic injury, especially prior to five years of age, during what Freud called the pre-Oedipal period. Children at this tender age find any serious lack of attunement and attention – or certainly, any outright abuse, neglect or emotional, if not physical, abandonment – an insult, a psychological injury, a traumatic psychic wound which distorts perceptions of both themselves, the world, and their relationship to it. When children experience parents or caretakers as unloving, rejecting or hostile, they respond to this narcissistic wounding by creating a shell-like false self – which replaces, protects and conceals the unaccepted, unloved and damaged true self – presenting instead a persona (Jung) based on what they perceive the parents and world want them to be. A great deal of what pathological narcissism in adults disguises is unresolved infantile anger, resentment and rage about not being recognized, accepted, and loved for who we are. This anger – along with feelings of being unlovable and unworthy of love – is buried beneath the false self. It is repressed, but not forgotten, nor forgiven. Narcissistic rage from the past tends to be re-stimulated by intimate relationships in the present. In romantic relationships, feelings are inevitably re-injured, and the childhood anger suddenly resurfaces – with a vengeance.'

'As far as their fans are concerned, celebrities fulfil two emotional functions: they provide a mythical narrative (a story that the fan can follow and identify with) and they function as blank screens onto which the fans project their dreams, hopes, fears, plans, values, and desires (wish fulfilment). The slightest deviation from these prescribed roles provokes enormous rage and makes us want to punish (humiliate) the "deviant" celebrities. But why? When the human foibles, vulnerabilities, and frailties of a celebrity are revealed, the fan feels humiliated, "cheated", hopeless, and "empty". To reassert his self-worth, the fan must establish his or her moral superiority over the erring and "sinful" celebrity. The fan must "teach the celebrity a lesson" and show the celebrity "who's boss". It is a primitive defense mechanism – narcissistic grandiosity. It puts the fan on equal footing with the exposed and "naked" celebrity.'

'"For more than two years, we combed the Middle East looking for bin Laden," Rumsfeld said. "Frankly, it was starting to be an embarrassment. You can imagine our surprise when we finally found him hiding deep inside the darkest recesses of each and every one of our souls." "It just goes to show that sometimes it's easier to look for the man in the FBI dossier than it is to look at the man in the mirror," Rumsfeld added. "He evaded us for so long because he had such an ingenious hideout," Rumsfeld said. "Only someone as evil as bin Laden would think to crawl down into that hole inside every one of us, the one that makes us hate instead of love, forget birthdays, and ignore alternate-side parking rules." "There is only one way to defeat Osama bin Laden," Bush said. "The way to eliminate this evil man is for each American to love just a little bit more, see your brother's problems as your own, always look on the bright side, and leave every place a little better than you found it."'

'...in the False Self, 'Other people's expectations can become of overriding importance, overlaying or contradicting the original sense of self, the one connected to the very roots of one's being'. The danger is that 'through this False Self, the infant builds up a false set of relationships, and by means of introjections even attains a show of being real'. The result can be a 'child whose potential aliveness and creativity has gone unnoticed ... concealing an empty, barren internal world behind a mask of independence'. By contrast, the True Self is rooted in ... the "experience of aliveness"... 'Out of this the baby creates a sense that "Life is worth the trouble of living". In the baby's nonverbal gesture which 'expresses a spontaneous instinct', the true self potential can be communicated to, and affirmed by, the motherer. 'The False Self in its pathological guise prevents and inhibits the "spontaneous gesture" of the True Self. Compliance and imitation are the costly results ...'

'...the only thing beaten children learn is to fear their parents, not to drive carefully or stay out of trouble. They will also feel guilty and learn to play down their own pain. Being subjected to physical attacks they are defenseless to fend off merely instills in children a "gut" conviction that they obviously merit neither protection nor respect. This false message is then stored in the children's bodies as information and will influence their view of the world and their later attitude toward their own children. Such children will be unable to defend their right to human dignity, unable to recognize physical pain as a danger signal and act accordingly. Even their immune system may be affected. In the absence of other persons to model their behavior on -- enlightened or knowing witnesses -- these children will see the language of violence and hypocrisy as the only really effective means of communication.'

'... the consequences of early, invisible injuries are so severe precisely because they derive from the trivialization of childhood suffering and the denial of its importance. Adults can easily imagine that they would be horrified and humiliated if they were suddenly attacked by a raging giant many times bigger than themselves. Yet assume that small children will not react in the same way... Parents believe that slaps and spanking do not hurt. Such treatment is designed to impress certain values on their children. And the children end up believing that themselves. Some even learn to laugh the whole thing off and to deride the pain they felt at the humiliations inflicted on them. As adults they adhere to this derision, they are proud of their own cynicism... they comply with the demands of a society that attaches supreme importance to considerate treatment for parents. ...these people obstinately trivialize their own sufferings, even if they are therapists themselves.'

"Women are raised as slaves. They have to oppose everyone's emotions: you can't feel too much of this, you can't feel too much of that. The constant desire of the slave is to oppose any strong emotions, to monitor the master's moods and to head off trouble before it comes, to manipulate and to reframe slavery as morality. And this slave morality is so common in women. The only morality is don't confront because a slave can't confront anyone. Slaves have to make forgiveness a virtue. Why? Because all a slave can do is forgive. A slave has to swallow all insults and if a slave is struck, they must slink away, beaten. And so what is a slave going to do? The slave is either going to fight or redefine all of the subjugation and insults and battering and humiliation and contempt they experience into virtue. If women are slaves, we're ALL slaves. The hand that rocks the cradle rules the world. If women make slavery and the effects of slavery a virtue, then we shall never be free."

"The false-self can't deal with rationality, it can only deal with sadism or masochism. The false-self brutalizes the true-self. The false-self believes that everything is hypocritical because the false-self itself is hypocritical. Not because it is protecting the true-self, but because by the time we become adults, it thinks that it is virtuous. Because of its addiction to the false argument from morality, the false-self is incapable of seeing any kind of rational, emotional, or spiritual truth. So the false-self will always intimate to you that it knows the truth that you will not admit to yourself. The false-self is going to strongly – and in a cowardly manner – suggest that every one of your true-self passions is just a pose, is just a front, and that what is really going on is you're acting out emotional sickness in the form of moralizing philosophy. If you can get somebody to believe that their true-self is their false-self, then their false-self will likely win forever."

@02:08:23 -- “It’s really important to break apart that which is us and that which is inflicted upon us. We internalize what we should externalize (abusers): we internalize the dark side of the people who abused us and imagine *we* have a dark side. And then we externalize what we should internalize (projections): we project out onto the world those abusers which live internally inside our minds.” -- Quote: “The feelings that we get that are overwhelming to us are never our own feelings; they are the feelings of other people.” — Stefan Molyneux -- [IFS: An internal protector protects you from the dark pain of an exiled internalized abuser?]

@00:46:00 -- “We internalize all personalities around us. There is no boundary possible – ever – for the internalizing of external personalities. It is an automatic process. If you spend any significant time with somebody, there is no way to avoid internalizing their personality. This is why it is so important to be discriminating in who you spend your time with. The reason that the unconscious gets so contradictory and so split is because when we are in situations where our own intentionality is attacked, we have to repress our own preferences, and we also have to internalize and repress the intention of others that our intentions should never be expressed. This results in significant splitting within the personality.” -- Quote: “The feelings that we get that are overwhelming to us are never our own feelings; they are the feelings of other people.” — Stefan Molyneux

'The unspoken truth behind the most terrifying novel in the world.' -- "Orwell was a murderer. Constant war – that's the constant war against the conscience that occurs in the soul of the murderer. The conscience has to be so overridden by this aggressive ego: O'Brien. O'Brien is the [false-self internalized father and dictator] part of Orwell that murdered, and the remaining shreds of his original [true-self] is Winston. The murder occurs before he writes the book and that's why Winston hasn't got a chance. ['Thoughtcrime does not entail death: thoughtcrime IS death.'] Winston is interested in the truth about the past...There is an independent self that wants to examine history but can't get any details, and that attempts to resist, and attempts to form a relationship with an outsider, with a skeptic, with someone who does understand evil and who judges the family... Big Brother. It's the family. He tries to have a relationship outside the family and the family destroys him for that."

"People have a very hard time living in reality. Reality is not a comfortable place for most people – and it's not because reality is inherently threatening... unfortunately we are told so many lies when we're growing up that reality becomes the enemy of our very identity later on in life." -- "If you don't know why you resist the truth, you have no chance of achieving it. And to know why you resist the truth requires introspection, it requires self-knowledge, and a real pursuit of your own soul and motivations." -- @ 46:00 "Capitalist" 'exploitation'.

'Buddhism: the doctrine that you are not allowed to protect yourself!' -- Turning the other cheek.

'All mourning is ambivalence. You're never too far from age 2, when your rage is magically powerful. ...the unconscious never forgets even the briefest of hates. Sometimes the guilt has a convenient narrative: caring for a cancer-ridden, demented parent who exhausted your physical and emotional resources, and then finally(!) dies. -- In most (all?) zombie movies, there is always a scene in which a main character confronts a loved one turned zombie. The rest of the previous zombie attacks are merely prelude to that one, specific, pivotal interaction. Quick, bolt the door, ambivalence is coming. Movies give the loved-one zombie a momentary flash of the old self – is it remembering, is it a trap, or are you seeing what you want to see? ...how the living negotiate that bit of mourning determines if they'll be able to put the dead to rest, or are going to have be tied to them forever.'

'...children whose immature parents use them for their own emotional needs, and who reject them when the child's needs do not reflect their own, develop a "false self," or even multiple selves, which may conform to society but cannot improve upon it. ...social evolution depends upon the evolution of the viable self, which in turn is achieved solely through the slow and uneven evolution of childrearing. Traumas are defined as injuries to the private self, rather than just painful experiences, since non-painful injuries to the self such as parental genital manipulation or being told by a parent that they wished one would die are more traumatic to the self than, say, more painful accidents. Without a well-developed, enduring private self, people feel threatened by all progress, all freedom, all new challenges, and then experience annihilation anxiety, fears that the fragile self is disintegrating, since situations that call for self-assertion trigger memories of maternal abandonment.'

"Uncorking the volcano."

"Motherland" -- Growth Anxiety: Inter-generational warfare, perpetrated by elder generation upon the younger generation. Elders send youngers off to fight foreigner "enemies" whom the elders have displaced their anger at youngers onto. Elders need to attack and punish the youngers for their enjoyment of freedoms that cause the elders anxiety about new possibilities to separate from mother they feel they can't anger for risk of the losing all hope of their love. Unprocessed abandoment trauma. Reactionary against progress. Fear of freedom. Fear of challenging mommy's narcissistic needs. Religious/Statist savior fantasies. "God" wears a dress. -- Parents believe child is going to fill emptiness within them. Doesn't happen: Parent false-self narcissism vs Child true-self narcissism. Child experienced as "selfish", "defiant". Parental rage, abuse, abandonment. "Mommy doesn't love me; I'm bad. I upset Mommy. Mommy, please love me!" Love not possible. Hope springs eternal. The cycle repeats.

'...goddesses were also "The Mistresses of Battle," soldiers killed in battle were also seen as sacrifices to her bloodthirsty appetite. "The goddess brings destruction to enemies; she drinks the blood of the victims who were formerly her children…she could not be halted in her slaughter of the human race." Since these deaths originated in such memories as watching his mother strangle his little sister when she was born, war goddesses particularly needed the death of their own soldiers. Only by defeating the infanticidal mother could sons "overcome chaos." "The hero is one who slays his mother [and] institutes a new order on earth…culture is the work of the hero, the mother-killer, and represents his attempt at self-generation." Only by sacrificing together could men establish patrilineal kinship and political power. Even in Greece and Rome, patrilineal kin only knew they were kin because they sacrificed together: sacrifice was called "a remedy for having been born of woman."'

'Narcissistic personalities ward off their sense of an empty, inadequate self by fusing with the harsh attacking parent alter and forming a grandiose self that identifies with the omnipotent parent. Or they become a latent narcissist and cling to and admire a grandiose other, a narcissistic hero who can stand up to the destructive mother alter. ...the narcissistic personalities of antiquity tried to maintain some sense of self by arming themselves with grandiose exhibitionism ... as for instance early Greeks ... preoccupied with fantasies of the power and brilliance of a world filled with arrogant, distant narcissistic heroes and gods and grandiose political leaders upon whom they depended to validate their weak sense of self. Their pedophilia was also a result of their only being able to have sex with a narcissistic double of themselves stemming from when they were beautiful youths, avoiding women as "vultures" who were out to catch and devour them.'

'In religions and politics, people turn to idealized authorities to avoid the risk of depending on themselves and to restage the painful feelings of abandonment by parents when they tried to individuate as children. Religions restage traumatic events encapsulated in dangerous alters. This is why the word "sacred" (sacer) everywhere designates "poison," "dangerous," "taboo," because the sacred is where we store our most poisonous, dangerous early memories. Gods, demons and spirits are not just containers for haphazard projections; they are highly organized and endurable, and so must first exist as durable, organized sub-selves in individual brains. It is through religious questions about God that people in the past asked their most important questions about Mommy: Why does she hate me, why did she tie me up, leave me abandoned in my feces, let me starve, why did she beat me, why did she strangle my baby sister, what does she want from me, what did I do wrong to deserve such torture?'

'...dissociation into traumatized alters occurs more in [large] groups because one feels more helpless and more depersonalized, particularly in the largest groups, nations, and therefore more fearful. When we think of acting in society or even [speaking] in front of a large group, one feels more open to attack, to humiliation, and one can more easily switch into the traumatized hemisphere. Our first line of defense when in a social trance is to cling to a "strong" leader or a "strong" subgroup, merge our alters with them and join in various group activities, often violent ones, to defend ourselves. Thus it makes sense that the inevitable characteristics of a group [are] invincibility, grandiosity, irresponsibility, impulsiveness, suggestibility and fearfulness, all qualities of the neglectful and traumatic figures stored in our social alters. Without the laterality of the brain, neither politics nor religion can exist, as they do not in other animals who do not have divided selves.'

'If we grow, we will never be what Mommy or Daddy wants us to be, and we will never get their love.” Entire societies react to innovative, progressive historical phases by defending against the loss of parental approval. They move toward war through seven phases [of a building war trance], first splitting off both the Bad Motherland and their Bad Self and projecting them into “enemies,” who are then killed, sacrificed, because they have fused with an all-powerful Killer Motherland. #1 FREEDOM: Increasing independence, innovations, growth of real self #2 FEAR: Growth panic, loss of parental approval, disintegration of real self #3 FISSION: Splitting into “in-group” and “out-group” #4 FUSION: Merging with powerful punishing Killer Motherland #5 FRACTURE: Projection of Bad Self into helpless victim “enemy” #6 FAKED PROVOCATION: Faking a provocative attack by an “enemy” #7 FIGHT: Becoming the “Hero” of the Killer Motherland and being sacrificed for Her while killing the Bad Self “enemy”'

From the book: Characteristics of a successful narcissistic development, "healthy narcissism": '#Aggressive impulses could be neutralized because they did not upset the confidence and self-esteem of the parents. #Strivings toward autonomy were not experienced as an attack. #The child was allowed to experience and express "ordinary" impulses (jealousy, rage, defiance) because his parents did not require him to be "special," for instance, to represent their own ethical attitudes. #There was no need to please anybody... #He could use his parents because they were independent of him. #These preconditions enabled him to separate successfully self- and object- representations. #Because the child was able to display ambivalent feelings, he could learn to regard both his self and the object as "both good and bad," and did not need to split off the "good" from the "bad" object. #...the child was able to integrate his narcissistic needs and did not have to resort to repression or splitting.'

'The belief that narcissism is synonymous with grandiosity is, itself, a narcissistic defense. You are being lied to, by yourself. The narcissist feels unhappy because he thinks his life isn't as it should be, or things are going wrong; but all of those feelings find origin in frustration, a specific frustration: the inability to love the other person. Each person tries to find ways of affirming themselves; but when it is done through identity and not behavior, it always leads to misery. #I know I can love, because I love my son and daughter, totally and unconditionally. And so now I know your kids are young. No matter what you do to them: abuse them, yell at them, neglect them, abandon them, withdraw from them, they will love you unconditionally. But after puberty, when they start to love other people in different ways than you, or more than you, even the best parent's status drops. How will your ego defend against that?'

'No, Mom, listen. He's really bugging me. Don't you understand that I need to develop this antagonistic sibling dynamic in order to define my role as an individual within the family, specifically with regard to how my dominance over him in some way strengthens or validates my nascent sense of self? C'mon, please? I promise I won't in any way undermine the psychological damage you and Dad have already inflicted upon Jeremy by using him as a conduit for your respective fears, frustrations, and anxieties. And I swear I'll be careful not to menace him in such a manner that he reflexively fights back, becomes prone to violence and quick aggression, and eventually begins to exhibit traits of an anger disorder or sociopathy. I just want to engender in him a lifelong sense of insecurity and diminished confidence, honest! So will you tell Jeremy to let me create an atmosphere of sustained menace, please? You will? Thanks, Mom!'

(Likely oversimplified...) Karma = False Self. Dharma = True Self

"You can't have any more empathy and love for yourself than you can have for the weakest around you." -- "Everyone is always talking about their family when they're talking about politics." -- "The reason that you would need to be addicted to the pathetic and destructive rush that comes from literally stealing candy from the hands of babes is that you have learned from somewhere that power is composed of two things: #1. An ugly grab and #2. A triumphant moralizing." -- "Whenever you are cruel to those around you, you raise a need for a state in their mind especially when they're helpless." -- "The primary reason for sadism is that it is an attempt to overpower and master feelings of intense helplessness... If you will not accept those feelings of helplessness and agony of being brutalized by power, then you must normalize the brutalization of that power: you project your own helplessness onto other people and then you torture it because the only other possibility is that you feel it."

'A boy discovers an incredible and gruesome world of monsters under his bed. Storyline: A child meets the monster that lives under his bed. He even becomes one of his best friends. Soon the child discovers a whole new world of fun and games under his bed where pulling pranks on kids and other monsters is the main attraction.'

'Lloyd deMause is the Director of The Institute for Psychohistory, founder of the International Psychohistorical Association, and author of seven books on psychohistory, four of which can be freely downloaded at http://www.psychohistory.com' -- Mentions voice therapy (restating your thoughts about yourself in the second person) to unmask the false self / 'alter'.

On self-esteem and social levelling: "One of the problems with self-esteem is mistaking the accidental for the personally virtuous. You don't want to place your self-esteem on the accidental characteristics that you may have."

'Negative emotional experience just happens to be the only place we’ll find new information trying to access our life, offering us the chance to see some part of ourselves differently, thus capable of changing us. Positive feeling experience is wonderful. It’s no surprise or sin that we want to spend as much time inside it as possible. Nothing else makes more sense. But that doesn’t mean to kill the baby with the bathwater. We all want to ease distress and unhappiness as efficiently as possible. But positive emotional energy doesn’t offer anything new; that’s what’s so good about it – no hassles. Learning always disturbs. That’s what makes it such a good carrier of new information. The question is whether, in being happy, we avoid taking even a moment to pluck just one valuable piece of new information out of our unhappiness before abandoning it? That’s all it takes to learn, to build upon that one piece.'

Gisted -- All of the evil, corruption and predation in the world follows from the moment when this invisible apple is offered that you are told you must believe in or die (or be condemned at the very least). If you get a sense of the agony the world is in at the right now then you get a sense of the horror of this moment of ultimate betrayal and soul murder that inevitably pushes people into becoming either sadistic, amoral, exploitative abusers; or masochistic, compliant, passive-aggressive victims. Either way, abuse or victimhood is made into an absolute so that you can avoid the pain of knowing that people chose to hurt you when they could have chosen otherwise and to repress the pain of acknowledging that your sole means of survival, your capacity to understand things rationality, was under direct attack by those who claimed to love you. But that pain still exists in the world and whatever we don't permit ourselves to feel we end up causing other people to feel ten times over.

Gisted -- "Culture is the exact opposite of what is real and what is true." Because of its desire for virtue, the true-self is corrupted into obedience by the miming of the eating of the invisible apple, and the reward that's given to this shattered true-self is a substitute false-self which is what we call culture. Culture is always a lie. And the big lie is always believed more than the little lie. Once you can get somebody to place their identity in a collective falsehood, you've got them for life. There's no way back to your true-self once your self-aggrandizing false-self is the substitute source of your self-esteem. There's a famous line from Hanns Johst's play Schlageter: ‘When I hear "culture,” I release the safety catch on my gun!’ That line resonates because it's true. When you can get people to believe false things and to obey bullies, then they are ready to participate in the brutality of the collective and to be a soldier of evil in the world.

2/3, 3/3: "This is where this new epoch is going, where we understand the true power of consciousness and the mind. What the control system has spent so much time doing is to hold us in a closed-mind, closed-vibrational state so that we cannot access that natural power we have, which is the true-self, to resist all this stuff that's being thrown at us. Because of this epoch change that's going on, we're now seeing a very clear forking in the road. There's a clear parting of the ways between those two groups of people in world: that which is staying closed and that which is demonstrably opening its mind."

'...how the myth of redemptive violence structures the standard comic or cartoon: An indestructible good guy is unalterably opposed to an irreformable and equally indestructible bad guy. Nothing can kill the good guy... Nothing finally destroys the bad guy or prevents his reappearance... Children identify with the good guy so that they can think of themselves as good. This enables them to project out onto the bad guy their own repressed anger, violence, rebelliousness or lust, and then vicariously enjoy their own evil by watching the bad guy initially prevail. (This segment of the show actually consumes all but the closing minutes, allowing ample time for indulging the shadow side of the self.) When the good guy finally wins, viewers are then able to reassert control over their own inner tendencies, repress them, and reestablish a sense of goodness. Salvation is guaranteed through identification with the hero ...[with whom] one's personal well-being is tied inextricably...'

"The original sin is now imperfection."

'We have an instinctive aversion to other people's false realities because they aren't our realities.' -- Aren't our false-self false realities.

"Once you get that self-bullying doesn't work, you know that violence doesn't work, you know that to your very core." -- Stefan Molyneux

Gisted -- The true self conforms to reason and evidence. The false self conforms to bullying irrationalities. The false self arises from the fear of personal death and from the threat of biological ostracism. The need for co-operation enables the tribe to enforce its whims upon the individual in return for protection. We survive the humiliation of being controlled by earnestly believing our conformity is a virtue because if we act as if it's just submission to power, those who inflict the false self will know that we're faking if and won't share the benefits of conformity. The false self displaces the true self as a rational adaptation for survival because if we reject the irrationalities of the tribe, we won't survive. When you reach out with your true self, you provoke the humiliation of people's conformity and they attack you because to reveal their false self really feels like dying to them because it was the fear of death that originally provoked their conformity to the tribe.

"If the counterfeiter was exposed, why would *you* feel humiliated??"

Gisted -- There *is* a war between good and evil; like it or not, you *are* a participant in this war. You can't change the world with politics or sky-ghosts or arguments. If you want to change the world, be as happy as you can and you will become a source of wisdom for those who are seeking happiness. But if bad society can get you to be bitter and cynical and to turn against truth – then you become an effective advertisement of how truth is bad – as compared to the conformity to culture that makes bad society appear good. Reason = Virtue = Happiness. Bad society needs you to be unhappy, it needs you to follow a cultural script called, 'The truth-tellers are miserable and that's how we know they are not truth-tellers because a truth-teller is, by their own definition, happy.' Depression is to keep you despairing, doubting, depleted, inert, weakened, little, resentful, hostile, hopeless, joyless, mute, empty, and blind to the power that you actually posses: the power of the truth.

Gisted -- The first thing bad society will try is to get you to give up your love of the truth, to get you to become superior to, and cynical of, the truth. Then you inevitably become a relativist who is a cancer to anyone with certainty. If they can't kill your love of truth, they will kill your love of people because if you love the truth but hate people, you are no longer any danger, nobody will want to hear any truth you have to speak. Bad society will have successfully inoculated and alienated you with bitterness and hostility and cynicism. (But you can't hate people for their hatred of truth, because *you* are a person and you love the truth.) The basic equation of the value of philosophy is Reason = Virtue = Happiness. And so if bad society wishes to discredit you, all they have to do is make you unhappy and any truth you have, nobody will want – because nobody wants to be unhappy. If bad society can make you unhappy then bad society is happy. And that is why you are depressed.

Gisted -- We live in world of savage moral insanity – and nobody wants to talk about it. Everyone seems to want to just sail along spouting off 'moral' rules to bully and control children – but when those children come back with legitimate basic questions about the universality of those rules – parents, teachers, politicians and priests get all 'morally' offended because they really don't have any answers for basic questions and they get really angry because it the questioning reminds them of their own humiliation when they were punished or saw others being punished for asking questions. To challenge the ethics of society is to challenge most people's fundamental and foundational reality. And so bad society has developed a defense mechanism against people who ask questions called, STFU! – because if enough people ask basic questions, the whole fragile edifice of society will fall down. Depression is inflicted by bad society as a way to inoculate itself against truth-tellers.

On hidden metaphors: "The true self, the self of honesty, integrity, purity, honor and dignity – is like the soul in the Christian mythology, you cannot kill it off – it's always buried down there under the rubble of accumulated moral corruption and evil – and it still reaches out to try to help other people, to warn other people – and this stuff is all very obvious once you look for the signs about what people are actually trying to tell you..." -- On moral relativists: Moral relativism is simply a defense mechanism to obscure the moral nature of the true self. Moral absolutism is innate to our nature. Moral relativists feel bullied by their own sense of absolute morality that they have consistently violated, and so to manage their intense feelings of corruption, they project their innate moral absolutism into you – you become their bully – and they try to undermine your certainty and optimism about morality. Don't talk to these people; you have to shield yourself from their cynicism.

'In the course of life it is important to avoid letting people get levers on you. The cons learn their victim’s likes and dislikes and personal history, so that they will be able to forge a more “authentic” bond with the victim. Inmates often work in large cabals, colluding in their informational exchange. One other tactic they use is to compliment the guard. Compliments are actually a devastating manipulative tool, because they enhance the ego of the complimented. Because the ego is false, and impermanent, the complimented becomes less grounded in reality... By asking the guard for help, they improve the bond (after all, to help someone is to be of higher status than them – and this nurtures the illusion of the guard that *they* are the ones in charge...) In prison as in real life, if someone doesn’t actively speak up and say something, silence is taken as assent. When human beings touch each other, if the touch is not aggressive, oxytocin is often released, causing a bond to form.'

Gisted -- 'Morality' is a form of a magick because without morality there's no self-attack, and if you can't get your slaves to self-attack for disobedience then the costs of human ownership and control are really high. The immoral, the amoral, and the evil all understand that if you can train people in 'virtue' when they're young, then you own them for life because people so desperately want to be good. It's all the 'moralists', the 'virtuous', and so-called 'good' people who say that morality doesn't work and who try to come up with every single possible exception to a virtuous rule in order to paralyze real virtue. But the evil people know morality *does* work because they've successfully indoctrinated children using the argument from morality (that obedience to the State is virtuous, that the State protects, that the State helps the poor, etc) and ensured that people can never escape from the noose of 'morality' or the invisible fence of slave-on-slave attack.

Gisted -- Hysterics believe *everything* is personal responsibility and don't take into account the wider context. This is because of their deep-seated need to punish. The reason all hysterics have a need to punish others is because they are reproducing the intense punishment they received as children. In the absence of enemies, enemies will be invented. Religious people are constantly inventing enemies to attack because they have invented a God that attacks them constantly and in order to restore any kind of 'sanity' or equilibrium they have to invent enemies to attack because the whole religion is the invention of an enemy called the true-self which they have to attack. Thus they will attack their own human natures, their sexual lives, their curiosity, their reason, their skepticism, their empiricism. This is why religion is such a cancer. You'll notice Republicans are distinctly ill at ease when they're without an enemy. All their *real* enemies are, of course, within themselves.

Gisted -- With Republicans it's the Old Testament. With Liberals it's the New Testament. Republicanism is highly correlated with religion. And religion is, of course, fundamentally hysterical: an 'All-Powerful God' is obsessed with not only your every decision and action but also your every thought! -- Republicans are fundamentally hysterical; they employ a lot of fear-mongering. People are hysterical that way because their inner lives are dead and where their heart, empathy, and sympathy should be is just a dead moon crater of nothingness because the impact of their early childhood has completely snuffed out any possibility of a lively, curious, and engaged interaction with life. When people are emotionally dead, they require drama: they require enemies, they require danger, they require conflict, they require anger, they require self-righteousness, they require all this false-self bullshit. Republicans are trolls, basically.

'Of course you feel nothing. Why would you?—it's not your loss. What's wrong isn't your lack of feeling, but that you think you have to feel something, that you have to tell this woman, remind this woman, how horrible is her loss. You think the only way to connect with people is to have their emotions. You forget that she has a life that doesn't have you in it. What you should say is, "I'm very sorry to hear that. Is there anything I can do?" and that's it. But that feels insufficient. You think this because you think that there is something you can do, that the sadness is not real for you so it must not be real for her and you thus have the power to change it. She's not looking for you to be sad, she's not looking to you for anything, her loss is bigger than you. If she needs anything from you, it's sympathy, not empathy. But no one taught you this. So you fall back on the character "man helping grieving widow." Action!'

'Taking Iraq and President Bush as starting points, and examining the defense mechanisms we use to cope with both, yields the unsurprising conclusion that we are a society of narcissists. While this discovery is familiar to readers of my blog, what might be a surprise is what this heralds for our society politically and economically. It isn't socialism, or even communism, as I had feared. It's feudalism. Let's begin.' -- Defence mechanisms: 'Splitting/Dissociation: reducing the other person to a binary abstraction of all good or all bad, is a primitive, or regressive, defense mechanism used when the emotional level and complexity is greater than a person's capacity to interpret it. Inherent in the act of splitting is apathy. You don't try to find a solution to the problem person, the split is the solution. It allows you not to have to deal with the other, because you've decided that the other is irredeemable. #Projection/Scapegoating #Denial #Reaction Formation/"Going overboard."'

I want, I want, I want, I want, I want. -- "The coming of the lawless one will be in accordance with the work of Satan displayed in all kinds of counterfeit miracles, signs and wonders, and in every sort of evil that deceives those who are perishing. They perish because they refused to love the truth..." – Thessalonians 2:9 -- (I'm not a Christian, but both God and Jesus have a remarkable knack for pointing out the OBVIOUS.)

Left–to–right: Obey the Father <---> Obey the Mother. Center: In absense of a singular external authority, obey the debased Self: the False Self: the Ego that has been twisted into making a virtue of blind obedience.

'Big Brother is watching you.' -- George Orwell

Gisted: "People keep attacking us for wanting to know the truth, or for being curious about the truth, or for not being certain. To not be certain is an anathema to weak egos; they can't take it. It's certainly an anathema to the false self, because it's designed to mask doubt. Whenever you bring up the truth around just about anyone, you're attacking their false self: you're directly threatening what they perceive as the entire basis of their personality, you're threatening virtue, you're threatening confidence, you're threatening self-esteem, you're threatening everything. Most people don't have any clue that a particular idea is threatening all their values, they just feel angry. That is the reaction of the false self. The false self manifests when you've come to genuinely love those who continually abuse you—and don't realise that's a problem. -- Like Winston's love for Big Brother at the end of 1984, the horror of the false self is when you no longer realise that you're lying."

'One of the most important films ever made.' -- The ways to the One are as many as the lives of men.