I just listened to the first part of today's Sunday show, and a couple things struck me that I wanted to share. The caller in question called in to ask about apathy. All he offered at first was that he felt like he was on the brink of some business success if he put in some work to get things off the ground, but all he felt like doing was sitting around watching netflix and playing video games and whatever. Beyond that, he just wanted Stefan to ask him some questions to help figure out the source of the apathy.

When you listen to Stefan one thing you get a sense of is that he is very good at tying things into narratives. Within a few minutes he had asked the questions to extract the necessary info to make a very compelling narrative. This time it went something like this:

The caller is in business with his parents. The caller's parents were verbally abusive to him when he was younger; less so now. He's tried to talk to them about his upbringing, but they brush him off. At this point Stefan went into a monologue about a new concept of his called the wecosystem. I think he actually hit upon a kernel of truth here: The mecosystem that he's talked about in the past is the idea that we have a multiplicity of personalities and views of ourselves, some possibly inspired by influential figures from our childhood. Wecosystem is the idea that on top of that, we live our lives in relation to a bunch of other people (spouse, children, friends, coworkers), each with their own mecosystem. And each component of everyone else's mecosystem interacts with the various components of our mecosystems in various ways. And each of these interactions influences our self-perception. He went on to liken relationships with other people to "infections" -- i.e. you have to be very careful about who you let into your life, because their voices will get in your head and affect your thinking, for better or for worse.

So in this caller's case, the issue was boiled down to the fact that it would be practically impossible for him to have any self-worth as long as he gets the sense from his parents that he is worthless (by being brushed off, etc). *Insert typical "get it good or get it gone" speech with layers of caveats about the importance of working with a therapist and Stefan just being some crazy guy on the internet here.* And this lack of self-worth and resulting emotional unavailability also explains why the caller hasn't had a romantic relationship in 8 years.

So there you have it, in under an hour we got a neat and tidy narrative on everything that's wrong with this guy's life and what to do about it. Whether or not it's actually true is another question entirely.

Now, the different perspective I mentioned is that I think, at least in this case, that the caller called in really looking for Stefan to do this for him. Cognitive neuroscience is finding that humans have a drive to construct coherent narratives through which they can understand the world and their place in it -- whether those narratives are actually true is of secondary importance. So what seems to be occurring is that you have callers who are desperate for someone to help them make sense of their lives, and you have Stefan who loves to do this and is really good at it. Put them together and you get conversations rich with Stefan telling the caller what to think about their lives, and callers sharing the tidbits of information that enable this to happen.

The only question left is whether Stefan should know better. He must know he's never painting an accurate picture with the paucity of information the callers supply. He always tells people not to just swallow his narrative and advice whole, but to introspect and see a therapist and such, but can he really expect that his words won't have a profound impact? He just got through saying that every person we choose to associate with has an impact on us -- surely this includes himself as well. He's clearly an important figure in many people's lives. I'm fairly positive that the people who spend a significant amount of time listening to FDR podcasts walk around with Stefan running through their minds all day. Actually talking to him would only strengthen the power of his words, since they seem to be personally directed (despite him knowing next to nothing about the callers). Maybe layering on the disclaimers is enough from a legal standpoint, but is Stefan doing the right thing ethically?


The second observation I had is that Stefan seems to be strongly fixated on keeping all negative voices out of his life. You can see it in the defooing and defriending he advocates. Today he said something along the lines of: "Any person who you keep in your life who has anything negative to say to you is violating you and you shouldn't stand for it." Again, there's some truth here, but I think it's possible to take this way too far. It's important to be receptive to constructive criticism from people who aren't just out to undermine you, but who care about you and want to help you improve. People who will tell it to you like it is. It seems Stefan has a tendency to perceive all criticism as attacks and all critics as attackers. And he chases people out of his life who could have helped him improve. You see this over and over again on the FDR forum -- not going to speculate about his personal life.

He seems to be weeding people out of his life not based on their adherence to the truth -- which may come out in the form of criticism or praise depending on his own actions, but based on the positivity or negativity of their statements. So he chases away people who say truthful but negative things, but people who give empty praise remain. This leads to an unbalanced environment that makes for extremely fertile soil for corruption to sprout in. I know he pays lip service to the importance of working though issues with people, but in practice what I see is him requiring people to conform to his more positive self-image and ignore any criticisms they have of him, if they want to continue interacting with him. Again, don't want to speculate about his personal life, but I hope the people he's close to feel able to criticize him when the situation warrants it.


So yeah, I feel like I gained some empathy for Stefan today. And I still don't feel like it excuses some of his behaviour.

I also want to add that I don't think I'm above any of this. For example, I have a strong visceral reaction to the thought of being wrong -- particularly being wrong about things I've put out there for other people to see. To the point where, if it doesn't really matter, I often find myself preferring to live with the uncertainty of not knowing whether I was right or wrong rather than checking and knowing for certain one way or another.

E.g. Sometimes after sending an email, I find myself wondering whether I misused or misspelled a certain word. My first instinct is to not look it up and find out for certain, as if not knowing for certain that I was wrong will somehow increase my chances of having been right. Logically I know that anything I do now will not change the past, and furthermore I know that knowing the answer will decrease my chances of making the same mistake in the future, but that backwards thinking of wanting to bury my head in the sand tends to be my first instinct. It takes conscious effort to act against it.

To the point, Stefan has made hundreds if not thousands of podcasts where he rambles on without doing much preparation or fact-checking ahead of time. There are bound to be countless instances where he says things that are untrue. Given the way podcasts are treated as authoritative treatises on subjects, people with questions are referred back to them, and listeners are encouraged to listen to all of them in order, I think he owes it to his listeners to strive to be as accurate as possible, not doing rambling podcasts, or at least making a much more distinct separation between the rambling ones and the ones he's prepared for. Yes it takes more work, and makes it difficult to do the podcasts while cleaning the bathroom or going for a walk or whatever, but it would increase his credibility. And when it comes to books, taking the time to lay them out, go through multiple iterations of editing, maybe use a real editor, rather than writing them as if he was speaking them and hoping they'll turn out like solid books. But as it is, I can certainly understand if his instinctual reaction is not to want to hear criticism. And again, I don't think that excuses it.

That would be fine if he wanted to market himself that way, but he doesn't. I mean, what he's doing is only a tiny step above what a psychic or tea leaf reader or what have you does (especially the dream analysis... haha), but at least they acknowledge that they're pulling stuff out of thin air. He constantly invokes things like truth and virtue and science. It's fundamentally inconsistent with his own espoused ideals (and keep in mind that consistency is at the top of that list of ideals).

I do agree that people need to take responsibility for their own lives, and one way to learn this is through experience. Happily FDR isn't the most dangerous set of ideas they could be dabbling in. We all came through it ok, eh?

But hey, I guess if you just are inconsistent, you can one day espouse consistency, and the next day be inconsistent with that, without there being any inconsistency at all. It's like an anti-self-detonating position or something.

This gives me a new idea for a molyneuxrevealed post. thank you. Something like this.

No one likes to be told they are wrong. No one likes to be wrong. Because of this, no one likes to tell someone they are wrong. It is too fraught with possible conflict. Which people really hate.

Parents are the only people in the world who care enough about you to tell you when you are screwing up. Everyone else just figures you aren't worth the trouble and they break with you.

Danny DeVito had a great line in some movie on the value of wives. "They let you know when you are being an asshole." Without them, you never find out. And by inference, you just keep being one. Since I saw that, I have tried to thank my wife when whe 'notices.'