Self Knowledge

“…we resist knowledge about ourselves, to a large part, because we wish not to know the truth about society. There’s a theory that depressed people are depressed because they’ve actually learned the truth about the world we live in.

That depression is accurate, that depression is wisdom, that depression is truth. Because, once you’ve learned about society, you’re now facing the future….

The reason people resist self-knowledge is that they learn about society and society is the future. Because you can’t live in the past; but you will always live in society in the future.

So, I would go to parties, when I was working on this, and I would look at people in my mind’s eye and I would say, well, you would watch a kid being abused and you would do nothing… and if that kid came to you for help, you would turn away…

…I tried talking about what happened to me in my past, with my friends. Did they want to hear? No, they didn’t want to hear, of course not. Because they want to live in a happy, joyous, absent, empty, ridiculous, brain scanning, empty headed matrix of “society is a pretty nice place”.

They want to live in the propaganda of the Whitney Houston song “the greatest love of all” rather than recognize that society is, to some degree composed of, not Whitney Houston the singer; but Whitney Houston the incredibly abusive mom. They want to live in the song, not in the facts. They want to live in the dream, not in the reality. They want to live in the sentiment, not in the empiricism.

And, alot of my friends also did not want to know that I had been suffering so enormously and they had done nothing about it. Those who knew me as a child. And so, they’d kind of listen politely and then it would be kind of like “now that you’ve got that off your chest, let’s go back to exactly the way things were.”

In this way, self knowledge also becomes knowledge of other people. I learned about my friends by learning about myself.

–Stefan Molyneux