Not only do parents and friends deserve to be scolded, scorned and shunned, but your unborn baby secretly wants to die! What should you do? Try not listening to underfathered moral idiots.
Among other jobs it’s doing, that video is a graduate seminar on extreme empathy. I go through three of the six arguments I have for a deeper, more informative understanding of empathy. More than that, though, the presentation itself is an example of the kind of empathy I’m talking about: We see the defooing act – unilaterally destroying all or many of your life-long storgic relationships on a whim and, plausibly, wholly on an exaggerated pretext – from the point of view of the defooer, of the defooed loved ones, and from Molyneux’s own hypothesized perspective.
I am deliberately engaging you in exactly the type of empathy I am talking about so that you may feel the emotions these other people are living through – so that you might feel empathy for them, regardless of your opinions on the subject.
Here’s an interesting question I don’t expect anyone else to come up with:
What empathy does Stefan Molyneux feel for the people he has counseled to destroy their past lives as the only path to The Glorious Future? What empathy does he feel for their parents and friends, for people who have had the rug pulled out from under them out of the blue, who are accused of crimes they know nothing about and are invited to submit to a show trial – or else – and who are then cut off forevermore from someone they have loved for many years?
I feel for all of these people, and I have no direct connection to any of them. You, too, right? Do you take delight in other people’s suffering? Guess who does?
I am hectored now and then by people who want to scare me with mad stories about sociopaths, who are apparently hiding under every last bed on the planet. I have my doubts about these claims, but here you see the real deal – a man without any ability to feel shame or remorse for the outrageous pain he has caused, who instead laughs about the pain of the defooed and who rejects and shuns the defooers in a way no family member ever would at the very first sign of a disagreement.
In the name of freedom.
None so blind as those who will not see.
Here’s more, from Sunday’s Church of Splendor homily, The Underfathered West, taking on the facts of a child’s life that result in cacophonous clowns like Molyneux or Richard Dawkins – whose head is also handed to him – or Hamlet the Chatterbox Dane. Fatherhood is humanity, and my ideas on fatherhood are coming together as “The Grand Unified Theory of Why Everything is Screwed Up – but Correctable.” I repay attention.
