If you're being required to do things that make you weak and ashamed,
then stop.
Don't do them.
Like one of the things I learned from Solzhenitsyn and Frankel, was that...
Systems go terribly out of control when people don't stop them
when they're going mildly out of control. You know?
And you might say, oh, I should just keep my goddamn head down and shut up.
It's like maybe you should, like that's not bad advice.
You know, you don't want to make
unnecessary enemies and you don't need any more trouble than you need.
But you got to ask yourself on a day to day basis.
What makes you think you're not selling your soul, you know?
And there's so much foolishness going on in the mid level bureaucratic world now.
That's where all the tyranny seems to be focused.
And the reason that it multiplies is
because sensible people say nothing when they should say something.
And what's so strange about that is
that there are way more sensible people than people who aren't sensible.
They're just not as noisy.
So whether you'll turn out,
so let's say something's bugging the hell out of you at work.
Well, then you have to prepare to find another job.
That's the first thing you have to do.
I don't think that you should find another
job, but you should prepare to find another job.
And if possible, you should prepare to find a better job,
because if you can't tell someone to go to hell, then you can't negotiate with them.
And if they've got you over a barrel, then you can't say anything.
So you got to set yourself up.
So you've got some mobility.
And actually, that's a really good principle in your life period.
You should set yourself up so that you
have a lateral move at hand, and then you should find out,
well, are there things that work that are disturbing my soul, you know?
And you find that out.
First of all, you ask yourself, okay, I'm disturbed at work.
Okay?
I'm probably weak and deceitful and useless and lazy.
You might as well start with that.
And then you talk to some people like your
wife, your friends, your coworkers, and find out.
Are you stupid, deceitful and lazy?
Or is there something not so good going on at work?
And so if you can then eliminate your own personal pathology as a cause of your
dissatisfaction, then maybe there's something rotten in the state of Denmark.
And maybe you should say something about
it before the whole goddamn thing collapses, because that can happen.
It can happen in companies a lot faster than people ever think.
And you may find that,
well, first of all, you may find if you say something,
well, first of all, that's an adventure, that's for sure.
That's a bloody adventure.
And you have to do it carefully and you have to be prepared for it.
But it might be the best thing that ever happened to you.
And the other thing is, if you're careful about it, you get your words right.
Like, this is strategic battle, right?
It's not something you wander into carelessly.
Then you may find that there's lots of people who feel exactly the same way
you do and that you've actually caught one onto something.
You're a Canary in a coal mine, not just like psychopathic mouthpiece.
You got to ask yourself when you go and do what you do,
like, is this making you stronger?
Is this making you weaker?
And if it's making you weaker,
then you got to ask yourself, do you really want to be weaker?
Because the weaker you get, the more you're tyrannized,
and then worse than that, like, the weaker you get, the more bitter you get.
And the more you work towards terrible
things, the more you'll snap at your wife, the more you'll kick your kids.
You know, like, it's no joke to be tyrannized at work.
And so I would say you have an ethical
responsibility as a citizen to forthrightly confront creeping tyranny,
no matter where it occurs and part of part of what we're learning.
I would say from these stories,
if we're learning anything at all is that if you're aimed at the good,
which is a question you really got to ask yourself, if you're genuinely aimed
at the good, then take heart.
Because you're a lot stronger than you think...
...
- They're all like, Why should I stand up? Be a martyr, get fired.
- This guy at Google got fired. Yeah.
- How do you convince people that there's
- a point to standing up when - it appears to be futile?
Well, the first thing I think is you convince them that it's not futile.
It might be difficult, but it's not futile.
If you get your words right, you have something to say.
There'll be an impact of those words.
It might not be the impact that you would choose.
But the other thing you got to tell people is: PICK YOUR POISON.
You may be in a situation where you don't have a...
You don't have a cake walk to the Garden of Paradise.
You got tyranny or famine.
Those are your choices.
But you get to pick which one you have.
And I would say if you're being oppressed and I mean in your
soul by what you're required to swallow at work,
well, you think you're not paying a price for that?
You got no self respect and rightly so.
But worse than that, you're an agent of your own destruction.
You're destroying your own ideal,
and you're letting people who are weak and corrupt win.
And if you stood up and stood up properly,
but you have to put yourself in order to do this, at least to some degree.
Right? You can't do it casually.
You have to do it from some position of preparedness and strength.
Then what makes you think you couldn't scare them back into the corners?
And that would be a good thing.
And, you know, the alternative personally,
it's bad because there's a psychological degeneration that goes along with it.
I've seen this with many, many of the people that I worked with,
who have been tyrannized in the workplace to the absolute detriment
of their psychological and physical health, right to the point of collapse,
confronting these crazy, crazy, things when they are sensible people.
That's a terrible price to pay, man.
It's a bad price.
And then if the foolishness isn't dealt with
at the local level, when it's still relatively trivial,
then it will multiply until it's dealt with at the social level.
And we're seeing signs of that already.
Antifa is a good sign of that, you know,
problems that aren't solved multiply and soon people fight.
And, you know, better to argue than to fight unless you want to fight.
And some people want to fight.
And I can understand why.
But I wouldn't recommend it because that doesn't lead good places.
It really doesn't lead good places.
So I say you have a duty.
Maybe that's where you stand up.
It's because you have a goddamn duty
to stand up and say, just say what you have to say.
You don't even have to be trying to make a point, exactly.
You're trying to get something done.
It's like "this is how it looks to me."
That's what that guy at Google did.
He wrote this memo, and he said, I talked to him today.
He said, Well, he went to a diversity
training seminar and he thought, no, I don't agree with that.
And so then they asked for feedback.
So he wrote this document a month ago.
This was written a month ago, got no real response to it.
Well, it bounced around inside Google
until a lot of people got interested, and then it escaped into the outside world.
But all he was doing was
he was told a bunch of things he didn't think were true.
He wrote down a bunch of things he thought were probably true.
He launched that out and said, Well, I think these things are probably true.
It's like, well,
probably they're true.
Well, so he paid a price for it.
But maybe we'll see what sort of price he paid for it, man.
He's gonna be a lot tougher in two years than he was two years ago.
You know, like, I reviewed this guy's document.
I did that yesterday,
and everything he said was validated by the scientific literature.
So what has happened is that someone has been fired publicly by major Corporation
for stating well grounded scientific truths, right.
There are exactly the sorts of things that I say in my classes, for example.
And the reason that I say them is because I read the literature.
It's not because I'm personally happy about the facts.
I think IQ research, particularly,
is so dismal that you can't possibly read it without being seriously disheartened.
If I could reconstruct the world so that I the IQ research wasn't true?
Well, it should be tempting, you know, but that's not how science works.
Science doesn't tell you what you what you want to hear.
It just tells you the way it bloody well is.
And he got pilloried.
He got pilloried for revealing a good fraction of current
scientific knowledge about gender differences.
Okay, that's not good.
And as you said, that's a big company, and it controls our communication.
How about we
do what we can
to ensure that these large communication companies don't get to impose a
factually false ideological structure on the rest of the planet?
Or you could think about supporting this...
This guy who blew the whistle, there's a fundraiser for him online.
He could use some money.
He wants to sue Google.
Yeah.
Maybe we could let them know that hiring
a human resources director who's also concerned with equity is
probably not a good idea for a capitalist company.
Why in the world would you hire your own enemies?
I don't understand that. So, well...
We'll see how the dialogue continues.
But back to the personal like
you need to say what you think, because that's where you come from, right?
And if you don't say what you think, then you kill your unborn self.
That's what you do. That's what Kane did when he killed Able.
And that's why his punishment was unbearable.
You know, you have things in you that are struggling to come to the light.
That's the truth. You need to oughter.
And you need to oughter that truth.
Because without that truth, you cannot live in the world.
Because the world is real and you need truth to live in the world.
And if you stifle your truth, well,
how can that be anything but something that brings about hell?
How could it be any other way?
So you think, well, why should you speak up? That's easy!
Because the consequences of not speaking up,
although delayed, are far worse.
That's the reason, that's the reason.
If it can't be courage, it could at least be prudence.