It does not matter what other people say or think – AUDIO NSFW
FEAR OF THE UNKNOWN
Well, the people have spoken and you guys have spoken clearly. You would like me to talk about fear. And so fear is what we will talk about.
I was having a conversation with an individual and I simply asked him the question. I simply asked him the question what do you fear. And the reason why I brought up this question was because I was getting a lot of pushback. I was getting a lot of excuses. I was getting a lot of yes buts, sure howevers, yeah well. Like these types of statements, right? I could go over them, it doesn’t matter. That’s all I heard though. All I heard were the first words.
Yeah, but…
Well…
So…
It’s all I heard. I finally asked this individual. I simply said, “What do you fear?” What is it that you fear? And we sat there for a moment and we discussed it. Well, actually more than a moment. We spent damn near close to probably 20 minutes talking about this. I can boil it down for you. It’s the fear of the unknown. That is the meta. It’s the fear of the unknown.
But when we look at the larger play, the larger picture, the fear of the unknown is not helpful because every second that ticks by is the unknown. You just lived it. You were just there. Hopefully, you were a highly engaged participant in that moment is the hope and not some sort of passive blob that’s living their lives through the lazy river in that water pool that you went to when you were 12 years old.
Damn! Those lazy rivers are awesome though, aren’t they? You just get to sit there as a piece of sludge and have the water take you away. And you say take you where? Take you to wherever that lazy river wants to go! The irony is the lazy river never ends. The lazy river never ends. There’s an unseen force that makes sure that that lazy river goes in a loop forever and ever and ever. But it is not satisfying for us to sit merely at the meta-level and say it’s the fear of the unknown.
FEAR OF WHAT OTHER PEOPLE THINK
We have to categorize these ideas. We have to categorize what is the fear, and for this individual, to put it simply, it’s the fear of what other people think. I’ve talked about this particular idea a lot. Frankly, I love talking about this idea because talking about this idea firms in my soul. Why? Not giving a fuck about what other people think is one of the most powerful keys to success. It’s that simple.
I could give you many reasons why, but I’ll leave it to three:
#1 Caring about what other people think takes up time to care about what other people think. Why do you need to think about what other people think?
#2 Taking the time to care about what other people think defocuses you from what you should be thinking about, which is your business or your hustle or whatever you want to do exceptionally well. I hope you’re not in that lazy river.
#3 Thinking or considering about what other people think about you means absolutely nothing because they will never operate from an understanding, a deep understanding, a deep contextual understanding of what you’re going through to a T.
So they are merely making assumptions and assertions about what they think, given the limited information they have, about what they thought your idea or your tactic or your strategy or your action that you’re gonna take or whatever.
Now, we cannot discount wise counsel. Wise counsel should always be asked for. But please don’t get it twisted here, guys. When I mean what other people think, I’m talking about the Internets, okay? I’m talking about the community. I’m talking about the world at-large. I’m not talking about your mentor or the wise counsel that’s around you, that helps you make great life decisions. No, you need to care about what they think. You’ve asked them to help you live a successful life. And if you don’t have mentors, you don’t have people like that, you should get some.
Maybe we should do a podcast talking about that someday. Actually, I already have so you guys can look it up at the thebitcoin.pub/p90x. Check it out.
Those are the wise counsel that you need. But giving two shits about what other people think about what you’re doing in life is completely a waste of time. That fear is redunculous. And so I thought on this after my conversation with them because I’ve had so many conversations about fears before. I don’t mind revisiting it because it’s important to quicken yourself, to remind yourself, to revalidate to yourself why certain things should not be wasted on, certain things in life and certain fears in life and certain ideas or thoughts.
FEAR TAKES AWAY PRODUCTIVITY
They’re just time bandits. They take away from productivity. They take away from what you should be doing. I thought more on this idea of fear. We all agree that fear is real. Fear is a very real thing. So after this conversation, I was like you know what, I’m really good at helping them see the illegitimacy often in that fear in terms of what could happen from that fear.
Now, is the fear real? Yeah, we acknowledge that you truly have this fear. This is something that is going through your mind. It’s rattling through your bones. Granted. But to allow that fear to paralyze you to inaction, that’s what we have to overcome.
So what really is the cross-counter? What is the counter to fear? I thought about this. What is the counter of fear? It would be easy, and I’ve said this before but it would be easy for me to simply say, well, you know, let’s just do it. Just go. This is true.
I mean this is a muscle that needs to be flexed. The muscle of execution. So many of you guys have a very strong muscle of paralysis. That muscle is so ingrained and so calcified in your behaviors, you don’t even have to work at it anymore. New idea? Really cool thing that you really would want to pursue? Nope. Paralysis. I flexed that muscle so much, I don’t you have to worry about it. My body will ensure. Everything in my body will ensure that I do nothing.
On the opposite hand, you have to flex the muscle of execution, the muscle of doing, the muscle of stepping forward. We’ve talked about this. But as I thought about this, I dug even deeper and this is where I really want to go with you guys—a little bit deeper into this idea of fear. What is the most fear? What is the most fear that you could have?
HORROR MOVIES
I thought on this. Like what is the most fear that I could have? You know what my first thought was? My first thought was the movie, Saw. Before I was married, I used to love watching scary ass movies. I had one friend, her name was Mia, I think we saw almost every Saw movie. It would just be our thing. We weren’t even into each other anything like that. I would just hit her up because I knew like she was sick. This was a sick woman. Just almost as mentally sick as I am. We didn’t connect on many levels, but on the sickness of being so desensitized to horror movies.
We both had a level of extremeness. I would just hit her up and say, hey, the new Saw 4 came out or whatever, the new, most gruesome movie of the of the summer just came out. Do you want to see it? And she’d text back, she’d be like “hell yeah”. So we would go see these things.
I’ll tell you the reason why. The reason why is loved—I don’t watch them anymore, but I used to love gore films. Just ridiculously. It’s not even scary. It’s just gory. Just like seeing like body parts thrown all over the place. The reason I got into that is because I saw two movies: The Nightmare on Elm Street and then I saw the movie It. Those two movies are ridiculously scary, gruesome. I mean for it’s time for sure. These movies changed me guys. They changed me.
I don’t know what it was and so I thought like is this something that would be fearful. Like would I be scared of being in positions like this? I don’t really know. I’m sure I’d be scared, but I don’t know what it’s like. I don’t know if that’s the scariest thing that I could experience being like chained up or being in a horror film.
Then I thought about experiences in the past, scary moments of my past. I couldn’t really think of any. I mean, I lived through them, then you know how my attitude and my worldview is, if I’ve lived through them and I persevered through them, then it couldn’t have been that bad. Shit, right? It couldn’t have been that bad. Brother didn’t die.
Then I thought about my future. What do I fear in the future? And I immediately cut that off because I don’t fear anything in the future. There’s nothing to fear in the future. The future is only unrealized gains. The future is only unrealized potential. It’s when I’m living to it. There’s nothing there that I fear.
FEAR OF KILLING A MAN
I was kind of stuck. I was like well what would be the most fearful thing? I was sitting in my desk here, I looked around to my piece, my firearm because I have a concealed carry permit and I am almost always can carry in on my person. I haven’t taken self-defense courses and firearm training. I am well-equipped and well-prepared, I believe, if I ever have to use. I never want to ever use, but I’d rather be prepared than not.
I saw this piece, this firearm and voila! I had my answer. Killing a man. That right there, my friends, would be one scary ass proposition, I think. I’ve never done this, but where is it done a lot? Ah! War. That was easy. But war is easy these days, guys. War is easy these days. We just get to drop bombs on people. You can just pressed buttons nowadays and people just evaporate, get eviscerated into the ether.
But what about war before guns? What about war before gunpowder? What about sword combat? Spear combat? We’re talking about your Romans, your Greeks. Face-to-face type shit. Like hardcore in the fucking arena, crushing it. Yeah, I say crushing it like I’m getting excited about this. No! This is sword combat guys. We’re talking about killing a man. I mean that’s real. That’s raw.
We were talking about the battlefield of the mind. We don’t live in the battlefield of the Romans and Greeks, guys. Our battlefield as we talked about in previous podcast is the battlefield of the mind. And we will spend many more times talking about this particular topic because it’s so important to be reminded about how powerful our mind really is.
But man, on the battlefield, in the olden days, before gunpowder, before guns before all the cheap button presses, before the up, down, up, down, A, B, start, before the easy cheat codes of killing, war was raw. War was savage. It was face-to-face. The battlefield was real. The smells were real. The sights were real. The blood was real. The emotions were real.
And the god who ruled that battleground, that was the god of fear. I know it. I know it. It had to be. And so like a good scientist that I am, well-edumacated as I am, I did some Google searching because I like to go deep on my thoughts because they allow me to make better informed decisions in the future as I see and I am able to utilize what I read to advance myself.
So I Googled guys and I found a great article by Edgar Jones from the Journal of Contemporary History in 2006. The title of this particular article—very long—is called the Psychology of Killing: The Combat Experience British Soldiers During The First World War.
You see, I wanted to understand killing because my assumption, my hypothesis, and I felt really affirmed in this hypothesis, is that the greatest fear you can have is having to kill another man, having to kill someone else. So what did I need? I needed someone who’s done the research on what happens to a man after they kill someone or what happens to men before they kill? What happens to men in war when they are killing other people?
The Psychology of Killing: Combat Experience of British Soldiers and During The First World War
I Googled stuff guys. I found many articles not quite hitting it on the head and then I finally found this one by Edgar Jones, The Psychology of Killing: Combat Experience of British Soldiers and During The First World War. You’re gonna learn something here guys. I’ll give you the TL;DR, the took too long; did not read version.
Do men enjoy killing? The answer is no.
Very important, you guys know how much I loved decentralized applications for the new world. Now, if you’re new here and you don’t know what a decentralized application is, I’ll tell you what it is simply. A decentralized application allows that application to be proliferated around the entire world and no one individual has control of it. Okay? So that’s what decentralization allows for.
The problem with history is history is centralized. And because history is centralized, history is constantly being rewritten so that we will never know what really happened. This is not some conspiracy, guys. This is real. This is why I love decentralized applications like Everipedia, decentralized applications like library. So that information can be stored. Facts can be stored. History can be stored and not be revised all the time. This article is important given the fact that revisionist history is so real and so powerful that the history that you think you thought you knew is wrong.
“In recent years revisionist historians have offered a new and potentially disturbing reason why most soldiers survived the experience of trench warfare without becoming psychiatric casualties. In The Pity of War, Niall Ferguson argued that for many combat was not a devastating experience but exciting, adventurous and fun, precisely because of the danger. Furthermore, he suggested, ‘many men simply took pleasure in killing’ and proposed that Freud’s death instinct might be revived ‘to explain the readiness of millions of men to spend four and a quarter years killing and being killed’. Ferguson took the radical position that the First World War was, in part, prolonged by the British soldier’s joy of combat: ‘Men kept fighting because they wanted to’. In An Intimate History of Killing, Joanna Bourke acknowledged that recruits expressed an inherent resistance to killing and that this had to be overcome by training. However, once civilians had been turned into effective soldiers many found that killing was associated with ‘intense feelings of pleasure’. Because commentators were struck with the ‘ease with which men were able to kill’. She concluded that ‘men unable to cope with killing were an aberrant group’. Troops in support roles immediately behind the front who were denied ‘an outlet for aggressive tendencies’ were at heightened risk of psychological disorders, so that ‘more men broke down in war because they were not allowed to kill than under the strain of killing’.
The revisionist case was not entirely new as Glenn Gray, an American philosopher, had argued that ‘many men both hate and love combat’, enjoying not only the ‘delight of comradeship’ but also the ‘delight of destruction’. Whilst not an infantryman himself, Gray as a member of a counter-intelligence unit during the Second World War had been attached to fighting units in Italy and southern France. He recalled that ‘soldiers who cherished concrete emotions found the moral atmosphere of the front so much more endurable than in rear areas that they willingly accepted the greater strain and personal danger of combat’. Conceding that there were some soldiers who simply ‘endure war’, Gray concluded:
‘Happiness is doubtless the wrong word for the satisfaction that men experience when they are possessed by the lust to destroy and kill their kind. Thousands of youths who never suspected the presence of such an impulse in themselves have learned in military life the mad excitement of destroying.’
More recently, support for the hypothesis that soldiers enjoy killing came from Theodore Nadelson, a psychiatrist who treated US ex-servicemen at the Boston Veterans Administration Hospital. Based on the testimony of 24 anonymized cases, Nadelson concluded that true killers in Vietnam were ‘ordinary men’ before enlistment. He argued that once an initial resistance had been overcome in training, soldiers became addicted to the excitement and sense of freedom created by the license to kill, while the act itself could assume the quality of sexual arousal or drug-induced ecstasy. Given that the veterans he had interviewed all suffered from intractable psychiatric disorders, including post-traumatic stress disorder, Nadelson implicitly rejected any suggestion that killing protected against mental illness.
The ‘joy of war’ case stands in contrast to S.L.A. Marshall’s observations of US forces engaged in north-west Europe and the Pacific. He estimated that only 25% of infantry fired to good purpose during combat. Roy Grinker and John Spiegel, two American psychiatrists who treated US troops in North Africa, also concluded that few soldiers ‘anticipate pleasure from destruction or killing, and, although some chronically hostile, aggressive individuals may be fascinated by the prospect of getting all the fighting they want, they frequently find it impossible to adapt their habitually irascible personalities to the controlled environment of teamwork and coordination necessary in battle’.
Subsequently, Dave Grossman suggested that increasingly realistic training was needed to overcome the natural reluctance of recruits to kill. Techniques of desensitization and conditioning (including the replacement of bullseye targets with human representations that fell back on being hit) eroded any resistance a serviceman might feel towards shooting the enemy. As a result, a firing rate of 55% was observed in Korea, rising to 90% in Vietnam.
This article re-evaluates the accounts of soldiers and their doctors, and examines new evidence from shell-shock treatment units to identify the causes of psychiatric breakdown on the battlefield. Admissions for shell shock have been recorded to test whether the incidence of psychological disorder changed in response to different phases of battle. This data may help us answer the long-debated question as to whether soldiers ceased to function because they had been worn down by the gradual attrition and physical hardships of trench warfare or because they had been subjected to the greater risks of going over the top. In addition, the units from which patients were referred have been analyzed to find out whether front-line or combat-support troops were particularly affected by the stress of battle.”
Guys, this was a long and drawn-out article but the end is very simple. It is clear. I know that the revisionist historians wanna paint our old ancestors as these bloodlust thirsty monsters and certainly Hollywood does a fantastic job of reinforcing this idea. But to me and I don’t get how people can come up with these other ideas and then again it’s just little ol’ me, I never believed. I never believed that men will ever want to kill. It is against the natural order of things.
Let me go to the very end going all the way down. This is the summary of all their research. Here we go.
‘Killing in war has remained largely taboo and Bourke and Ferguson are commended for exploring this emotive issue. There is, perhaps, something inherently unknowable about combat; knowledge denied to all apart from those who took part. Historians can, of course, seek approximations through oral testimony and contemporary accounts but there are few certainties in the issue of killing. Whilst soldiers who took pleasure in such acts undoubtedly existed, it is far from certain that they were typical. It is also undeniable that troops found periods of excitement in the adventure of war and the camaraderie of combat. Fear, as Bourke argued elsewhere, was ‘the most dominant’ emotion of battle and ‘if any enjoyment was achieved it was due to the remarkable resilience of the human imagination’.”
FEAR OF KILLING
So my hypothesis was correct, guys. My hypothesis was correct. That the greatest thing that you can fear is being in the position to kill and take a life of another. So is that something that we fear today? Is that something that you fear on the regular? I just debunked your entire fear issue, my friends. See what I did there? You have nothing to fear because you will never—pray God—ever be in a position where you have to take another man, another person’s life. You will never get that far. You have nothing to fear if that’s the most fearful thing that you could do.
So I did a little bit of more research guys. And I looked up the top 10 biggest fears. You guys have already seen these lists. I actually went to three different sources and they were all relatively the same.
10 Biggest fears:
- Plane
- Public speaking
- Heights
- Darkness
- Intimacy. What a bunch of pussies! What kind of pussy ass generation do we live in guys? Ha! I read that and I chuckled. I’m not gonna lie. This is an unscripted, this is a real, authentic, radical transparency show, podcasts, whatever you want to fucking call it. The #5 fear in Americans today is the fear of intimacy. What the living fuck! I don’t even know what to say! What a bunch of pansy ass bitches running around.
- Death
- Failure. Wow. This is number seven. Really?
- Rejection. What a bunch of pussies.
- Spiders
- Commitment. You know if you’re not like laughing inside just a little bit… Guys, what has happened? Has the boomer generation fucked us that bad? Is that what happened? Did the boomers fuck us that bad? Some of you guys are boomers. Ha-ha-ha! Listen to this!
Man, what happened guys? The fear of darkness? The fear of intimacy? The fear of rejection? The fear of commitment? You know all these you know boil down to? It boils down to the very beginning of today’s show. The fear of what other people think about you. Guys, you see what I did? I just debunked your whole fear thing. You ain’t never gonna fear the greatest fear of on the battlefield, how to take another man’s life with the potential of that guy putting his spear or his sword right between your eyes or right in your side or cutting off your leg. Tis but a scratch guys. You’re not gonna be there. Okay? You’re not gonna be an axe paddler. It’s not gonna happen!
What are you scared of? What are you fearful of? You’re not afraid of heights or planes or death or darkness or spiders or commitment, failure, rejection. Are you scared what other people think about you?
I’m gonna give you the #1 way to reduce the fear in your life. It’ll be the best way. You’re going to have to remind yourself and you’re going to have to preach this to yourself every day. You’re just gonna have to do it. You’re just gonna have to do it. I had to do it. I had to do it. You just have to preach it to yourself every day.
That it does not matter what other people say or what other people think about your dreams in life. Because guess what? You’re not gonna be around in 100 years and neither are they. Let that sink in. Like you’re not going to be around in 100 years. Okay? They’re not going to be around in 100 years.
Now you can look at this fatalistically and say well shit, bro that’s fucking depressing. I’m not gonna be around—well I don’t give a fuck. You know what? I would look at the other way. I better make this the best damn time of my life because there is no dress rehearsal. There is no practice in life. There is only time tick tick tick tick taken away and you’re not gonna be here in 100. They’re not gonna be here in a hundred years. So what are you scared of?