 We're each going to speak a little bit at the beginning about tribalism and family relationships and then leave a lot of time for questions. I think honest this time. So I just want to get a sense a little bit of some of your experience. So blood is thicker than water. How many of you actually heard people in your own family say that or things to that effect? I'm just, fair number of you, okay? I'm sorry? Okay. How about, did you get the attitude again from some family members, you know, you're a heath or you're a calabrese, you'll be okay or, you know, our way of doing things at least implicitly get the idea. Our way of doing things is the right way because whatever the last name is. How many of you get that from your families? Okay, fair enough. I got that a lot from my families. And guilt, which I think Ankar brought up in a different context this morning. Anybody know guilt from family guilt? Hey, that's, God, that was the most popular, by the way, okay. Also came up this morning, you know, a lot of us still have tribalist inclinations on some issues and I hate to say this, but you know, family brings out the tribalist in me. And anyway, I'm working on it. But it's taken some work. I want to talk about a couple of things. Why I think it's natural for family to exert a tremendous grip on a lot of us. Why it's objectively difficult for an objective adult to figure out exactly how to deal with family and then just say a word on how to deal with family. So I think it understandably exerts a tremendous, it can exert a tremendous grip on many of our minds. First impressions count, right? And as a child, these are the very first impressions you're getting in life, just as you're even getting your bearings, your sense of the world, your sense of reality, your sense of yourself. This is the first social dynamic you're dealing with, but not only social dynamic, right? They're the people who help you. You depend on them. I think this makes it all the more difficult to gain distance and an objective perspective. Even these people, your mother and father, now I understand, obviously people grow up in different circumstances, you know, all sorts of different configurations of families, but unlike everybody else, your mother and father, they get titles. They're mommy and daddy, even your siblings, right? You quickly learn, well you have a sister Maria, oh yeah, and you have an aunt Maria too, or somebody else is named Roger in class like your cousin Roger, but nobody else is mommy or daddy. No wonder what they say and what they do, you know, carries some authority in our minds. And the implicit I do think is as important as the explicit what's actually articulated, right? From these people, particularly the immediate family in the early years. So it can be natural, I think, to absorb the idea that their ways of doing things just are the right ways of doing things. And when they say you should do this or you have an obligation to do that, that's just taken like a metaphysical fact. This can also be exacerbated by the fact that others in the family aren't questioning some of those things. So then to say a little bit about why I think even as an adult, it can be sometimes complicated to figure out how you should assess your family members and deal with them. Family expectations are often unspoken. There's a lot in a lot of families that's left unspoken. Resentments from 10 years ago, grievances, a lot of families don't like to talk things out and through and some of that can shadow our later relationships. Again, unhealthy dynamics and assessments of other people in the family can be exacerbated by the fact that everybody else in the family is going along with this. You're especially weird if you just question certain things. Often the ways of our families are coming from people who themselves are not on rational premises, right? I mean a lot of their philosophical beliefs are not sound. Some of them have self-esteem issues and security issues, so these are all in the mix. Then you've got a society that reinforces the idea that family is all. I mean even last week in the aftermath of the horrible massacre in Pittsburgh, some of the pundits, but we're all one family. Now even though some of what they were getting at I think is fine and legitimate, it's that family. Family is the be-all, right? Holiday season coming up, Thanksgiving, Christmas, everybody spends the holidays, the major holidays with their families, right? At great expense, great trouble, great travel, great distance, right? Oh, you're not spending holiday, you know, Christmas? There's something wrong with you, that's the unspote, right? So family has this really special status, it seems. Then a final complicating factor, at least. Sometimes you do owe your family certain things, right? The message here isn't oh, you know, grow up, be an objectivist and hell with the family. There are often lots of good things in families and family members, and it's possible that even on egoistic premises, not sacrificial premises, you might owe certain things to people in the family. Even inconveniences at times, right? And inconvenience doesn't mean a sacrifice, those are not equivalent concepts. You might value certain people in your families, you might have really gained and benefited in certain ways, yeah, it's often complicated by the fact that well, I didn't ask for those benefits when I was two years old or when I was seven years old. Nonetheless, you might have benefited in substantial ways, you might have other things, qualities that you enjoy about family members, there's something in familiarity of having been through some of the same experiences, vacations together, or whatever it might be. That can be grounds for good positive relationships with a sibling 30 years later or whatever. So anyway, let me just say a little bit more about how then might it make sense to deal with family members, very broadly speaking. Assess them as responsible adults, as adults and as individuals. So be willing to say, yeah, that brother was great and she wasn't so hot at all, that's it, right? Uncle Joe, I always found him really kind of phony. And uncle Billy had a great sense of life, wonderful to be around. I would do things for him, I would visit him in the hospital and so on. So judge them as individuals, realize that family, that word when it's invoked, that isn't a get out of responsibility free card for anybody, blood isn't thicker than reason, right? So judge people individually, but judge them justly, right? The virtue of justice, judge them objectively, judge them in context. There's a personal thing I'm debating saying, but I mean, you have to judge people in context. So be rational, you've heard that before. In particular here, I think in this context, question some of your own motivation. Why am I doing that? Why am I inclined, is it just to appease mommy's demands? Is it out of guilt? Is it out of, no, there's a genuine value here or what? So there's a lot of, I think, self-questioning that also has to go into figuring out rational ways of dealing with our families, okay? That's great. So let me just elaborate on a few things that Tara just said, cause I agree with all of that. It's because of that guilt, right? That it makes it so much harder to evaluate and to judge. And you have to be aware of that, that it's hard to evaluate your parents partially because you're young and life experience is limited and it's hard to be objective about something as close as the relationship. They were part of your life, or they were part of your life 18 years for most of us, right? 18 years that they're all the time. And then most parents, particularly if you're Jewish or Catholic, have embedded some good guilt within us. Which is an emotion that's hard to deal with. Yeah, good guilt, good guilt. Family guilt, which is always good guilt, right? There's no such thing as good guilt. There's own guilt and unearned guilt. This is unearned, cause what are you? You're a kid, right? So, and it's very hard to undo all that. You're also rebelling. Most of us rebelled when we were teenagers, you know, in rational and irrational ways. I certainly rebelled in irrational ways when I was a teenager. I didn't have the context that I had five, six, seven years later. So the tendency is they don't know anything, you know, and so you can go, you can bounce around. They're useless, and as you go, oh, well, maybe there was some virtues there. Maybe there's some good things there. So you can go in either direction. You can become too subservient or you can rebel for the sake of rebelling. And again, the challenge, and it's not easy, particularly with family, for all the reasons Terra mentioned. And because if they were a good family, they've given you so much, right? You haven't gotten life, that's the big one. But they've supported you for 18 years. Now it was their choice, but they still supported you for 18 years. So you, in that sense, they've given you a lot to untangle all of that. And the objective about evaluating your parents is very hard, and I think it's part of why, even years and years later, we look back and we still, we have to unpack it, and it's hard to deal with and so on. But you have to hold one thing clearly. It's your life. It's not theirs, right? And I know this is pretty basic, and if you've read The Fountainhead, it's all over The Fountainhead, but it's about you. It's not about them. You have to develop that independence of thinking and independence of living. You don't automatically own your parents anything. You owe them justice. You owe them, if they were good, you owe them how you would treat any good person. You owe them that sense of justice. But you don't automatically owe them obedience. You don't automatically owe them love. You don't automatically owe them anything. It has to be earned based on your assessment today of how they treated you growing up and what value they contribute to your life now, at your age, as you're living right now. I was doing an interview, I just posted up on YouTube a couple of days ago with an evolutionary psychologist by the name of God Saad. Many of you might know him. And he during the interview said something like, everybody jumps in the river to save their own kid. It's blood is thicker than water, right? And we're evolutionarily programmed to love our kids and to jump in. And we're evolutionary programmed to love our parents. We have to do it. There's no choice. I said, really? But what about those parents who not only don't jump to save their kids, but abuse their own kids, treat them really, really badly? And what about a kid you don't love? What about a parent you don't love? There's nothing about this that's automatic. It has, but it's, again, it seems automatic because for 18 years, we've been in this particular environment. We've had to deal with them. And the expectation is they, parents tell their kids all the time how much they love them and the expectation is you love them back. And it's very, very hard and challenging to be independent and to think independently about this particular relationship and you're like, probably the hardest one for anybody in terms of the relationship because of the time. And the culture, as Terry just said, the culture is constantly reinforcing this, whether it's evolutionary biologists now telling us how it's in our genes, right? To the religious conservatives who tell us that the unit in society, American conservatives constantly say the unit of society is not the individual, right? It's the family. Whether it's Centurum or Jeff Sessions, I mean, they talk about this all the time, about the essential unit socially as the family. And this is constantly reinforced. Why? Why is it the family? Why isn't it you and go back to, I didn't hear Greg's talk but I take it that Greg talked about what is the unit, right? So it's a tough one. I think family is one of the toughest ones in terms of human relationship, maybe the toughest, in terms of figuring out exactly where you stand and establishing your own independence without rebelling for the sake of rebellion, which is kind of the other part of it. So, you gotta be your own person. You gotta think for yourself and be as objective as you can be in assessing your relationship with your parents, with your siblings. And at the end of the day, I mean, so many people I know who there's still a sense of duty. We have to go and spend holidays with the family. It's really hard, particularly if you live close to them. It's almost, you know, because otherwise it's a massive breakup, right? So the two pieces of advice are, think for yourself and move. Move away, move away, yeah. And moving away makes it easier, I can say, you know, from personal experience. It makes it much easier to deal with it and to have some objectivity about it because you're not engaged in the daily thing. So, but yeah, it's a challenge because it's the first tribe and most parents want it to keep it a tribe and you're trying to break away from the tribe and be your own person. And it's hard. I'll just quickly add, well, echo really two things said. I think this is, so Ayn Rand's advice is always to judge. And I think this is an area in which it's super important to judge, but judgment, it has a kind of stigma attached to it now. The judgment means negative judgment and it doesn't mean negative, it means objective judgment. And I think if you've had halfway decent parents, the judgment has to be super positive, that they've contributed so much to your life. And even if you disagree with things they did and if you're now looking at it as an existing or a future parent, I do some things differently. That doesn't mean that they weren't trying to do their best. And so, and I mean, it's one of the worst things, I think that can befall an individual to have really bad, like to have really bad abusive parents because they're not yet equipped of how to cope. It's difficult to judge your parents because of the relationship and so on. But if any parent who's trying, it's a hard job. I mean, it's a really hard job. And that's, you don't have that perspective, I think as it growing up. You tend to think, yeah, your parents know everything and can do everything and they can't and they don't know everything. So it's, and that, to get an objective perspective you should get, oh yeah, okay, this is really difficult. If they did halfway decent, you should have a positive evaluation of it. But I think the other aspect of it is, to become an adult, you're becoming, as Iran was stressing, an individual. And it takes, in a relationship, it takes two people to be striving to now have an adult relationship. So, and I think it's difficult for parents to now view the child no longer as a child, but as a fellow adult. But the child has to do that as well. So I've been in a lot of relationships where people are complaining about their parents are still treating them like kids. And I tell them, yeah, but you act like a kid around them. So what do you expect to happen? You have to, and that you're asserting now that you have your own life and your own values is not, I'm condemning everything you're doing and so it's just, this is my life, these are my values, these are my interests. And they might not now sync up with yours, what you think and what you value and so on. And you can still have a real relationship, just like you can have friends you disagree with. But if you're trying to move to adulthood, you have to try to deal with your parents as though now they're individuals. But that also means with a life of their own and interests of their own. And it's not every time I need them, I go and then I expect them to drop everything and they're gonna pay attention to me. But when they start treating me like a kid and want that kind of relationship, I said, what are you doing? I mean, I'm an adult. You can't, so it takes a lot I think to establish a good relationship. And it takes both. And if both sides aren't trying to do it, it's often a very difficult thing to navigate them. But both sides have to be doing it.