Hello, everyone. I'm Stephen West. This is Philosophies this. Thank you to everyone that supports the show on Patreon and thank you to the people that don't support the show by going through the Amazon banner.

You can find out more about both those things on the front page of philosophies this.org. Apologies for the voice and my lack of execution today. I'm just getting over our cold. But it'd been too long since I'd graced you with my voice.

And I wanted to give you guys this. Today's episode is part six in a series on Sartre and Camu. I hope you love the show today.

So when a culture where there's so much social currency connected to being a victim and having some burden that you carry around with you throughout your life, there may be some of you out there that feel a little left out of all that.

Maybe you're the kind of person you look at yourself. You don't feel like a victim. Maybe you don't sit around poised waiting to make other people aware of some bad thing that happened to in the past. Well enough of that crazy talk. Get off the bench because your uncle Steve's putting in the game. I'm here to tell you. Don't worry, my friend. You are a victim. You really are.

Turns out we're all victims just by virtue of being born because just think for a second about how horrible the world was for us when we were all babies. Think of what it's like being a baby. Imagine going through something similar today. And if you made it on the other side, tell me you wouldn't be part of some sort of advocacy group for the people that are currently going through it. Think about it. You didn't choose to be born. Imagine being rounded up against your will and being rocketed off to some alien planet. You know nothing about. You find yourself once you get on that planet absorbed into some foreign tribe. You've been

doing it. You don't speak the language. You have no idea what anything is. You think the remote control of their TV is food. You're completely defenseless. And who do you have as teachers on this journey? What just some random man and woman that happened to look like you didn't go to school for this stuff. Being a baby, being a baby is like going to the world's worst community college where they don't even have teachers. It is pulsing random people off the street and say, hey, teach these kids about rocket science. Go. Except it's worse than that. We're not just learning about rocket science. We're learning everything about what it is to exist.

How we look at other people, how we look at the world, how we look at ourselves within that world. What I'm saying is the struggle for us former babies out here was real. And I think it's safe to say that when you're living in the middle of this chaotic world as a baby, just trying to figure things out. No one's really blaming you for just sort of going along with a lot of the ways people were doing things around you. There's a lot to figure out. And a lot of these ways we've learned to make sense of stuff are totally arbitrary. A lot of the ways we think about stuff have just been sort of almost by accident passed down from generation.

Philosophers realized this and at the time of Sartre for over 300 years, people have been pointing out how many of the ways we look at things in the Western world are largely derivative from the way Christianity describes being a human being. That's how entrenched religion was in the lives of people back then. And that even if you've never been to church, even if your family's 15 generations removed from ever having stepped foot in a church, some of these things are so foundational that generation after generation of confused baby trying to figure things out just went along with certain assumptions about existence that have been

to have their origins and Christianity. For example, there's a certain revelatory way that a lot of people look at important crossroads in life. Right? Like, for example, they'll say, okay, so I need to choose a career path for my life. I need to declare major. Big decision, what do I do? Well, whenever I close my eyes and think about what I want, I honestly don't know what I want. I can't make that big of a decision. Yeah, I've narrowed it down to a few things, but how can I ever know? And while it's not like I'm spending hours a day thinking about this stuff, I have faith it's going to come to me someday. I have faith in God. I'm going to be a great man. I'm going to be a great man. I'm going to be a great man. I'm going to be a great man. I'm going to be a great man. I'm going to be a great man. I'm going to be a great man. I

said, I'm going to wake up one day. Something's going to happen to me. Some life event is going to occur. And then I'm going to know what it is. I'm going to realize my calling in life in that moment. People do the same thing with relationships. They'll say, I have this vague idea up in my head of my one and only someone. Don't know exactly what they look like. Don't know exactly what they're going to be like, but I'm confident. One day I'm going to meet someone. And there's going to be this moment when I look at them and I realize they're the person I want to spend the rest of my life with. People do this with anything. They'll do it with motivational videos on YouTube. One day I'm going to watch the right

person's scream and let me to be a better person. And from then on out, it's going to be easy for me to go to the gym and eat pine cones for the rest of my life. In other words, there's a certain revelatory way that some people look at life choices that some thinkers believe is a long lost relic of the revelatory way we used to think about the nature of existence. That a reasonable expectation to have when navigating your life is that one day you're going to wake up. And there's going to be some event, some miracle that you witness, some transcendent moment where you realize the divinity of Jesus. If you have any further questions about the nature of existence,

just forward them to the Pope's inbox, that's a reasonable thing to expect in that worldview. Well, this isn't the only example of these long lost remnants of Christianity in our thinking. And another major one, another one that a lot of people in today's world still use to make sense of things, is the way that they look at themselves and who they are. Just like in Christianity, where yes, you have a body, but your true self is a soul. It's an eternal spirit hidden deep down within that body that you have an intimate access to. Just like that.

A lot of people in today's world think of their true self or the answer to the question, who are you as a personality hidden deep within us that only we and our closest friends have access to. You know, those say things like, sure, when I'm out in public, I do kind of put on a mask to other people for the sake of social utility. I mean, I don't act like my 100% true self in the Starbucks drive through. Yeah, I tell people things they want to hear. I play the game because look, the fact is, it's just not useful to not to mention, I don't really feel comfortable given 100% of my true self to the person in the Starbucks.

I just drive through who am I really though? Well, that's something I reserve for my family and my closest friends. In fact, even some of my closest friends don't know everything about the depths of what it is to be me.

Maybe for some of you out there, there's only one other person in this entire world that has full access to your true self hidden deep within you.

But Sarca would say, is this really how the self works? Is the self really like the Christian soul hidden somewhere deep within you that only you have access to.

I think it would say it very well may be that you put on a mask when you go out in public for the sake of pragmatism.

And it very well may be that you've reflected on yourself and you have this idea up in your head of who you are that's only accessed by you and your closest friends.

But don't ignore the possibility that there are multiple levels of deception going on there.

Maybe you're telling yourself a story you want to hear the same way you're telling the Starbucks barista story.

This concept is a common one in existentialism. It's actually one of the main themes in Dostoevsky's book Crime and Punishment.

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