How to Stay Sane in a Statist World
2017-11-05 · Guest: Dr. Michael Edelstein (Clinical Psychologist and Author) · 51:17
Psychological dimensions of freedom and REBT
Bob Zadek explores the psychological dimensions of freedom with Dr. Michael Edelstein, a clinical psychologist and libertarian. They discuss Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT) and how its rejection of internal coercion mirrors the libertarian rejection of state coercion, while addressing the “burden” of self-reliance that comes with true liberty.
Topics: Libertarianism, REBT, Psychology, Self-Esteem, Coercion, Occupational Licensing, Albert Ellis, Murray Rothbard, Anarcho-capitalism
Speakers:
- Bob Zadek: Host
- Dr. Michael Edelstein: Clinical Psychologist and Author
- Charlie Deist: Producer
- Caller (Bob): Listener from San Francisco
The Burden of Freedom [00:28]
Bob Zadek: Hello everyone, welcome to The Bob Zadek Show, the only live libertarian talk radio show on the air all weekend. The show always of ideas, never of attitude. Thanks so much for listening this beautiful Sunday morning.
Freedom is, of course, for all of us, aspirational. All of us aspire for freedom—freedom from government, freedom to run our lives and organize our lives and our relationships the way we think is best, without having somebody else’s vision of our freedom imposed upon us. And all of us, certainly the listeners to my show, aspire for that and do all we can to continually free ourselves from the constraints of government at all levels.
Today is a cautionary reminder, and also a solution to the problem of what would happen if we actually achieved all of the freedom we so much aspire for. Because after all, freedom to run our lives imposes upon us the obligation to do a good job, and that’s not easy. We are so accustomed to having government tell us what to eat, when to sleep, what kind of light bulbs to use, how much water can come out of our showerhead, how much water we can have in our toilet. We get lulled into a comfort zone of “we can be off duty.” The government will tell us what to do and how to organize our lives.
And on a personal level, I experienced that when I visited in Eastern Europe several times, in the newly freed Eastern Bloc countries where they are enjoying the absence of communism, the absence of an oppressive, overbearing state. And I expected the attitude of the people that I spent time with to be relieved and happy. But there was a substantial portion of the population who wanted communism back. They wanted to be relieved of the burdens of having to care for themselves. And we don’t want to ever succumb to that reliance so that our skills of coping with our own lives simply atrophy. And once that happens, it’s all over, because nobody will aspire for freedom anymore. Freedom will be a negative, not a positive.
Well, how does one cope with freedom? And it’s not easy. Well, with that profoundly complicated question, I thought I’d ask my friend, Dr. Michael Edelstein, to join us this morning. Michael is a psychologist, he has published several books, he helps patients in the Bay Area and beyond learn how to cope with freedom, learn how to experience the joy of self-reliance, and to simply run your life without interference. Also in the studio with me is my producer and dear friend, Charlie Deist. Charlie and I will speak with Dr. Edelstein and we will learn the challenges of coping with a state-free life. With that introduction, Charlie and Michael, welcome to the show.
Dr. Michael Edelstein: Thanks, Bob. It’s a pleasure to be here.
Charlie Deist: Always good to be on the show. So, Michael, I wanted to get you in studio here because I think that this is sort of a unique meeting of the minds. We have a libertarian attorney, and I can say with confidence that you are the premier libertarian, vegan, clinical psychologist in the Bay Area. You’ve got offices in San Francisco and Marin, and you’ve helped a lot of people, including myself. Back in college, I discovered your work. We met through libertarian circles, and I at the time had kind of just heard about these ideas of cognitive behavioral therapy and learned that this is a different approach than maybe a typical talk therapy that you might get with a psychoanalyst or a psychiatrist. So could you start off just sort of telling us, what is it that you practice with this Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy, and how it differs from a traditional talk therapy that you might get with a psychoanalyst or a psychiatrist?
Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy [05:45]
Dr. Michael Edelstein: Yes, Charlie, thank you for that nice introduction. And as you said, I practice REBT, Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy, which was devised by Albert Ellis many years ago. And the main idea of REBT is that it’s not your dysfunctional childhood or your crazy parents, or even a job that you don’t like that forces you to feel anxious, depressed, angry, procrastinate, or addicted. But rather, it’s what’s in your head—your thinking, your ideas, values, beliefs, attitudes, opinions. What you tell yourself when you get yourself emotionally disturbed, angry, depressed, anxious. It’s those ideas that create your disturbance, not situations themselves. And that’s a very powerful idea because if it’s your own thinking that causes your disturbance, then you can change your thinking. You can’t go back in a time machine and change your childhood—that’s dead and gone, it’s not going to reach out of the grave and grab you—but you can change your current thinking in the moment.
Charlie Deist: So what does that actually look like when you’re working with patients? Somebody comes to you and they’ve got some kind of distorted thinking, or their thoughts, according to your criteria, are out of order or out of line with reality. How do you first go about identifying the areas where people might have distorted thought patterns?
The Three Musts of Emotional Disturbance [07:28]
Dr. Michael Edelstein: That’s a good question. The first step is to find out what their values are and what they would like out of life. And usually when they come to see me, what they would like is not to be depressed, not to be emotionally disturbed or addicted. So that’s what we start with. And then we look at their addictive thinking or their anxiety-creating thinking.
And there are three main areas that we can look in to find that. The first is a demand on oneself. And that takes the form of: “Because I prefer to do well in life and in my work and get approval of significant others, therefore I absolutely must do well and get approval. And if I don’t, this proves I’m a worthless failure.” And this kind of thinking, this demand on oneself, which you could call an ego demand, leads to anxiety, depression, guilt, jealousy, shame, humiliation.
The second demand is not a demand on oneself, but it’s a demand on others. And that takes the form of: “Because I would like you to treat me kindly, considerately, lovingly, with understanding, reciprocally, reasonably, therefore you absolutely must treat me this way. And if you don’t, you’re no good, you’re a rotten person, you deserve to roast in hell, and I’ve just appointed myself your roaster.” So I get angry, resentful, hostile, and treat you poorly, which just leads to a vicious circle rather than any improvement in the other person’s behavior. And that’s the second “must,” the demand on others. And that’s also called grandiosity. Because you have some chance of changing some things in your environment, but you have much less of a chance of changing another person because they have their own will, their own preferences, and their own desires in life.
Bob Zadek: What’s interesting is that reference to grandiosity, the belief that you can change others’ behavior—that sounds like everybody running for public office. Everybody who’s running for public office, Michael, seems to have grandiosity on steroids, because they not only believe they can—and by the way, they can change people’s lives, but not through persuasion, but through a gun and a jail cell—but they believe they can change people’s lives, and that’s why they have chosen that occupation for the very purpose. So that desire to change other people is a pretty universal quality, is it not?
Dr. Michael Edelstein: Oh yes, it’s a universal quality to want to change other people and want to change your environment to make life easier for yourself and achieve your goals. But when people take that universal desire and make it into a demand, an absolute “must”—“You run the universe and people have to be the way you want them to be”—that’s when you get into trouble. By the way, you identify a fertile ground for clients for me, so send these politicians to me and I’ll cure them.
Coercion: The Common Denominator [13:43]
Charlie Deist: Now, when we’re talking about this broader definition of freedom, it’s sort of the cognitive liberty, the emotional—the opposite of distress, emotional health or emotional well-being. When you start to see improvements in your patients, how does that show up? And where, if somebody is starting to develop a new way of thinking, what does that look like? How do you replace a distorted thought with something that is a healthier pattern of thinking?
Dr. Michael Edelstein: That’s an important question. And before I answer that, Charlie, let me just touch on the third area of emotional disturbance. The first was a demand on oneself and the second a demand on others. The third is a demand on the impersonal conditions of one’s life. And that takes the form of: “Because I prefer my life to be hassle-free, easy, interesting, productive, therefore it absolutely must be. And if it’s not, then all of my life is horrible.” And that demand tends to lead to procrastination and addictions. So if you’re addicted to alcohol, cigarettes, heroin, shopping, video games, look for that “must,” a demand on the conditions of your life.
And then to your question, Charlie, well, once you identify this irrational or unrealistic thinking, what can you do about it? And the answer is: use the scientific method. Question, challenge, and ultimately contradict the “musts” and “shoulds.” Because if you think about it, since you don’t run the universe, there’s no reason why things absolutely must be your way. So I help my clients see that in many different ways—that their “musts” are false and the global evaluations that lead to that—“I’m no good, you’re no good, life is no good”—is our fiction. And then as they question, challenge, and contradict that, they tend to feel better and do better and report to me that they’re less anxious giving a talk, or they spoke to their boss about changing things in the work environment where in the past they were anxious about doing that, or they stopped drinking compulsively—those kinds of things. So usually it’s very evident that they’re doing better as they change their thinking.
Bob Zadek: Now, Michael, in a typical therapy session—yours, I suppose, as well as most others—it is the therapist who gets to probe the dark inner workings of somebody’s psyche. On this show, it’s more balanced. And you are a fervent libertarian, an anarcho-capitalist perhaps. And my question is: is it coincidental that your political worldview and your quite effective approach to psychology happened in the same human—you? Or is there a relationship between the political beliefs you have come to embrace and how you see how you can help patients whose life is kind of out of control?
Dr. Michael Edelstein: That’s a great question, Bob. And I think that there is a relationship. There are a number of similarities and overlap between libertarianism and Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy. And one of them is that they both stem from a basic simple principle with profound ramifications. In libertarianism, the principle is: it’s wrong to initiate aggression against an innocent person. And in REBT, it’s: no “musts,” no “shoulds,” no demands. So they both start with simple principles and then you can apply it to many areas of political or emotional life.
Bob Zadek: In other words, they—in both approaches, your professional life and your political life—it is the aversion, the absence of coercion. That’s the common denominator. I think the word “coercion” is the unifying force that unifies the yin and the yang of your life.
Dr. Michael Edelstein: Yeah, that’s great. I hadn’t thought about it that way, but that’s true. Coercion by the state politically, or coercion by yourself, your own “musts,” your own demands, that tend to limit your life and lead to a much less enjoyable emotional life.
Charlie Deist: I think it’s interesting that in contrast to certain other ideologies where there’s a more activist approach that you can take to getting what you want, where you can lobby the government to do this or that, libertarianism has fewer options. And I think that is partly an explanation for why it suffers in the political landscape—it doesn’t really have any real voices for representation. Because most libertarians who start thinking about these things realize that there are much higher returns to working on oneself and one’s immediate sphere of influence than trying to influence a national scale. So I don’t know if it’s the kind of thing where we could say that libertarians on the whole will gravitate towards alternative approaches to political activism—lobbying, writing letters, drumming up campaigns—but it does seem like it might be a more sort of fruitful approach for the future of, you know, for turning away from a sort of political mindset to a personal improvement mindset.
The ABC Method of Self-Therapy [17:01]
Charlie Deist: So I want to give our listeners a little bit of the toolkit that you give in your book, Three Minute Therapy, and that I assume you work with your clients. What is the kind of short version of—how can somebody work on themselves, do their own therapy at home or with a group? What’s the best way to do it?
Dr. Michael Edelstein: Yeah, I’m glad you asked me that, Charlie, because my goal is to teach my clients to be their own therapist. And one of the main methods that they use in order to question, challenge, and contradict their irrational thinking is what Albert Ellis devised, called the ABC method, or I call it the three-minute exercise. And that involves six elements in the alphabetical order of A, B, C, D, E, F.
So at A, you start with an issue. Let’s suppose you’re fired at work. So A, the activating event, the situation you’re upset about, is “I was fired at work.” And presumably you’re upset about this, and that’s why you’re doing a three-minute exercise.
So at B, you have an irrational belief: “Because I prefer not to be fired, I absolutely must not be fired. This proves I’m a worthless failure.” So that’s demand number one that I mentioned, a demand on yourself.
And then at C, that could lead to depression, anxiety, guilt, procrastination, addictions. So at A, B, and C, we pretty much diagnose the problem. A, the situation, the adversity; B, what you’re telling yourself about it; and C, the emotion or behavior it results in. And you notice we didn’t have to put the person on the couch and ask them to free associate about their childhood for ten years before we discovered the cause of their disturbance, but it just took a few seconds to do the A, B, and C, and you can do this with yourself when you’re disturbed.
But then we go on to doing something about this irrational thinking. And D stands for disputing or questioning the irrational belief. And that’s a simple process. You just take what you have at B—“I must not get fired”—and you make it into a question: “What’s the evidence because I prefer not to get fired, I absolutely must not get fired? How does this turn me into an awful, worthless person?” So we ask that question, we’re looking for evidence.
And then E, if you think about it, E is effective new philosophy or effective new thinking, the answer to the question. And there are many reasons why your “must” and your self-doubting is false. So you could come up with some of those. And some typical ones at E is: “Although I strongly prefer to keep my job, there’s no reason I absolutely must not get fired. People get fired all the time. It is highly disadvantageous to get fired and will lead to more hassles in my life at first, but hardly the end of the world. I don’t like this situation, but I definitely can stand, I can bear what I don’t like. I’ve survived difficult situations like this in the past and I’ll survive it in the future. And the fact that I got fired only proves about my worth, at the very worst, is that I’m an imperfect human who acts imperfectly, not a worthless failure.”
And then the more you remind yourself of that—and I recommend to my clients that you write this exercise out a few times a day, two, three, four, five times a day, ten million times a day—the more you do this, the sooner you get it into your brain and you start thinking differently. And as you think differently, then you get to F. F is a new feeling, which is deep concern about being fired and not having an income right now, frustration about the event, sadness, regret, disappointment, but not depression, anxiety, suicidal thoughts, etc.
Charlie Deist: So it’s about taking those useless emotions—depression, anxiety—or worse than useless, things that might trigger some sort of negative feedback loop, and turning it into a more, if not productive feeling, then at least something that won’t inhibit you from moving forward.
The Fallacy of Self-Esteem [21:10]
Charlie Deist: You said something about self-worth in there, and that we don’t want to make—we don’t want to have thinking that bases our self-worth on the events of our lives. And a related idea that you’ve written about and talked about is self-esteem. Can you tell us why you think that the concept of self-esteem is a problem or is something that prevents people from being as free as they could be?
Dr. Michael Edelstein: Yes, definitely. And self-esteem is a very large problem that people have, and most therapists and self-esteem authors have it wrong in my opinion. And so let’s start by defining self-esteem. To esteem something means to think highly of, so self-esteem means to think highly of oneself. So you get a great job, so you did well—that’s very nice. And then you overgeneralize to your total self as a person and you think, “I have this great job, therefore I’m a great person.” And that leads to high self-esteem. And then you get fired, and then you go to the other side of the coin and you tend to think, “Well, I got fired from this great job, I’m a loser, I’m no good, I’m worthless.” And that leads to these problems: depression or addictions or other emotional problems.
So it’s self-rating—rating your total self based on the rating of your behavior—that leads to high or low self-esteem and is unrealistic and causes a variety of problems. So the solution is: rate your behavior. It’s important to rate your behavior. And if you get fired, say, “That’s bad that I got fired. What did I do that I can improve on next time?” So that’s important. Or if you have a good job and you’re keeping it, you’re getting raises and promotions, then it’s good to say, “I’m doing well. What am I doing to do well? How could I maintain these behaviors?” So rating your behaviors, your performance, is a positive thing. But then overgeneralizing to your total self really has no point and it leads to disturbed emotions. And it’s unempirical—there’s no evidence you’re a good person. You’re always an imperfect human who acts imperfectly, never a good or wonderful person. Your essence, your personhood, stays the same throughout life, which is imperfection. So there are many ways to counteract that by questioning and challenging that idea that you’re a good person or a bad person. It will help you get over self-esteem problems and lead to unconditional self-acceptance, which means accepting yourself as the human you are, the imperfect human you are, whether you do well, poorly, or not at all.
Bob Zadek: This is Bob Zadek, and I’m spending an hour talking with Dr. Michael Edelstein about the confluence of his unique and highly effective approach to psychotherapy, what that has in common, what it teaches us about the core beliefs of libertarianism, where those two apparently independent schools of thought actually meet and have common goals. 800-424-BOB-SHOW to join my conversation. We’re going to take a really short break. We’ll be back in thirty incredibly minute seconds. Please stay tuned, lots more to follow.
[Break]
Freedom and the Post-Communist Transition [26:42]
Bob Zadek: Welcome back to The Bob Zadek Show, the only live libertarian talk radio show on the air all weekend, the longest-running libertarian talk radio show in California. Thanks so much for listening to my conversation this morning with Dr. Michael Edelstein. We are discussing the confluence of two very important philosophical, medical, psychological ways of approaching the world: the importance of individual freedom and, of greater importance, the burdens that individual freedom places upon all of us.
You may recall that earlier in this show, I reported on my visit to Eastern Europe where I discovered to my great surprise that many citizens who spent much of their life living under communism found the non-communist, the greater freedom life, to be not to their liking. They were troubled by, burdened by, the importance of running their own lives. And it is too easy for us to yearn for more freedom, to want to get the government out of our lives, until we find out that when we achieve that success and we do get the government to some degree out of our lives, well, that means somebody else better take over, and it’s going to be us. And it’s that second part of the freedom equation—no government, well, somebody’s going to have to take charge and it’s going to be us—that I dare say members of our society even today find that disconcerting, troubling, and perhaps pretty scary.
So Michael, you have been a libertarian with those beliefs for quite some time. What is the relationship between how you embraced libertarianism and how you formulated your approach to psychology that has been so effective? Is it coincidental, or does it tell us something about, dare I say to borrow a phrase from David Boaz, the libertarian mind?
Influences: Albert Ellis and Murray Rothbard [29:28]
Dr. Michael Edelstein: Well, there is a similarity in how I adopted both ideas. And the similarity is I found experts in the field and learned from them. In the case of libertarianism, I was lucky enough to befriend Walter Block, a noted libertarian, and we became friends and talked about politics for many months, and he converted me to libertarianism.
And in the field of psychology, it was Albert Ellis in the early 1960s. I heard Albert Ellis on the radio and went to a talk of his and read a book of his, and it made a lot of sense. I was 18 at the time and I was in psychoanalytically oriented therapy, and the sessions would consist of the therapist saying things like, “Why do you feel that way? Tell me more about it,” things like that. And I would do most of the talking, and I’d feel very good right after the session because he didn’t criticize me, he was warm and very nice. But in between sessions, I had no idea of how to deal with my problems—with my anxiety, procrastination, worry about being rejected by girls—and so it really didn’t help.
And when I went to the Albert Ellis lecture, he criticized very generously psychoanalysis and the kind of therapy I was in and experiencing, and it made a lot of sense, so I started to see him. So in both areas, there are geniuses in the field. And Walter Block learned it from Murray Rothbard in a similar way. So there are geniuses in the field, and if you’re interested in learning more about either, I recommend you read books by Murray Rothbard and Walter Block and books by Albert Ellis. Albert Ellis was very prodigious; he’s written over 80 books. There are YouTubes and podcasts of Albert Ellis, so that’s a great way to learn about it.
Bob Zadek: Walter Block has been a guest on my show about two or three times. Walter Block wrote a book which caught my attention many years ago called Defending the Undefendable, which is a fascinating book. I recommend it; it’s a quick read, you can read it in one night. It will make you so interesting at cocktail parties and after-dinner conversation; you will find your circle of friends to grow astronomically. Walter Block was also one of the few libertarians who warmly embraced Donald Trump’s run for presidency, was one of the first.
Communicating Libertarian Ideas [32:26]
Bob Zadek: We have a caller, Bob from San Francisco. Welcome to the show this morning, and what’s on your probably complex mind if you’re calling in to talk to Dr. Edelstein? Good morning.
Caller (Bob): Yeah, I actually have a simple mind, that’s why I’m calling the good doctor here. And my question is: does the doctor have any advice to any of us that are libertarians and when we’re talking to non-libertarians, what the best way is to approach non-libertarians so that they become open to our ideas? And in sort of on a broader base, say we have a boss and he’s doing something we don’t like the way he’s doing, we think it’s a mistake—is there a way to approach the boss to sort of get him to open up to our ideas?
Bob Zadek: Very good questions, Bob. Thank you so much. Michael?
Dr. Michael Edelstein: Thanks for the question. And usually a good way to approach anyone that you’d like to listen to you is first listen to them and understand their perspective, what they’re thinking. And often in discussing politics, people use the same words to mean different things, like “capitalism,” for example. And so it’s good to understand their perspective on definitions of these words. Often just getting at a common agreement about a definition of a word like that leads to a change in political outlook. So listen, be positive, don’t get offensive or things like that. And especially don’t get angry or resentful, don’t have “musts”—“You must see the truth and you must get the idea because I have the truth with a capital T and you are benighted and don’t understand.” So don’t escalate your preference to persuade them into demands, into “musts” and “shoulds,” and then try to have a good give-and-take and avoid interrupting. So that’s generally my way of handling a conversation.
Bob Zadek: And what about explaining to non-libertarians, the second part of Bob’s question, about libertarianism? By the way, my suggestion, Michael—I’ve had great success with hypnosis, but that may be a little simplistic. So if you have a more profound way to deal with them, I would love to hear about it.
Dr. Michael Edelstein: I normally—and I don’t think that my way of doing it is necessarily the right way. One of the things to do is experiment with different approaches and different ways to explain it. But one thing you can do is if someone’s really interested, recommend some basic books on libertarianism or some good talks on libertarianism or some good websites. So that would be something that would be good to be on top of and consider turning people to.
Force vs. Protection [37:30]
Bob Zadek: Bob, if I might, a suggestion that I have found to be effective in explaining to non-libertarians, especially progressives, the difference between progressivism—if that’s the alternative to libertarianism—the difference between that and libertarianism. I can explain it, Bob, in a way that is very simple and very dramatic and almost is not subject to rebuttal. And I simply explain to them that the core difference between libertarianism and non-libertarians is that non-libertarians, especially progressives, require and require embracing force, imprisonment, and guns in order to promote their philosophy. Every element of progressivism has baked into it a compulsion. If you don’t do what I suggest, then—or what we require in our worldview—you will have your property taken away by fines or your freedom taken away by imprisonment. So progressivism cannot survive and cannot be promoted except with the ally of force and taking away one’s property. And that statement, Bob, is not susceptible to dispute. Whereas libertarians simply say, as Matt Kibbe said in the title of a wonderful book, “All libertarians want is: don’t harm me and don’t take my stuff.” And that’s a very easy philosophy to embrace. And once you challenge a progressive: “How do you promote your point of view without a gun and a jail cell?” they become mute. And I hope you find that helpful, Bob.
Charlie Deist: It’s interesting, Bob, as you’re saying that, I’m starting to develop a little bit of a sense of uneasiness about that way of framing libertarianism because, on the one hand, libertarians don’t advocate abolishing laws or jail cells or taking guns away from police, unless you are on the anarcho-capitalist side of the spectrum, which we can let Michael speak to in a minute. But I’d like to suggest that maybe there is more force or more coercion or more—maybe let’s just call it violence—that rests inside each individual. And this is the reason that we’ve struggled for so long to get rid of the yoke of government. It’s not necessarily the inherent force of government, but it’s almost the inherent violence of humans that’s mirrored in the institutions that we’ve developed in order to contain our violence. So I think the hopeful thing for me in this conversation is the possibility of working through whatever internal contradictions we might have, rid ourselves of our own violence in order to develop that personal cognitive liberty and gradually, one person at a time, grow out the ability and the sense of responsibility so that we could someday live without the jail cell, without handing over some of our power to government. What do you guys think about that?
Bob Zadek: Well, Charlie, libertarianism is not passivity. It’s not the total absence of guns, force, and power. It is simply—in libertarianism, guns and force and power are used only for protection, not for the purpose of imposing anything more than that. The two-pronged libertarian approach is, as I said earlier: don’t harm me and don’t take my stuff. And since I don’t choose to protect those freedoms myself by arming myself to the teeth and by killing anybody who crosses the line, I would much rather have the infinitely more civilized approach of having an institution be established, as the Declaration of Independence said, in order to protect those inherent rights that I have simply from my humanness. I have the right to be left alone and to have no one take my stuff. I have that right. And all I ask is, yes, there is force, yes, there is a military, but with the incredibly limited mission of protecting me and making sure nobody messes with my stuff. So I’m not “burn all the guns,” I’m not “swords into plowshares.” I want protection, but other than that, if you don’t mess with me, government has nothing to do to you, no force to be imposed upon you. So I didn’t state my position well. I embrace an army, I embrace a police force, but for the sole purpose of protecting me so I can enjoy the rights that I’m entitled to by nature of my being a human being.
Dr. Michael Edelstein: Well, I have a somewhat different view as a libertarian anarchist. And I think that anything that people want that isn’t coercive will be provided on a free market. So if you want food, it could be provided on the free market. If you want education, it could be provided on the free market. And if you want police or military, it could be provided on a free market.
Charlie Deist: Always an interesting thought experiment to get into the hypothetical of, you know, were we to somehow dismantle the state, how would various private agencies or organizations be able to step in and would that be an equilibrium—they would say in economics—would that be a stable equilibrium, something that would naturally tend to proliferate into a competitive marketplace, or would it just go back to one monopoly protection agency? And that gets into the theories of people like Walter Block and Murray Rothbard.
Influences: Albert Ellis and Murray Rothbard [41:59]
Charlie Deist: Michael, you talked earlier about your two main mentors or people who have influenced your thinking, Murray Rothbard and Albert Ellis. I read both shared a dislike of Ayn Rand and her objectivist philosophy. And I also found an exchange that you had had with one of Ayn Rand’s disciples, Nathaniel Branden, about this idea of self-esteem, where he had written a book called The Six Pillars of Self-Esteem, rooted in objectivist thinking that elevated the individual as this sort of, you know, paragon of virtue, at least potentially, where he made some of those generalizations about the whole person being good or bad depending on whether they embraced the right principles and acted on them. So what was the substance of your disagreement with him? And could we think of objectivism as almost a form of libertarian heresy in not recognizing that people are prone to mistakes and that we will fall short and that it will end up backfiring if we don’t have the right model of what a human is?
Dr. Michael Edelstein: Well, I wouldn’t think that if someone’s psychology is unreasonable, that necessarily is a reflection of their political philosophy, so I wouldn’t call him a libertarian heretic. But Nathaniel Branden was the main proponent of Ayn Rand’s idea of the importance of self-esteem. And Nathaniel Branden has written many books on self-esteem, and one of the most popular, as you mentioned, Charlie, was The Six Pillars of Self-Esteem.
So Nathaniel Branden described six practices that if you engage in, then that would give you self-esteem. And it was a practice of living consciously, self-acceptance, acting responsibly, being assertive, living purposefully, and having personal integrity. Now, I’m in favor of all these things; they sound very good and I help my clients achieve these things. But then he goes overboard and overgeneralizes from doing well on these things—having integrity and being assertive, being honest with yourself and others—to saying, “Therefore you’re a good person because you do well at this.”
Now, I’ve had debates with various proponents of this Ayn Rand philosophy, and they claim that he’s not saying you’re telling yourself you’re a good person if you do well on these things, but that the experience of doing well on these things leads to self-esteem. Well, if we get back to my ABC model, he’s saying A, “I acted, say, assertively, I was assertive,” therefore at C, “I have high self-esteem.” But we know that’s not how emotions work. He’s leaving out B. It’s sort of a behaviorist model where A causes C, where the situation, or in his case the practice of something, leads to high self-esteem or a good feeling about yourself. But really it’s B. B is: “I am assertive, that’s good, therefore I am a good person.” So he’s leaving out that important step.
And then the question is: are you a good person if you do well on being assertive or these other things? And the answer is: you’re doing well at this task or this trait, but that’s not the entire you for many reasons. One reason is humans are a process; we’re always changing. So you could be assertive today and not assertive tomorrow. So are you a good person or a failure if you’re assertive today or not assertive tomorrow? Or to take a more difficult case, let’s say we look at Charles Darwin. Charles Darwin was a great naturalist and pioneer in the field of naturalism and science, yet he suffered from debilitating panic attacks and depression. He withdrew from life for periods of time, didn’t write, didn’t do research. So he did very poorly in personal freedom, but he did well in science. So is he a good person or a bad person? Obviously, people are too complex to make a reasonable decision about that. So that’s my main beef with that.
Bob Zadek: You mentioned Charles Darwin. I was a pretty strong adherent and believer in his approach, summarized sometimes as “survival of the fittest,” until Donald Trump became president. And before that, Donald Trump made buckets of money. And Donald Trump personifies and proves beyond a doubt that Charles Darwin didn’t know what the heck he was talking about. Just an aside.
Conclusion and Resources [47:09]
Bob Zadek: This is Bob Zadek, I’m spending an hour talking with my dear friend, Dr. Michael Edelstein, and my producer, Charlie Deist. We’ll be back with a wrap-up in thirty really short seconds. Please stay tuned.
[Break]
The Libertarian Minute: Occupational Licensing [47:31]
Bob Zadek: Juan Carlos Montes de Oca thought he was engaged in an act of charity by giving homeless people free haircuts. But according to Arizona’s State Board of Cosmetology, he was breaking the law. Juan’s crime? Cutting hair without a license. Occupational licensing laws are out of control. No one should need permission to earn an honest living. No freedom is more basic than that. Can you believe that in some states, governmental permission is needed to braid someone else’s hair? And until recently, Arizona required a license for horse masseurs. None of these laws even remotely protect the public, only protect practitioners from honest competition. Frederic Bastiat, the great 19th-century libertarian thinker, explained occupational licensing as a form of, quote, “legalized plunder,” close quote, where particular industries petition the government for special privileges that prevent competition. Thankfully, organizations like the Institute for Justice are fighting for our economic liberties in court. The IJ recently won a landmark case against the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation, which had been requiring Texans to obtain a cosmetology license to practice eyebrow threading. Eyebrow threading? That’s a harmless technique for removing eyebrows with two pieces of thread. Never mind that cosmetology schools spend zero hours teaching eyebrow threading. This has been the Libertarian Minute with me, Bob Zadek, host of The Bob Zadek Show. Learn more about libertarian ideas at libertarianminute.com and get the podcast of my weekly show at bobzadek.com.
[Break]
Bob Zadek: Welcome back to The Bob Zadek Show, the only live libertarian talk radio show on the air all weekend. Hope you enjoyed that commercial by me, by me and about me. Hope you don’t mind. We’re just wrapping up our conversation with Dr. Michael Edelstein. Michael was helping us understand the correlation between his quite effective form of psychotherapy and his fervently held libertarian and anarcho-capitalist beliefs. Michael, how can our listeners follow your work, learn more about your worldview and your approach to life and psychotherapy?
Dr. Michael Edelstein: I have many YouTubes and podcasts, so just do a search on YouTube on my name and you’ll find many. I have a website called threeminutetherapy.com, which is also the name of my book, and “three” is spelled out, the word threeminutetherapy.com. And I do an in-person, phone, and Skype practice, so I work with people around the United States and even overseas by phone and Skype.
Bob Zadek: Thank you so much, Michael. Bob Zadek saying so long for now. And Michael, by the way, a little business advice: since you charge by the hour, how can you make a living at three minutes of therapy per patient? You must make about a dollar and a half a day.
Dr. Michael Edelstein: Well, I do a lot of marketing and try to get on radio shows like this one.
Bob Zadek: In other words, it’s volume. Thanks a lot to Michael, thanks to my producer, Charlie Deist. I’ll be back next Sunday again for another hour of independent and objective libertarian ideas.