How to Stay Sane in a Statist World

“There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” - Prince Hamlet, Hamlet

This week's guest, Dr. Michael Edelstein, helps his patients see clearly what Shakespeare intuited about the relationship between thinking and emotional health. Edelstein is a long-time libertarian and practitioner of Rational Emotive Behavioral Therapy. This method leaves your childhood in the past, and instead trains you to challenge and replace distorted thinking with a more rational – even cheerful – perspective towards the things we cannot change. As the world hurtles towards an uncertain and unsettling future, we can find comfort in Dr. Edelstein’s advice on how to stay happy in a statist world. First, we need to recognize the traps that we're likely to fall into, including the sacred cow of "self esteem." Self esteem, Edelstein says, is the "unempirical, illogical and impractical" notion that we should rate our whole selves, rather than our actions, and think highly of ourselves regardless. Once we start thinking this way, we're more likely to end up with the opposite emotion when we make mistakes. When large groups or nations succumb to these stark and unrealistic self-portraits, it can lead to nationalism, wars, and even mass insanity. It’s not often that you get to hear a libertarian attorney interview a libertarian clinical psychologist on the secret to overcoming anxiety and depression. Just because the world's gone crazy doesn't mean you have to. Bob's producer, Charlie Deist, also joins the show. Learn how to respond rationally to adverse events from the Bay Area's premier vegan, libertarian cognitive behavioral therapist, on the show of ideas, not attitude.