SelfAdoration.com

I pay particular attention to the very young and the very old.

I like children because they have not yet learned how to lie comprehensively. Abstract deception is one of the sine qua non attributes of the fully-human state of consciousness – and yet another thing dancing bears can never do – but it’s my least favorite arrow in the conceptual quiver.

And I attend to the elderly because they embody the lifelong practical consequences of habituated probity or deceit. Nature is just, so time wounds all heels, but time also seasons goodness into sweetness.

Can there be a single, easily-implemented key to lifelong happiness?

Surely the answer is yes: Love your self.

But to do that, as we’ve noted, you must make your self lovable, fueling your mind with the hope that your hard work will pay off.

Can you do that alone?

For a while, as a young adult, but the evidence of the elderly argues that you can’t do it forever.

Perhaps I’m conflating unlike things, since the fate of the solitary old person was generally sealed by too much deceit, not too much solitude. Even so, the overwhelming number of the very happy old people I meet are very happily married.

Yesterday I met a couple who take the prize for lifelong happiness together.

They were walking side-by-side holding hands, which only children, the newly-romantic and the happily-coupled do. But they were also connected in another way: She had an oxygen-supplementation line – and he was carrying her tank.

A simple enough thing – chivalry or common courtesy, certainly no huge burden. But it was marriage near the end of life in a way you would not have seen it when those two were younger: They are there for each other, and they cannot be apart as long as they are connected by that skinny, transparent oxygen line.

When you are young, you think you can get away with lying to yourself, but this is just because the consequences of your deception have not caught up with you yet. Older people (more…)

The Non-Agression Principle (NAP) is merely a sentiment, much alike to the Golden Rule. But it is (putatively) socially-restrictive, where “do-unto-others” is reflexively unilateral. NAP is an attempt to induce by magic yet another Social Contract – asserted unilaterally by you yet somehow binding on me and everyone else. I dealt with all that a long time ago in Meet the Third Thing.

But: There is an underlying ontological reality to NAP: The mutually-assured destruction (MAD) that adult men communicate to each other by means of the nod of acknowledgement.

If you imagine two strangers meeting in isolation, the thing that engenders and sustains the peace between them, and which makes overtures toward mutually-beneficial cooperation possible in due course, is the conviction on the part of each of them that they are evenly matched – approximately equal in ferocity, martial prowess and weaponry. By means of a glance followed by a quick nod, each of them communicates these ideas:

• I see you.

• You see me.

• I have values I will die to defend.

• I am prepared in body, mind and emotional commitment to kill you, if necessary, even if I die in the process.

• Ergo, we should be friends, or at least non-combatants, instead.

(This is a very Driven mothertongue expression, incidentally, a contingent affectionate display: “I will do my best to love you if you do your best to love me back.”)

When the parties are unequally matched – as with a bully encountering an untouchable or thugs plucking a ripe teenage girl – crime ensues, NAP be damned. What makes peace (and the concomitant plenty) possible is not NAP but MAD.

So when Rand says, “The precondition of a civilized society is the barring of physical force from social relationships” – she is talking out her ass. It is the mutual and simultaneous pre-emptive assertion of the threat of violence that creates the peace necessary to negotiate any further fruits of that peace. To the extent that it relies on either Rand (more…)

To refuse to think is to refuse to live. Accordingly, if you’re not studying me, you are wasting the finite time of your life in its own despite. Amidst a vast horde of finger-wagging, terrorizing poindexters, I alone am doing the poet’s job: Leadership.

Here’s what matters: The world you live in is a garden, a paradise of infinite possibilities, awaiting only your commitment, attitude and effort to bloom into a riot of riches. Want proof? Take a moment to hug the computer you’re reading this from while asking, “What did I do to deserve something so wonderful?”

Meanwhile, the job of virtually everyone who is paid to describe your world is to convince you that you live in a demon-haunted dump, where your only chance for survival is to catalog every past peril.

Why should that be so? Even ignoring the spontaneous de facto conspiracy that is anti-egoism, we are continually haunted by shrieking ghouls because those wretched wraiths are, by now, the only people we will let speak, and the only ones we will listen to. We live in a Cautious tyranny, and, to all evidence, we like it that way.

Witness:

That’s a very cursory gloss the empathy strategies of the four DISC types. I would argue that all of these motivations are fear-based in origin – all expressions of the fear of loss. The goal-pursuits of the Driven and the Cautious are both aimed at material safety, but the Driven pursue their safety by the production of abundance, where the Cautious pursue theirs by loss-avoidance.

The Driven were not driven from the classroom, they fled in abdication of their duty to lead. And the Cautious are not competent to lead at all. There are few Driven accountants – and (more…)

I’ve spent six months, now, pummeling The Ayn Rand Institute. This is precisely as fair as Donald Trump picking on poor, pathetic Jeb Bush: An aggressive attack from a Driven personality will always cow the Cautious, since the Cautious temperament cannot react without planning.

And where normally I would pull my punches for de facto retards, in this case I say none so deserving. Rand’s remnants are an existential menace – and not just to those many thousands of dead babies and their many thousands of self-annihilated parents.

I pointed out the other week that the official-Objectivist admonition that “emotions are not tools of cognition” is obviously, stupidly wrong. Today we’ll take a different tack: Demonstrating how emotions provide crucial evidence about the internal state – and underlying empathy strategies – driving your emotional responses – and those you see coming back to you from other people.

So: Apprehend this chart:

If you make a claim I think is truthful, and I like that, I’m going to feel satisfaction. If I think the claim is false, but I like it anyway, I’m going to feel an internal disquiet. If I think the claim is truthful, but I don’t like it, despite that, I will feel annoyance. And if I think the claim is false and I don’t embrace it, what I will feel will be indifference.

This is not to imply than any of those emotional reactions is a reliable guide to epistemological correctness in the world outside your mind. The chart is simply an illustration of how you will react when the world outside your mind intrudes on your internal presuppositions – essentially on your DISC profile.

The reason for this is that your emotional reactions emerge from the parts of your brain that are incapable of reason. This does not make them non-existent, and it does not make the information value of their existence irrelevant or dismissible. Too much the contrary! What that chart does is illustrate for you how your emotional (more…)

An unmarried emancipated woman is a de facto man until she marries: She eradicates her own infestations. She cannot have delegated her self-defense to a man because she has not. She has divorced her father and not yet wed her husband.

Accordingly, she must defend herself. A proficiently-deployed firearm would be ideal, but this is Europe, so hand-to-hand is probably optimal.

Krav Maga is how Kelly Ripa could cripple Michael Strahan, so big, strapping German broads should make for fierce, fearsome Amazons. This problem will persist until they do.

We grew up in a golden age. Now we discover the world Jefferson, et al, swept away for us – until Marx swept it all back. But that’s no more than spilt milk, by now, because there is no alternative to the existential.

When does a fish need a bicycle? When the bike is the only way to get back to the sea. We do as we shouldn’t, in marriage and family, but abstract knowledge is the great equalizer. When the women of Europe can promise, “You’ll die with a pork sausage up your ass and your dick down your throat” – the streets will be as safe as houses.

This is not even #SisterYouAskedForIt. Every woman should learn how to be deadly, from her determinedly deadly parents, long before she’s out on her own. This was a foolish luxury we conferred on our daughters – and too many of our sons. That is ending in Europe, and perhaps here, too.

And that is ultimately to the good. An organism that cannot defend its own life will not have it for long, and if you cannot defend your self, in too many important ways, you don’t have a self.

The survivors of this mess, barely begun, will be amazing people. I wish I could live to meet them.

P.S.: Without even intending to, I just invented actual #feminism: By learning to be deadly, a girl will learn everything she needs to know about standing up to men. She will (more…)

Note and disclaimer: Speaker Greg Swann is no longer affiliated with The 21 Convention or 21 Studios in any ongoing capacity.

Urf. I don’t hate it that I make enemies. I’ve done that all my life. I do wish, though, that I made better enemies – men who are actually capable of following through on their enmity. I am sitting on the powder keg that will enflame all of Western Civ, and I can’t even incite enough anger to get the match struck.

Oh, well. Vita brevis, ars longa. I’m terrible at waiting, but waiting is what I got.

Meanwhile, here’s a wonderful video made at the tail end of The 21 Convention in Tampa in October of 2013. There are two more videos of me to come from this extravaganza – an interview with Marilee Ellis and my one-hour presentation on deploying DISC to improve your empathy strategies – but apparently the petty slights for those movies are still being composed.

This was huge fun. There’s a good highlight from me at around the 17:00 mark, how actually to be your ideal man. And I’m worth seeing again at the very end, as a bookend to the quote that began this post.

Friends or enemies, here’s to manlier men!

One of the points I hit repeatedly in 2015, in public and in private, is the idea of masculine frame: Holding onto your identity as the emotional anchor in your marriage amidst the tempests of feminine crazy.

It is easy to decry the emotional distance and waning commitment men exhibit in that circumstance, but she is at fault, too: He is cheating her of the rock-steadiness he promised her, but she is in all likelihood cheating him of the lifelong boner-bait she promised him.

The bad news? That’s his problem, too.

It’s his marriage. It was his relationship since it began. When she attacks his frame, she is trying to take over a job he cannot abdicate. When he yields that frame, she panics, trying even harder to take over. Rinse and repeat, and the marriage is doomed – until he takes back the masculine frame that drew her to him in the first place.

The video embedded below was an eye-opener for a lot of people. If you give me twenty minutes, I’ll give you back your marriage.

A few weeks ago, writing about taxation, I said:

I have further thoughts on Ayn Rand’s late-life Social Security parasitism if anyone cares to revisit that topic.

I was referring back to a post I wrote in June of 2014: How to explain Ayn Rand’s late-life Social Security parasitism? “Old people make mistakes.” That might seem like too much inside baseball to you, but it’s interesting because Ayn Rand’s terminal destination – government-registered looter – is the best weapon Marxists have to deploy against her lifelong anti-Marxism.

As I discussed back then, the official-Objectivist rationale for this undoubted predation is ludicrous, an obvious ass-covering exercise: Ayn Rand was really, really, special-snowflake entitled to steal other people’s money because she had been opposed all along to having her own money stolen. This of course is Tu Quoque and Two Wrongs Make A Right, the lies one can predictably expect to hear every time you catch a hand in the cookie jar.

I find that explanation hugely implausible. Had Rand actually believed she was proudly championing the restitution of property rightfully her own, she would have proceeded differently: By formally demanding a specific sum, for example, or by suing for the restoration of her property rights – or by seizing what she said was hers like some fictional towheaded pirate. Moreover, it seems reasonable that she would have mounted her campaign while she was still young and vital, not when she was already circling the drain.

But that argument of timing – by way of her estate planners, Rand applied for Social Security and Medicare as she neared her death – implies that Rand also did not think she was entitled to those funds by the ordinary illogic of the elderly, either. If she was seeking restitution, she would have done so when we was younger, and if she was simply a typical rent-seeking septuagenarian, she would have applied for ‘benefits’ when she became eligible – years earlier.

All of this argues to me that Rand did not herself knowingly (more…)

Self-adoration is the mental state that results from habituated excellence – from consistently setting and eclipsing high standards.Shanghai Daddy via Foter.com / CC BY-NC-ND

A question from David Brodie, a man I much admire:

I was wondering how you would apply the principles of self adoration to the classroom, and how you would go about teaching the concepts of self adoration to children.

I’ve kind of winged it so far, really I was just riffing on the moment while explaining the basic rules of the classroom (“Respect..respect yourself, respect your classmates, respect your teacher, respect the room…but most important to me is to respect yourself..” then I gave an example of how holding yourself to a higher standard, in this case with cleaning up food after yourself, is respecting everything else below that). It just felt too collectivist and like I was missing the mark – the purpose should be the self adoration and self respect they achieve from holding themselves to a higher standard, but I felt like I was actually still just calling on them to respect everybody else first and making it sound like they were respecting themselves first.

What’s your take?

I’m doing some of this too, just now, in a much less organized fashion, working things out as I go on the basis of long-standing habits. What I have to offer are at best rules of thumb, though I am sure there is a perfectible theoretical praxis to be found here.

So first: Catch your kids doing something right. You know what praise-worthy virtue looks like, so praise it when you see it: “I love the way you organized your work. You clearly gave this a lot of thought, and it shows.” “I like the way you look after your little sister. She’s lucky to have a big brother like you.”

True visibility reflects the underlying DISC motivations of the person you’re seeing, so you should take those into account: “Jimmy likes for things to be perfect, and just look at all the detail in his project. But Johnny likes to get things done, and you can see how much extra work he (more…)

It’s the two-year anniversary of The Church of Splendor. To celebrate, we’re reveling in poetry – including the evanescent effervescence of that silent sibilance that ensued when my mother made beans. Find serious joy like that at any other church!

I’m a very high-D in the DISC system, a Driven. Compared with a highly-analytical Cautious personality, I can make three mistakes and land on the perfect answer while the high-C is still building the spreadsheet to analyze mistake number one.

What does that mean in the context of losing weight? I ain’t counting calories, points or starch stats. My friend Richard Nikoley runs a very big Paleo-living blog, FreeTheAnimal.com, and I deeply admire the work he is doing there, but I have zero interest in thinking about food, much less obsessing about it. Food is something I consume while working in order to keep working. That’s all.

The consequences of habituated inattention will accrue, of course, with the result that I have been a slowly blossoming carnation since 1998, the last time I would say I was physically fit.

I started to reverse course a few years ago, losing weight steadily instead of steadily gaining. My diet secret? Not a diet, but simply a long-term change in my habits.

With that as introduction, I will give you my three quick ’n’ easy high-D diet prescriptions:

1. Eat half as much twice as often. Whatever you think you want, eat half that much. If you’re peckish later, eat another small meal. First, you’re not nearly as hungry as your eyes think you are. And second, you won’t make the time to eat too often, so you’ll eat less overall.

2. Avoid sweetened drinks. I include diet drinks and fruit juice, but YMMV. That 64-ounce soda is definitely your enemy, and an 8-ounce glass of OJ is plenty with breakfast. Arguably artificially-sweetened drinks just make you swap in other sugars later, but I’m safe either way, because sacharine tastes like rat poison to me. I drink ice-water mostly, with coffee and tea, no milk, no sugar, for variety.

3. Avoid fancy wheat. Wheat is not food, it’s fodder. That’s why the Roman welfare state was built on a foundation of wheat: You can tell people it’s free food, when it’s really just a way of bulking (more…)