SelfAdoration.com

A few people have mentioned Sam Harris to me, but, until lately, I haven’t paid him any mind. Harris is one of a half-dozen or so currently-publishing pop-sci writers who inflate absurd academic claims all out of proportion and then sell them as intellectual cotton-candy to thoughtless people — who in their turn like to affect to pretend to make-believe that not-actually-reading EZ-reading non-fiction books makes them intellectuals. This is not a new scam, but the plummeting profits in book publishing — along with the ease of promulgating scathing debunkings of this nonsense (about which more below) — promise to make it an obsolete con-game in very short order.

But I happened upon a link to an essay by Harris called The Fireplace Delusion at Billy Beck’s place, and I clicked through to see if there was any there there.

There is not.

Most of the article is devoted to endlessly masticating the obvious fact that wood smoke is toxic. If this is news to you, it could only be because you don’t read the news. But Harris treats it as a huge, world-shaking revelation that requires paragraph after paragraph of completely redundant defenses.

His actual point is to claim that, because the mindless people he dines with refuse to accept obvious facts of nature that don’t conform to their thoughtless prejudices — buttressed in many cases, I am sure, by completely useless graduate degrees — that this is in some way analogous to the reluctance of some religious people to conform their supernatural claims to the laws of nature.

Your first thought, on reading that summary, might be to argue that Harris is committing the fallacy of the specious analogy, since the two categories of error are so different. But I would go one further and say that (more…)

A friend said this on the phone: “I’m sorry this is taking me so long. I’m really bad at computers.”

My reply: “Why would you say it that way?”

“Huh?”

“I understand that you’re reporting on what you see as being a matter of fact. But why not say it this way: ‘Computers have been a challenge for me, but I find I’m getting better with experience.’ You’re telling the exact same truth, not misrepresenting anything. But by focusing on what you’re doing right, you’ll improve your future performance just by changing your attitude.”

I’m not talking about canned affirmations. I’m talking about the words you choose when you’re telling the unshaded truth about your life, your mind, your talents, your work, your relationships.

You can say: “I’m a lousy writer.” But you can be just as truthful by saying this instead: “It hasn’t been easy for me to improve my writing skills, but I’m finding that hard work is paying off for me.”

You can say: “I always get lost when I go someplace for the first time.” But it would be equally factual to say, “I find it beneficial to prepare carefully before I travel to an unfamiliar neighborhood.”

You can say: “I’ll probably lose.” But you would be no less honest to say, “I just might win.”

The statements you make about yourself might seem to you to be statements of fact at the time you are making them. But whatever truth there might be in those expressions right now, you are also writing the script for your future. Saying “I’ll probably lose” is functionally equivalent to saying “I’ll never win.” If you don’t mean to say that you can never, ever get anything right, (more…)

From Chapter 10 of Man Alive, “A mindful catalog of mindlessness.’

I told you how you came to be a self, but how did you go about failing so completely, so consistently, to be a defective, bungled and botched not-self? You worked at it, that’s how.

It really is a testament to your fundamental goodness that you have tried so hard, for all of your life, to conform to ideas of moral virtue that no one can live down to fully and yet still manage to remain alive as a human being. You were thoughtless – mindless – and so you did not know that the cause of your repeated failures at attaining those “virtues” was human nature itself. But you were damned if you didn’t try to be what you sincerely thought was “good,” and that much is all to your credit. You may have behaved mindlessly, but you gave your mindless pursuit of ethical perversion everything you had.

But how did anyone gull you into behaving so thoughtlessly so scrupulously and so relentlessly for so long?

Here’s one good way: Inclusion and exclusion. It worked great when you were five years old and it still works great today. Obviously, no one can indoctrinate you before you master Fathertongue. Before then, words are semaphores to you, ciphers, with no more conceptual content than the (more…)

In Nine empathies I rehabilitate the DISC personality assessment by connecting it back to mammalian-like versus reptilian-like empathy strategies. In Shyly’s delight we’ll be taking DISC strategic, using it to better manage your everyday value-pursuits.

In the book, I cite this DISC analysis of the cast of the TV show Entourage I wrote five years ago. Someday this will be ‘news’ – when they release the Entourage movie. Until then, it’s an example of the kind of fun DISC play you should be doing all the time.

For now, I just want to talk about thinking in a DISC-like way, using on-the-fly DISC analysis to evaluate and respond to the people you come into contact with.

Here are the four DISC categories:

Dominance
Influence
Steadiness
Compliance

That’s less than useful. Here’s a better way of understand what DISC is measuring:

D’s are drivers. They’re all about getting things Done. A high-D (c’est moi) can be a prick to work for (yeah), but every successful boss will have a lot of D in his personality.

I’s are all about Image, about the way other people perceive them, their accomplishments and their stuff. Many successful salespeople are strong on I traits.

S’s are strongly associated with family life and social communities generally. If your office has a Secret Santa gift exchange, it’s being run by an S.

C’s are associated with calculation, computation and a comprehensive attention to detail. If the till comes up three cents short, a D will toss in some coins to get on with business, but a C will keep counting and counting until the cause of the discrepancy is uncovered.

Here are two more axes for understanding DISC profiling:

D’s and I’s are about telling, where S’s and C’s are about asking.

And D’s and C’s are about process, where I’s and S’s are about people.

It would be terribly convenient (at least for me) (more…)

This is me from today’s Church of Splendor homily: The interests of the self. This week – in observation of 9/11, which is by now a world-wide day of shame for sane Muslims – I’ve been trying to extend the hand of Driven Sociable friendship to the lifelong victims of Islam.

“Where are the moderate Muslims?” we demand. Where are the incentives for considering alternative social strategies? To tease you away from a Cautious tyranny, I must offer you more than you stand to lose by quiet rebellion. This is how I start:

More in prose:

Empathy for the irreproachable: How the Prom King becomes the monster.

My sermon on religion: Unsolicited advice to the sane victims of Islam.

Redeeming Western civilization by curing the incuriosity of the East.

Reflecting His Radiance…

Relationships as prison camps: “There’s no way out of here. When you come in, you’re in for good.”

This is an advance-look chapter from the book I’m working on now, “Shyly’s delight: Work, play and love like a Labrador.” It’s about illimitable joy, so I’ll tease you with some observations about pain. —GSS
 

By doing all this DISCing, you’re learning to think DISC all the time, on the fly. You should DISC everyone you meet – including fictional characters. We once DISCed the cast of Entourage, and just lately my wife and I resolved that Claudius in Hamlet should be played as an over-matched Incandescent being Peter-Principled – “When sorrows come, they come not single spies but in battalions” – into an all-too-temporary Cautious tyrant.

It’s all right here in this chart:

Incandescents make their greetings aggressively – often with a sneer or a snub – in pursuit of a distant admiration. Claudius begins by using veiled aggression in pursuit of the affections of Queen Gertrude and the people, but he ends using nothing but naked aggression against everyone, throwing anyone else – including Gertrude in the end – onto the pile of corpses to save his own skin.

Why does DISC matter in your real life? For one thing, because just like Claudius, every Prom King, every Queen Bee, every idol of the Incandescents, must eventually become the monster. When either of the aggressive strategies, Incandescent or Cautious, is dominant and where escapes to alternatives are blocked, the social environment will come over time to resemble a prison camp.

Why are you not dancing like Shyly in your life at home or at work?

Are you Mister Driven married to Missus Cautious? She’s always wasting time over-preparing, he contends, while she thinks he’s always going off half-cocked. Who is wrong? Neither one. They just count their wealth in different currencies. He wants it done even if it’s not perfect, where she wants it perfect even if it’s not done.

Why did your top sales rep just up and quit? You praised him quietly, with more money but with no acclaim, (more…)

From September 16, 2012, just after Benghazi. I may come back to this sometime soon, because Islam is a particularly brutal example of the intellectual and spiritual ossification that results when a high-C tyranny achieves a relatively-stable state. What would stable Marxism look like? Just like that. That’s worth exploring someday. –GSS
 

When Man Alive was first published, a number of people were distressed that I didn’t take a harder line on religion. My reason for doing as I did was pretty simple: Although I am a very strident atheist, and although I have nothing but contempt for theology and for all religious apocrypha, I like, respect and admire many people who say they are religious — including my own Best Beloved, my wife, Cathleen Collins.

I care a lot less about what you say you believe than I do about how you actually behave. If you are capable of leaving me alone to live my life as I choose, I don’t care what you say are your reasons for behaving as you do. By contrast, if you claim you are in agreement with my own ideas about the nature and structure of reality, and yet you cannot manage to keep your nose out of my business, then I care a great deal your actual behavior, regardless of your putative agreement with my philosophy.

This topic is of moment this week because our friends in the lands infested with Islam have put on another display of the impotent irrationality that is represented to be the substance of their religion. I don’t make fine distinctions about anegoistic doctrines: Whether your claims are based in religion, in politics or in some absurd academic dogma, if your behavior is atrocious, you are engaged in self-destruction in spite of your self.

We go through all this in the video, but the solution to every problem posed by anti-human dogmas is four-words simple: Fuck you. I quit. When the sane believers of every sort of doctrine work up the nerve to say those four words to their would-be masters, the world will be a better place overnight.

As always, the audio-only (more…)

I’ve been thinking about the connection of poker to securities trading: Are they both rent-seeking?

Poker is. In a vacuum (no rake), poker is zero-sum – no new wealth created – and rent-seeking in the form of error-mining: I make my money on your mistakes.

Is securities trading different? I’m not talking about venture capitalism, which definitely does produce new wealth. And as with poker, leave the SEC out. Is there anything about after-market securities trading that is wealth-creative in the way poker is not?

Consider:

1. Wealth is dinner, material values brought into existence by human capital, typically for profit. Denominated values are fungible but indigestible.

2. New wealth comes from new production.

3. Production-support is production.

4. Profit-seeking non-productive/non-production-supporting transactions are rent-seeking. (This is a much larger definition than other people use. Like pure capitalism, pure rent-seeking is better understood without the overlay of government coercion.)

Heinlein said there are makers, takers and fakers (D, C and I in DISC, with the Ss taken for granted as usual). Capitalism is making. Rent-seeking is either taking directly by force or taking indirectly by trickery, but the rent ultimately sought is an unearned piece of the maker’s production. If the makers do not produce new wealth, the thugs and the gamblers cannot eat – the plot of Atlas Shrugged.

Am I missing something about after-market securities trading that causes four cows before the trade to come to be five afterward, or am I right that, like poker, the transactions occurring do not produce new wealth or support its production in any way?

I am a geyser of ideas almost no one cares about – yet. I know I repay effort, and I know of particular individuals who are repaid by the time they invest in my ideas. My take is that the leading edge of the idea of self-adoration will be propitious for the few people surfing that wave, but it’s a very blue ocean out there right now.

Here are a few notes from my weekend’s work:

I’ve always known that Mothertongue is animal in origin. It’s how you talk to your dog, for goodness’ sake. But now I can show how it works – and why it is always at work.

This chart contains within it the secret to fixing every broken relationship in your life. I don’t think anyone takes me seriously yet, but my take is that the implication of that chart is a complete and final cure for tyranny.

All my libertarian friends are ass-backwards about everything – just like everyone else. Moral goodness is a perfectible praxis, but it is also the essential ingredient to a happy home life, and it is therefore the _sine qua non_ of a free and peaceful civilization.

Another:

Here’s an exercise for an idle grad student:

The Grand Unifying Theory of Human Motivation – as taught to me by a turtle, and by an eternally-outraged human reptile.To read more about empathy, see me, feel me, touch me, heal me at Amazon.com.

Proposed: The idea of ‘other-direction’ Riesman noted in The Lonely Crowd was the wave-like consequence of changing from D-focused to C-focused education ideas at around the turn of the Twentieth Century.

The Ss were changed in their emotional habits by this philosophical shift, changing from diligent producers of D values to fearful fountains of C errors – a meaningful distinction between inner- and other-directed.

Ds and Cs are both inherently inner-directed, Is inherently other-directed. The change Riesman notes could only be among Ss, and the change (more…)

You know that book I keep begging you to read – Nine empathies? Here’s something funny about that book:

I wrote it last Saturday.

It’s not very long, only about a 90-minute read, and I only wrote about two-thirds of the revised length of the book on Saturday. But I wrote the whole book, start to finish, with subsequent revisions all being interstitial – additions between the lines. I wrote a book that I could have shipped on Saturday, and in fact I did ship it to Amazon’s servers on Monday, long before I was all-the-way happy with it. I shipped successive revisions twice a day after that, until I called Thursday morning’s version the golden master. Then I said, “Hey look. I’m done!” – but in my mind I had been done since the day I started.

What is it that I’m telling you?

I don’t work like you. Most of the people who read me are going to be Cs or Ss in the DISC system. I’m much too wordy for my fellow Ds – and I’m only wordy because I see words as a currency, rather than as an distraction. Even so, I would much rather write a book than read one. I tend to work more outrageously even than other Ds, but my style of working is completely alien to Cs.

I wrote in ten hours what a high-C would have agonized over for ten months – or ten years. Worse, I took off with almost no plan – twelve lines of notes – knowing that I was at least two full epiphanies short of a revelation. “Welcome to Seat-Of-Our-Pants Airlines. If we can’t get you there on time – you’ll never live to tell about it.”

To say the truth, my kind of productivity annoys high-Cs, because it shouldn’t be possible to do this much this well this quickly. They are equally alien to me, in that I can’t fathom working any other way. Their fear of error paralyzes them, where (more…)

I know why.
I can help.
I repay effort.
I grow regardless.

I think I want to do a new business card, just so I can plaster that poem on it!

Here is why thinking matters:

Those four lines in order are: Epistemology, teleo-ontology, econo-politics and moral philosophy.

Again in DISC motivations: C, S, D, I.

The universe is all one thing.

Intrigued? Dubious?

Read the poem again.

Wanna see the empathy for the monster?

I’ve got it worse than TV’s most rancid meth-head vampire pedophile assassin…

I’ve got empathy for the real monster, in my book Nine empathies: Apprehending love and malice. Watch me work:

From Chapter 8: Empathy for the monster.

I can give you a very simple formula for the empathy for the monster: Take your pre-existing dysempathy for the untouchable – your niggardly refusal to attribute human emotions to him – and combine it with a big fat dollop of the empathy for the impossible.

Bingo! Instant monster. You already don’t want to believe the untouchable is truly a human being, so refusing to believe in his human motivations while imbuing him with colossally amazing impossible characteristics makes for a thing you can slaver and slobber over in your every living nightmare.

So we fear terrorists and drug cartels and carjacking tweakers and teenage gang-bangers and steely-eyed state troopers with itchy trigger fingers. Not to deprive you of your entertainment, as the mass media sells and resells you your own misery, but the diaster that is most likely to befall you is the failure of your marriage – caused, I know without much doubt – by your failure to put first things first, as evidenced by this disproportionate empathy for the monster.

Here’s another formula, the one proposed by determinist/reductionist scientists: Take a fully-human human being and, by recourse to an empathy for the impossible, subtract his empathy. This is not actually what they say. They claim that human beings can exist without (more…)

That’s a fun headline – more fun still because I can back it up: I can show you how you can make sense, for a change, of the people you love and live and work with.

I’ve got the magic beans, Bunkie, the true goods, the genuine article.

If you download and read my new Kindle book Nine empathies: Apprehending love and malice, I will show you:

* Why the schoolyard bully was able to taunt you with such perfectly-honed insults – plastering you with a nickname that sticks to you to this very day.

* Why your marriage always seems to hit its worst spots right after the two of you have just been through something wonderful together.

* Why you can’t seem to stop dreading things that never happen – all while you never manage to take on the real-life problems that always do occur.

What are we talking about? Empathy.

“Empathy?! But where’s the charity? Where’s the altruism? Where’s the self-sacrifice?”

I left all that out.

Why? Because it’s not there. All of those ideas about empathy are wrong. Accordingly, I will also show you:

* Why the motivation to engage in and express empathy is always egoistic, why the actions are always taken in pursuit of the actor’s own perceived benefit – and for no other reason.

* Why the human mind is uniquely different from animal brains, resulting in both abstract conceptual consciousness and in the consequent freedom of the will.

* Why learning to think my way, instead of constantly pursuing a frenetic loss-avoidance strategy, will give you the life you’ve always dreamed of but have never dared to live.

No kidding. I can deliver. The reptilian scales will fall from your eyes and you will see at last how to love like a Labrador – love with delight, with joy, and with the deepest kind of reciprocal admiration.

Grab (more…)

This is a big, big day for me. My new book Nine empathies is available now in Kindle form at Amazon.com. Even better, it will be FREE all day Friday, September 5th – which news you are entreated to share with your friends.

Toe-in-the-water-timid? Here’s the safely-brief introduction to a 90-minute read.

What do I want in exchange?

I want to change the way you think about everything forever.

Seems like a fair deal to me.

And do please exhibit empathy for the untouchable poet by making your thoughts public.

All I ever want is to change the conversation. Thanks for your help in doing that.

 
This is me from Sunday’s Church of Splendor homily on the topics taken up in Nine empathies. Here’s the Cliff’s Notes: The Grand Unifying Theory of Human Motivation – as taught to me by a turtle, and by an eternally-outraged human reptile: