SelfAdoration.com

I’m writing a short book of philosophy this weekend discriminating among depths of empathy. This is how it begins:

Introduction: Empathy unbound.

When it comes to empathy, I feel so all alone. Determinist/reductionist science is bound and determined that virtue must be vice. In consequence, academics have so convoluted empathy as to miss most of what it is, this in preference to extruding elaborately detailed claims about everything it isn’t.

Here is everything empathy is not: Self-sacrifice.

How do I know that? Because no purposive human behavior is self-sacrificial. To act is to express a preference – to seek to instantiate a subjunctively postulated future world that has been improved by that expression – and the primary beneficiary of that future state is the actor. He may in fact be seeking a benefit – or a loss – to be experienced by another party, but that is a conditional and incidental secondary consequence. Every action is taken first by the self upon the self as the expression of the (more…)

As you will have noticed, I consider internet talk show host Stefan Molyneux to be a menace. In order to avoid admitting that he has destroyed hundreds of lives through his advocacy of ‘defooing’ – unilaterally destroying all or many of your life-long storgic relationships on a whim and, plausibly, wholly on an exaggerated pretext – Molyneux and his minions have developed a sheaf of diversionary tactics.

You saw me dealing with one the other day, the claim that biological relationships are inferior to chosen ones. In fact, all storgic relationships are chosen by the persistent voluntary membership of the people making up those relationships, regardless of how they are related to each other. Moreover, newer relationships are generally more fragile and less durable than older ones, and it is not possible unilaterally to engender a new family just because you chose to betray the old one.

That is to say, this vain resort is gone from Molyneux’s bag of tricks.

The next dodge is to accuse opponents of child abuse. I wish I were making this up. It’s the Well-Poisoning Fallacy, if you didn’t know: I can’t answer you, so I’ll tell an outrageous lie about you in the hope that the mob will turn against you. You can imagine how well that stunt works on me.

So as to take away that scam, too, let’s learn something else Stefan Molyneux doesn’t know about the family.

So: While I abhor any sort of violence against anyone, I find Molyneux’s equation of spanking with child abuse to be absurd.

I will give you a bright-line standard for evaluating (more…)

I made a video for The 21 Convention’s Youtube channel called Comfort for the Defooed Heart. It’s about the dark evil at the heart of the Stefan Molyneux cult-of-personality and how people can recover from the immense hurt they’ve suffered as the result of Molyneux’s casual cruelty.

Among other jobs it’s doing, that video is a graduate seminar on extreme empathy. I go through three of the six arguments I have for a deeper, more informative understanding of empathy. More than that, though, the presentation itself is an example of the kind of empathy I’m talking about: We see the defooing act – unilaterally destroying all or many of your life-long storgic relationships on a whim and, plausibly, wholly on an exaggerated pretext – from the point of view of the defooer, of the defooed loved ones, and from Molyneux’s own hypothesized perspective.

I am deliberately engaging you in exactly the type of empathy I am talking about so that you may feel the emotions these other people are living through – so that you might feel empathy for them, regardless of your opinions on the subject.

Here’s an interesting question I don’t expect anyone else to come up with:

What empathy does Stefan Molyneux feel for the people he has counseled to destroy their past lives as the only path to The Glorious Future? What empathy does he feel for their parents and friends, for people who have had the rug pulled out from under them out of the blue, who are accused of crimes they know nothing about and are invited to submit to a show trial – or else – and who are then cut off forevermore from someone they have loved for many years?

I feel for all of these people, and I have no direct connection to any of them. You, too, right? Do you take delight in other people’s suffering? Guess who does?

I am hectored (more…)

What is the ‘defoo’ advocated by Stefan Molyneux – the practice that has at last won him recognition as a cult leader?

And what can you do when it happens to you?

All my Molyneux news.

We watched Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet on DVD last night. Very insightful in light of all the things I’ve been writing and talking about. Claudius put me in mind of the tragic figure of Stefan Molyneux, a Peter-Principled high-I whose sorrows come not single spies but in battalions. What I hadn’t seen before, though, is that young Hamlet was underfathered by the death of Yorick, not by the demise of old Hamlet. I’ll be talking about that at church today – The Underfathered West.

I’ve written a lot about this film, huge surprise. The introduction below was written in November of 1997. The little boy you meet there would have just turned six years old. The review comes from February of 1997, at the time of Hamlet’s theatrical release.

 
Hamlet past his bedtime

I rented Branagh’s Hamlet last night. I had seen it this spring at a big-screen theater in Phoenix, an unforgettable experience. Sadly, the videotape is not letterboxed, so much of the wide screen impact is lost. Nevertheless it is quite fine and very worth renting – or buying.

My six-year-old son Cameron came out of his bedroom and tried to pretend that he just had to see the film, a staying-up-late ploy that never works and that he never stops trying. Surprise of all surprises, last night I let him stay up, and he surprised me by becoming engrossed. I had to synopsize for him now and then (though Hamlet in synopsis is very brief), but he figured out from the synopsis that Hamlet and The Lion King are the same story. Not even Cameron can stay up as late as Kenneth Branagh, but he made it to the slaying of Polonius, nearly two hours.

Branagh’s Shakespeare is vigorous, to say the absolute least, but this can’t be a vice when we are so used to thinking of these plays as dry and dull, the fitting penance of a schoolhardy youth. In the theater I thought the ghost was too much, but it was just enough on the television screen, and it was the ghost who hooked (more…)

Thanks to Anthony ‘Dream’ Johnson of The 21 Convention, The Church of Splendor is streaming with his much more robust Youtube powers.

This week: Loki the Trickster illuminates the emotional factors in play in every transaction – in every mutually-voluntary human social interaction. That would be boring in any other church, but we punch things up with loud guitar plunking and elaborate swear-words.

You have never been to a church like this. Settle in and let me talk, and I’ll show you the world as you’ve never seen it:

The Church of Splendor is growing. With half-a-year’s worth of services in the vault, Anthony ‘Dream’ Johnson of The 21 Convention is taking on the live streaming with his much more robust Youtube powers. Anthony has been a fast friend to my ideas since the publication of Man Alive, and he has been very generous in sharing with me the enormous audience he has built over the years.

Here’s the link to the video stream. And: New praxis, new mistakes, I promise, so don’t be dismayed by miscellaneous shake-out-ery. No errors, no art. No garage, no garage-band discourse. It’s not philosophy to my satisfaction until it’s philosophy without a net – until you’ve bet your life on it.

Is all of this a mystery to you? I’m talking about The Church of Splendor, my atheist egoist garage-band televangelical mission.

An atheist egoist church? How does that work? More big ideas, fewer big hats, same damn offering plate. The Church of Splendor is moral philosophy for people who know why they need one, practical ontology from the gritty to the grandiose. That is to say: You ain’t never been to a church like this.

This week I plan to talk about the Carney’s high art of persuasion: How to read people and influence decisions. Until you understand the transaction from the buyer’s motivations, you don’t know what you’re selling. We’re going to talk about a simple sizing-up exercise that will tell you what to sell to get what you want.

Who am I preaching to? That would be you. I love my part of The Church of Splendor because I get to talk right at your mind, and you are stripped both of your defenses and of your need to be defended. That’s my kind of fun.

The Church of Splendor. This Sunday and every Sunday at 10 am MST, streaming thereafter.

Come play with me?

Here are two complementary facts about the ontology of adult genetic Homo sapiens:

Men are seed-sprayers.

Women are egg-layers.

Men and women are functionally equivalent, in the sense that, away from our sex differences, we can all do pretty much the same stuff. We are intellectually equivalent, even if the vestigial effects of poverty, religion and tradition have cost humanity the full benefits of female mental prowess over the centuries. We are politically equivalent, obviously. There are biological differences that result from our sex differences — men tend to have better upper-body strength, women have better blood circulation at the core but poorer circulation in the extremities — but apart from those sex differences, we are an awful lot alike.

That much is not surprising. We are the same species after all, and the XY model is just the one-off variation on the XX prototype. Even men’s sex hardware, of which they can be very proud, is just women’s junk turned inside out. This is true of male mammals in general — except for the pride part.

But because males — male mammals, not just male Homo sapiens — are seed-sprayers, their reproduction strategy will be different from that of the egg-laying females.

Human beings are thoughtful creatures. We have had the gift of mind cultivated within us, the graduation from an animal’s style of cognition and communication to the fully-human state, thinking and communicating in notation systems — in Fathertongue. For now I am am talking about thoughtless biological reproduction strategies, but in no way am I excusing human beings for behaving like thoughtless animals. Too much the contrary!

But the thoughtless reproductive objective of a seed-sprayer is to spray those seeds everywhere. This is what a Maple tree is doing with those cascades of whirling “helicopters,” and it it what an Agave plant is doing with its seed pod, one of the most inspiring phallic symbols to be found in nature. For seed-sprayers, reproduction is a numbers game. His supply of seeds is effectively infinite, and, plausibly, his best chance of reproducing himself is to spray (more…)

Yesterday’s Church of Splendor homily: We start with a discussion of the essential role of self-responsible fatherhood in the creation of Western Civilization. Then we relate that back to the anti-family praxis of ‘defoo’-ing – disassociating from your family-of-origin – advocated by talk-radio/social media impresario Stefan Molyneux.

I’m less interested in him than in his victims, but I could not possibly be more concerned about allegedly pro-liberty, pro-humanity doctrines that advocate the wholesale destruction of the family – the only respite in the storm, the only redoubt from the wars, the only fortress stout enough to stand against the void.