SelfAdoration.com

I can think of almost nothing in the lives of ordinary Americans, nothing that is ‘organized’ or ‘official’, that is not thoroughly steeped in Marxism.˙Cаvin 〄 / Foter.com / CC BY

[I wrote this essay in 2002, and, of course, by now everything it addresses is just that much worse. Tyranny is an avoidable fate – but not if you don’t know how to recognize it. —GSS]

 
My son is a Cub Scout. A few weekends ago he had his yearly ScoutORama, a sort of Scout convention and trade fair. The theme of this year’s event was ‘American Heroes,’ and it turns out that American Heroes, for the most part, build small catapults and cook in Dutch ovens. One Cub pack took the theme rather more to heart, with a huge display called ‘Freedom In Unity’.

To an attending Cub Scout I said, “Is it conceivable to you that unity and freedom might conflict?”

After a moment’s thought, he said: “Huh?”

As a father of an eleven-year-old, I fully expected this retort. Undismayed, I pressed on: “Isn’t it reasonable to suppose that the quality best represented by the word ‘freedom’ is freedom from other people?”

“HUH?!”

And my wife pulled me away, arguing, quite correctly, that it is unfair to expect children to regurgitate, much less competently defend, the horseshit they are force-fed by adults.

They do so eventually, of course, and thus become the adults who do the force-feeding of the next generation of helpless victims – unminded before they can be fully mindful, starved and stuffed at the same time, gorged forevermore on horseshit.

But: It’s not the what, it’s the where, the who, the how. And most especially: The why.

When the French, to pick an odorous example, rail against Individualism, we know what we’re hearing. When radical feminists – or radical environmentalists, or radical vegans – heap scorn upon Liberty, it doesn’t take much acuity to see right through them.

But to listen carefully – and I am cursed with the skill of listening carefully – to a Scout leader or a PTA president or a youth minister is to listen no less to the preachments of Herr (more…)

Me and my girl Cherry Bomb making our first movie of the New Year:

In the video, I am reflecting on my end-of-year essay on mastering something difficult this year: If you apply yourself to doing what you have always wanted to do, you will make an enduring improvement to your way of being.

Near the end, I mention my “High-D” diet and a video I made for the 21 Convention’s YouTube page.

If you would like to help build The Church of Splendor, I’m eager to hear from you.

Anti-humanism as the ruling paradigm of science:

Subjectivity is your private experience of the world: your sensations; your mental life and inner landscape; your experiences of sweet and bitter, blue and gold, soft and hard; your beliefs, plans, pains, hopes, fears, theories, imagined vacation trips and gardens and girlfriends and Ferraris, your sense of right and wrong, good and evil. This is your subjective world. It is just as real as the objective physical world.

This is why the idea of objective reality is a masterpiece of Western thought—an idea we associate with Galileo and Descartes and other scientific revolutionaries of the 17th century. The only view of the world we can ever have is subjective, from inside our own heads. That we can agree nonetheless on the observable, exactly measurable, and predictable characteristics of objective reality is a remarkable fact. I can’t know that the color I call blue looks to me the same way it looks to you. And yet we both use the word blue to describe this color, and common sense suggests that your experience of blue is probably a lot like mine. Our ability to transcend the subjective and accept the existence of objective reality is the cornerstone of everything modern science has accomplished.

But that is not enough for the philosophers of mind. Many wish to banish subjectivity altogether. “The history of philosophy of mind over the past one hundred years,” the eminent philosopher John Searle has written, “has been in large part an attempt to get rid of the mental”—i.e., the subjective—“by showing that no mental phenomena exist over and above physical phenomena.”

Why bother? Because to present-day philosophers, Searle writes, “the subjectivist ontology of the mental seems intolerable.” That is, your states of mind (your desire for adventure, your fear of icebergs, the ship you imagine, the girl you recall) exist only subjectively, within your mind, and they can be examined and evaluated by you alone. They do not exist objectively. They are strictly internal to your own mind. And yet they do exist. This is intolerable! How in this modern, scientific world can we be forced (more…)

Kevin Williamson at NR:

There is some debate on the right about whether President Obama is a fundamentally well-intentioned incompetent or a more Machiavellian figure so power-hungry that he is willing to kneecap key sectors of the U.S. economy in order to advance his political agenda. My own view is that the distinguishing feature of Obama’s ideology is the utter inability of the president and his partisans to distinguish between the national interest and their own political interests. (That is one problem with electing a messiah rather than a chief administrator.) If you believe that your guy is a uniquely gifted, once-in-a-lifetime transformational figure with a mandate to save the country, and that he is opposed by uniquely wicked servants of Mammon and partisans of unreason, then it follows that your political interests are identical to the national interest, and consequently you have such grey eminences as Bill Clinton, who has managed to secure for himself a career as an elder statesman without ever having been a statesman, insisting that Republicans are “begging for America to fail” — because they oppose large parts of the president’s health-care program, which the president now opposes, too, having set aside measures that are too unworkable or punitive to act on until some more politically opportune time.

Market orders are complex and organic; political orders are relatively crude and artificial. Obamacare, to take the year’s most dramatic example, is an attempt to impose a simpleton order on a much more sophisticated order, like trying to make microchips with cookie cutters. Such attempts generally end badly, succeeding only in bringing chaos out of order. Friedrich Hayek described the process in The Road to Serfdom: The plan never pans out the way it was expected to, and the planners are obliged by political necessity to take ever more arbitrary and authoritarian steps in order to give the appearance of success to an enterprise that cannot in fact achieve its goals. Even in a democratic society — perhaps especially in such a society — the effects are corrosive, undermining the rule of law, liberal institutions, and the mutual trust that (more…)

A long read, but worth it:

Finally, manufactured intelligence is self-involved. It mistakes feeling for thinking. It deals not with how things are or even how we would like them to be, but how we feel about the way things are and what our feelings about the way things are say about what kind of people we are.

Liberal intelligence is largely concerned with the latter. It is a self-esteem project for mediocre elites, the sons and daughters of the formerly accomplished who are constantly diving into the shallow pools of their own minds to explore how their privilege and entitlement makes them view the world and how they can be good people by challenging everyone’s paradigms and how they can think outside the box by climbing into it and pulling the flaps shut behind them.

Perpetual self-involvement isn’t intelligence regardless of how many of the linguistic tricks of memoir fiction it borrows to endow its liberal self-help section with the appearance of nobility.

Liberalism isn’t really about making the world a better place. It’s about reassuring the elites that they are good people for wanting to rule over it.

Demi-billionaire Robert W. Wilson to billionaire Bill Gates:

When I talk to young people who seem destined for great success, I tell them to forget about charities and giving. Concentrate on your family and getting rich—which I found very hard work. I personally and the world at large are very glad you were more interested in computer software than the underprivileged when you were young. And don’t forget that those who don’t make money never become philanthropists.

These clowns think YOU work for THEM. You need to tell them otherwise.

“This is the mind on strike.” —Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

Rand was hugely right about this, as is ever more obvious with every new failure of alternative tactics. The problem, of course, is who bells the cat: The idea of a general strike of producers is appealing as a general idea, but no one wants to lose everything as a stand-alone martyr.

The solution is to have a one-day strike, a John Galt Day, once a month. If, on the first full work day of every month, everyone who is sick of being enslaved by parasites were to take the day off — producing nothing — the vampires in Washington would get the news in no time.

January 2nd is the first business day of 2014. If you want to communicate your disgust with the status quo, stay home. Watch Netflix. Play video games. Frolic like it’s your honeymoon. Just produce no new wealth for that one day. If you fly airplanes for a living, or run a power plant or — especially — if you perform surgery, so much the better. Just by doing nothing, you will communicate who needs whom.

Do the same on February 3rd and March 3rd, the first business day of every month. Post a little #JohnGaltDay note on Facebook or Twitter, just to make it plain what you are up to: “The is the strike of the producers, Mr. Obama, Mr. Boehner. This is the mind on strike.”

Nothing changes until people change, and people don’t change when they think their policies are working. We know better. We need to communicate our better knowledge in a way that makes an impact. If you want your world to change, for you and for your children, stop bearing it on your back.

If you want this to work, you have to follow through: Share this idea with everyone you know, and then DON’T SHARE the wealth of your production on John Galt Day.

Liberals and social conservatives: As you gaze in awe and horror at the inevitable collapse of every grand plan to control human behavior from the outside, this would seem to be a wonderful time to question and replace your base premises.

You cannot do what you propose to do. Here’s why, in three links:

1. You cannot possibly have the moral right to dominate other human beings.

2. Even if you insist you do have that moral right somehow, the domination of one human being by another is ontologically impossible.

3. But if you instead act upon your self, other people and the universe as these things actually are, a life of illimitable Splendor can be yours.

Knowingly to persevere in error is self-destruction in its essence. Today is a great day to start doing better.

Thomas Hawk / Foter.com / CC BY-NC

How do you know when a time is right for your idea? How about when someone else comes up with something similar?: Atheist ‘mega-churches’ take root across USA, world. For the past three months, I’ve been thinking about starting a church evangelizing egoism and excluding no one, and here is the something similar. I’m reading this as a publicity stunt, but we’ll see. That’s definitely not what I’m about.

What I want is a mission devoted to the idea of doing better. Just that. The doctrine is mine, Man Alive, et very cetera, but I’m a lot more interested in praxis than dogma. If you cross a soul-enriching music performance with a mind-enflaming motivational seminar, you’re halfway to seeing what I see.

Picture a real live church service somewhere, once a week. My ideal location would be a big bar on late Saturday afternoons, to put the idea of choosing admirably in mind just when it might be needed most. That can be simulcast by Ustream or Spreecast, so the whole world can join in, one mind at a time.

But: I’m digging living on the road a lot, so I would love to take this show on the road 15 or 20 days a month, too: Full-day hotel meeting room seminars with a ton of rotating content and drawing on local talent as well. If you think about the way seminar mechanics do major-city blitzes — TV spots and infomercials leading up to the show in three or four locations on successive days — that’s the kind of road show I’d love to mount. An operation like that could produce one or two new hours of tight, professional video every day.

What does victory look like? How about an operation on the scale of the big boys, like Joyce Meyer or Joel Osteen? That may be too far to reach, but we are entering the age of Garage-Band Televangelism, so anything is possible.

The creed? On top of everything else, there are these two principles:

1. I don’t go to your church.

2. I am not arguing with you.

All I want (more…)

For freedom-seeking people to achieve their ends, the middle class — the everyday expressions of joy and excellence — must grow.

The good, the true and the beautiful – and I’ll leave ’em dancing in the aisles, I guarantee it.

I can speak at any length on just about any topic, delivering music, uplifting humor and solid, practical, useful inspiration.

I can fill a hole in your line-up, MC your event or take the keynote slot – and make you look like a genius for booking me.

The price? I’m easy. If the event is making money, I’d like to make money, too. If not? Let’s make fans together instead.

I’m interested in working any kind of event, including:

* Church services or meetings
* School assemblies or classes
* Political/Tea Party events
* Sales meetings

I can tailor my talk to your audience, and I can speak knowledgeably on a vast range of topics.

See me in action: Greg Swann – The Trailer.

My friend James Pruitt (@jamesdeantx) keeps trying to put me in front of Senator Ted Cruz (@SenTedCruz), which is the kind of quixotic ambition I deeply admire. Plus which, I’m really interested in fracking, but I don’t want to go to Minot and Williston in the winter.

Both notions would seem to be calling me to Houston for October, but I’m open to other ideas. My biggest secondary objective, right now, is to speak in front of live audiences, so that would be your best bargaining chip in calling me elsewhere.

My dates are 10/05 to 10/28, less travel time.

I need to decide soon, so if you have a proposition, propose it.

A very short book trailer for the free book Man Alive!

If you’re tired of watching your life circle the drain as demagogues rob you of every human value, this book is for you.

How do you change the world? One mind at a time. If you want to get that process started now – while there is still time – please share and embed this trailer far and wide.

A short film about why your own hypocrisy about the philosophical values you actually live by empowers the enemies of human liberty — to the peril of everything you love.