SelfAdoration.com

Happy Birthday, Man Alive!bernat… / Birthday Photos / CC BY-NC-ND

At Easter, I traded email with my father about the poetry of song-writing. I write about that stuff, of course — less than I might, but publicly. I write everything very publicly, but my father has seen almost none of that. This public life of mine means nothing at all to my family.

My mother died at Christmas. She was one of my favorite people in the world, the one person besides my wife that I would call just for fun, just to tease and torment her with the thrust and parry of talking for the sheer joy of talking. And yet my mother died without knowing anything fundamental about me. And poetry or not, that seems likely to be the case for my father, too.

That’s not an expression of dismay, it’s just funny. I have my Cathleen, the incomparable love of my life, because of my writing. I hear from brilliant strangers all over the world, some of whom are very careful students of the things I’ve written. And yet I’m sure my mother knew nothing about that part of my life, and I have no idea at all what my father knows or doesn’t know.

Surely I am my own worst enemy, in this and every other regard. I have never trusted the reader, and that includes my own parents. When I write, I know I will be happy with the work I do. My happiness is why I do it. But I also know that I will get no reward, or next to none, from the people who read my work, and it’s good odds that one or more trolls will try to punish me for having dared to speak up.

I don’t mind any of this. It’s just so much weather, as full of moment as any gust of wind. This work starts and ends with me. You just happen to be here, that’s all. But I have always wanted to trust the reader, to put him beside me in the car, as my guest, instead of always keeping him at (more…)

No masters, no slaves.
A compelling argument memorably made.

Earlier today, members of Ukrainian feminist group Femen staged protests across Europe as they called for a “topless jihad.” The demonstrations were in support of a young Tunisian activist named Amina Tyler. Last month, Tyler posted naked images of herself online, with the words “I own my body; it’s not the source of anyone’s honor” written on her bare chest. The head of Tunisia’s “Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice,” reportedly called for Tyler to be stoned to death for her putatively obscene actions, lest they lead to an epidemic. Tyler has since gone quiet, leading some to fear for her safety.

The accompanying 31 photos show the Ukrainian women doing two things American feminists cannot do:

1. Stand up for the oppressed and not the oppressors.

2. Look good without clothes.

I expect things will get worse before they get better for the women of Islam, but it’s nice to have contemporary visual evidence that the feminine waist is not extinct.

Do not be deceived. Apparently, homosexuals are the only Americans left who want to get married.Makena G / Love Photos / CC BY-NC-ND

It’s funny, in a way, that we are wasting so much psychic energy debating gay marriage.

For a first thing, marriage is falling apart. The welfare state has made unmarried child-rearing financially attractive to women at the same time that feminism (the other red meat) has made marriage and fatherhood completely unattractive to marriage-age men. Apparently, homosexuals are the only Americans left who want to get married.

And for a second thing, gay marriage is not the problem, not at all. As I said last December and echoed yesterday, the immediate push for gay marriage is simply rent-seeking, while the long-run objective — as with Big Red Feminism — is to undermine the family as a redoubt against the über-state. The true problem with marriage is that the long-run is here: The family has been all but completely destroyed.

Here’s some good news: This won’t last. The family as a private social structure is universal to human civilizations.

Here’s some bad news: The most likely impetus to the formation of new family structures will be the collapse of the welfare state.

Here’s the best news: Absolutely none of this can be regulated by thugs in black robes.

The welfare state will fail in due course. When it does, there are a great many full-time dependents now living on the kleptocracy’s largesse who will be left high and dry. Many of those people will starve to death — expressing in their deaths the inestimable mercy of Marxism — and the survivors will form social structures — voluntarily, privately, spontaneously — to serve as survival machines.

And this is what the family is, at its essence. Man and woman? Okay. Love and sex? Yes, please. Kids? Without ’em, a traditional marriage is more like a long date. But what matters is the survival machine — the shared investment in the family, taking shared risks in the pursuit of shared rewards. This is why it’s still a family when both parents are the same sex, when the only adult (more…)

You have the power to choose who you will be, but you do not have the power to escape who you have become.Hani Amir / Foter.com / CC BY-NC-ND

I hope I don’t seem to be a scold.

It suits my ends to poke around in the trash can inside your brain, but I’m not doing it to be mean — nor to induce you to feel bad about yourself. I know a whole lot about the interior mental processes that motivate the pursuit of values and disvalues — and about the subsequent and secondary consequences of those mental processes — but it’s not as if I can actually read your mind.

So how do I know so much about how your mind works? I don’t, not by any means except inference. What I know about is how my mind works. We are alike as things — we are ontological equals — so I know that your mind works the same way mine does — no less than and for the same reasons that your heart works the same way mine does. Moreover, I can look you in the eye and tell you the truth of your life in excruciating detail, working from nothing other than past experience with myself and other people. Our differences make us unique and beautiful, but our similarities make us comprehensible to each other.

So without intending to scold you, I need to say something to you in the gentlest way I can:

You’re getting everything wrong!!

Wrong, wrong, wrong. All the time, for all your life. Everyone, everywhere, for all of human history. Wrong, wrong, wrong — always and everywhere wrong — with wrong heaped upon wrong in twisted, corrupt dogmas of wrongness.

Do you want proof?

It could be you’re all hunched up in resentment at being called wrong. Or maybe you’re folded in on yourself in guilt, revisiting all of your past perceived sins. But here’s how I know that you’re wrong, and that you’ve been wrong about nearly everything, for almost all of your life:

Because being wrong doesn’t matter. Being right is the only thing that matters.

We all tell lies, (more…)

When will the world’s economy crash to dust? Homey don’t play that. But will it fail? Completely? Catastrophically?

I believe in human ingenuity. I celebrate every wonderful thing the mind has done so far, and I have complete confidence that the indomitable human mind is equal to any intellectual challenge.

Here’s even better news: The history of humanity can be expressed as fully-human people desperately trying to out-produce their faux-animal oppressors. Judging by that standard, the slaves are still able to outrun their would be slave-owners.

But: If something can’t go on forever, it won’t. You cannot consume your way to prosperity, not you as an individual and not the world considered as a whole. Is the bad news in the newspaper as bad as the newspaperati make it out to be? Definitely not. But are people justified in their fears for the future?

I think they are. The intellectual problem is easy: Human beings cannot be ruled. They live most peacefully and profitably among each other where they leave each other alone, and they are most miserably impoverished where they are most completely enslaved to the state. This is news to no one, with the world itself as the ever-ready existential demonstration of these facts.

But until our course is reversed, the United States and the world at large will continue to scurry to perdition, waddling in a turbulent haste as only the morbidly obese can do. Politicians will continue to insist that bad checks aren’t really fraudulent if you use them to buy lottery tickets, because, that way, you can buy all your bad paper back when you win. Journalists will continue to transcribe this nonsense, denouncing anyone who points out that it cannot possibly work. And each day we will inch that much closer to the death camps, because that is the only way this road leads.

Want some more bad news? The progress of statism is an intertial mass, so to speak, like an aircraft carrier under weigh or an interstellar probe out in the cometary halo. If we actually manage to reverse our course — and, who knows?, Rand Paul’s recent filibuster (more…)

I don’t do well in despair.

Clarify that. I don’t mean that, when I find myself in despair, I fare especially badly.

What is mean is, if despair were a classroom discipline for which one could be tested and graded, I would probably flunk out.

I’ve lived through some ugly stuff in my life — who hasn’t? — but mostly I didn’t notice. I’m good at thinking — or so I like to think. And, good at it or not, I really do like to think. But I can only think about one thing at a time. For most of my time, for most of my life, I like to think about work. I like to think about what I’m doing. I like to think about what I’m getting done.

That doesn’t leave much room in my mind for despair. Or depression. Or gloom or sadness or fear or doubt or pain or worry or any of the things that people talk about when they’re not talking about work. I know about those ideas, much as I know about ideas like schadenfreude or universal guilt, things that I’ve heard about or read about but never seen from the inside.

You could say that’s my good luck, I suppose, but I’m sure it’s a choice on my part. Who hasn’t known sadness, after all? It’s not that I’ve never lived with painful emotions, it’s simply that I choose not to live with them any longer than I have to — which almost always turns out to be no time at all. I turn to my work not to escape from pain, nor even to work to alleviate it. I turn to my work because that’s what I love most in my life — and my purpose in living is to love my life.

But I come up short, I think, because I’m so badly equipped to prepare for desperate times. We’re headed into an economic recession, perhaps a depression, and I truly don’t know what to think about it. I’ve lived through several of these episodes in the past, and I worked right through all of them and (more…)

I am buried in links, so I will now dig myself out. This is stuff I saw on the interwebs that I thought was worthy of note.

Let’s start with some good news, a 99% price reduction in the cost of desalinated water. The earth is 70% water. There is no shortage. What we are always short of is human ingenuity and the conditions necessary for the mind to prosper. Give me a lever and a firm place to stand…

On-line education continues to disintermediate the “professional” mis-educationists, with salutary disruptive consequences. Here is an on-line database to find on-line courses, and here is a discussion of how, precisely, the bee-hotches will be disintermediated.

The gun-grabbers may have thought their their own extremities were gun-free zones, but that didn’t stop them from shooting themselves in both feet many times. Meanwhile, the quest for the prefect 3D-printed AR-15 proceeds apace. What’s the legality of all this? The Outlaw Gunsmith will tell you all about how to get around the law. And once you understand that any law made by man can be evaded, subverted or corrupted by man, you just might be ready to accept the awesome and seemingly terrifying fact of human sovereignty: You cannot control other people’s behavior no matter how desperately you want to, so, if you wish to behave sanely yourself, you should stop trying to push other people around. Just can’t handle the facts? That’s why I want to print me up an AR-15 or two.

Practical advice from a Texas state trooper: “If you think our police are no threat to your freedom, you’re living in a fantasy world.”

What do you call a big-name professional atheist who is willing to say the rudest things about a pussy like Jesus but who cowers before the minions of Mohamed? An academic, of course, but I meant specifically. Who is the most gutless man of The-Truth-Writ-Large ever? My vote goes to Richard Dawkins:

In a recent Al-Jazeerah interview, Richard Dawkins was asked his views on God. He argued that the god of “the Old Testament” is “hideous” and “a monster”, and reiterated his claim (more…)

The Cul-De-Sac Hero asks if anyone can “provide a definition of a rational mind.” I can, and I’m always happy to take care of people who take care of me, so I think I owe him one.

I responded to him last night like this:

Obviously human beings are everything professional rent-seekers say they are not. Human beings who understand the nature of their own minds are indomitable — impossible to exploit.

I’ll take this up at my place and link back. My short answer for now is that the terminology is so loose as to be useless.

As it turns out, my long answer is over 3,000 words by now, and I am nowhere near any sort of affirmative argument; nothing so far but illustrations of why determinist claims of all sorts cannot be true of human beings. I may end up with a short book. In any case, I don’t know when I’ll be done, nor who besides my wife will read what I have written.

In the mean time, I have already covered the specific ground The Cul-De-Sac Hero is interested in with a robust defense of human nature in my book Man Alive! Here is an extract from Chapter 2. The explanation of how this awesome mental prowess comes to exist is taken up immediately afterward, in Chapter 3.

 
From Man Alive! — The nature of your nature.

So start here: You are an organism. That might seem obvious to you, but a huge number of the critical arguments made against your mind turn on the idea that, since you have a rational, conceptual consciousness, any sort of behavior that reflects your origins as a biological entity is necessarily irrational. We can call this the Spock Fallacy. I think the portrayal of Star Trek’s Mr. Spock himself refutes this claim well enough, but it is one of a type of reductionist fallacies that are constantly being deployed against you: Not only are you damned as being less than the sum of your parts, typically some one part of your nature – blown out of all proportion and distorted out of all recognition – is (more…)

This is just cool…

I was cited in a comment at A Voice For Men; I’m posting my response here as well as there. –GSS
 

The Cul-De-Sac Hero is my hero. Thanks for the link.

If readers here are interested, I undertake a defense of free moral agency in chapters 2, 3 and 4 of my book Man Alive!

The Cliff’s Notes: Conceptually-conscious volitionality is effected in notation systems (that much is tautological) and hence is not illuminated by discussions of animal behavior or biological sub-systems. These topics can be interesting to ponder as influences on human choice, but choice itself is effected in abstract symbols in the interior monologue inside an individual human being’s mind. This process cannot be caused or prevented by external forces — nor even observed by other people except in its transient and potentially-misleading secondary physical consequences.

When someone you meet insists that human behavior “must” be determined by something (anything!) other than free moral agency, don’t waste your time arguing. Instead, find that person’s luggage and cut off all the “If Lost Return To” tags. If he doesn’t bitch about it, he’s a robot. If he does, you will have his own explicit admission that he believes that human behavior is caused by volition.

No one actually doubts the existence of free will. I keep hoping someone like Sam Harris will take me on so I can make his life a living hell until he begs me to stop — which entreaties will be his admission that he knows I can choose to stop tormenting him.

Most of this academic horseshit comes from the refusal by supposed scientists to understand the difference between human and animal behavior. Here is an extended example, the claim that mathematical calculation is “automatic”:

Consider this nonsense, also spotted at Instapundit: Our brain can do unconscious mathematics.

What is nine plus six, plus eight? You may not realise it, but you already know the answer. It seems that we unconsciously perform more complicated feats of reasoning than previously thought — including reading and basic mathematics. The discovery raises questions about the necessity of consciousness for abstract thought, and supports the idea that (more…)

Anthony Johnson at The 21 Convention is publishing video segments of the talk I gave to the group on Ontologically-Consonant Teleology. I actually spoke twice to the 21 Convention, but my first address was lost. The second talk, encapsulated in these videos, is an extended vocabulary lesson on life as a self-aware, self-responsible free moral agent.

I’ll add links as Anthony does, but here are the videos he has posted so far:

Part 1 of 6.
Part 2 of 6.
Part 3 of 6.
Part 4 of 6.
Part 5 of 6.
Part 6 of 6.

If you’re coming from Anthony’s YouTube site, you can find a comprehensive rundown of my thinking here, starting with the introduction to my book Man Alive!.

Here’s the full presentation in one video:

News flash:

It would seem that beat induction is a uniquely human, cognitive skill

Zounds! Abstraction, which can only be done by human beings, can only be done by human beings! Who knew…?

Of course, the wannabe ruling class can never manage to quit while it’s behind:

That it appears to be present from birth further indicates that it’s an innate skill, meaning there’s little chance that it can be learned.

“Innate abstraction” is nonsense, but you cannot learn how to correct the errors in your thinking without first learning how to think. If your entire epistemology is rooted in a devout insistence that the human mind must be an artifact of mindlessness, you will find a way to reject all factual evidence to the contrary, even when it’s rapping on your head in waltz time.

The good news for you: Your mind is free to dance to its own rhythms.

From a comment on Facebook, I cherry-picked these three words

> the natural order

responding as follows:

But because our behavior is governed by free will, this cannot exist for human beings. Rabbits cannot choose to be carnivores, tigers cannot choose to be vegans and neither can choose to eat nothing but whey protein and Doritos, but human beings can make any possible choice.

You might argue that some of those choices are unwise, but the person making them can offer up his counter-arguments, which may seem to you to be specious or profound. Either way, every other human being is exclusively self-controlled regardless of what you might think or say. There is no inescapable natural order, and you cannot reasonably expect to “should” other people into doing things your way instead of their own.

Meanwhile, self-adoration — making the conscious choice always to choose admirably — can be demonstrated to be an ontologically-consonant teleology — a manner of living most likely to yield happy consequences and least likely to result in persistent misery. It is a strategy that can be learned and taught — quite easily and without leaps of faith.

You can’t “should” people into living your way, but by evangelizing egoism, you can help them learn how to make the most and the best of living their own way.