Download a free eBook about the redemption of the ego – about Splendor.
But the ideas in the book are excellent, in my never-humble opinion, and no one but me has talked about any of this stuff in the intervening 25 years. ManAlive! covers some of this ground in different ways, but there are gems in here — a just derivation of property rights, for example, or what to do about intellectual property theft — that I have not dealt with since.
You can download the book for free by clicking on this link. The zip file you will download contains the book in HTML, PDF, epub and mobi formats, for your eReading edification. In the extract shown below, we document the mechanics of irrationality, specifically how people go about making the same mistakes over and over again:
They start out wanting to have it both ways, wanting to have the life of a human without the identity. They spurn the potency of a man, demanding instead the omnipotence of a god or the impotence of an animal. To achieve this mental abomination, they must erect and sustain a mental inversion. To erect it, they need to deny a premise they know in advance to be true. And to maintain it, they need to continue to deny their own knowledge, their own sense evidence and memory of experience. At full maturity, the Substitute For Experience (SFE) is a ravenous monster…
Now, consider that many people have more than one Madness…
Yikes! Now do you understand why they are so unhappy? Not quite yet…
For there is one thing left to consider: what happens when a person has to choose between something he wants very badly and his Madness? This is reality’s ultimate revenge on the Sleepwalker. Nature abuses his his body as the price of his error, and logic cripples his mind. But it is his own personal identity, his ego, that thrashes him when he chooses the zero of his Madness over the one of his spirit…
Self-flagellation, self-mortification: they do have referents in our so modern world. They refer to Sleepwalkers… Because if he had to strive frantically to maintain his SFE before it cost him anything, he must double his zeal afterward.
This is where the aspect of self-punishment comes in. Each of them knows that he has renounced something he wants in order to sustain his SFE. In his private guilt, each will think of some specific value. But, at a deeper level, each has also renounced the desire to live life at its fullest that is the normal mental state of childhood. And self-renunciation is self-destruction in the very tightest sense, the dismantlement of the ego…
Madness is self-destruction, and the Sleepwalker knows it is. When he employs it to achieve even greater self-destruction, he is inflicting a grievous injury upon his ego. And he knows it…
At this point – at every point along the line – he has a choice: he can go on trying to sustain a falsehood, or he can face up to the truth and rebuild from where he is. Unfortunately for the Sleepwalker, he has habituated a completely invalid method for dealing with unpleasant facts: he ignores them…
So, what happens? The Sleepwalker acknowledges failing his ideal of life by embracing his Madness still more tightly… Recall, one cannot react without there having been a prior action; one cannot pretend not to know without first knowing. By his reaction, the Sleepwalker demonstrates that he is aware he has failed his values. But to admit this consciously would require that he admit the invalidity of his SFE. So, instead, he strains still harder to pretend to himself that he believes his false premise.
And where before the SFE was an invalid means to an end thought to be positive, it becomes a means to an end known to be negative. For when he loses a value for which he yearns due to his own willful errors, the Sleepwalker concludes that he is unworthy of his values. Before he used his Madness to obtain values without having to earn them. But afterward, he uses it to deny values to himself, to negate himself in punishment for having negated himself…
His self-flagellation simultaneously serves two contradictory purposes. He punishes the self of his deeds for having failed the self of his ideals. And he punishes the self of his ideals for demanding deeds he does not want to perform. He mortifies his spirit with more of the poison that made it ill: he renounces his desires and ignores his actions…
He convicts himself of attempted suicide and executes himself as punishment…
That’s a dour passage, but the book is about the redemption of the ego, about Splendor. Give it a look. I’m a better writer now, but I was on top of my game philosophically even as a punk-ass kid.
