SelfAdoration.com

Taking the time to really see the people around you will help you navigate your values – and theirs.

We’re taking the tiniest piece of DISC – how people deal with congested pedestrian traffic – the DISC of walking! – to illuminate the whole: What the people around you are trying to do and the choices they will make in pursuit of those values.

Tell me that ain’t church:

More, from a comment on Facebook:

The reasons for the four walking strategies fall out straight from the chart shown here:

The Driven want to get where they are going and they hate avoidable delay. The Incandescent want to be celebrated for having yielded (ultimately) at the same time that they want to avoid the ignominy of having yielded (eventually). The Sociable want to express their love for you while avoiding any aggressive or rancorous displays. The Cautious want to take the time to analyze the data and arrive at the perfect solution to the problem, but the dag-blamed universe won’t stop changing all the time. Every other aspect of DISC – of purposive human behavior – will map out the same way.

I can show you where all monstrous behavior comes from – starting with your own.

That would be church, Lurch. More on the non-existence of villains here. Much more from me on monsters in Nine Empathies.

I’ve been bitching about abortion for 16 months now, and no one is more amazed by that fact that I am. It’s always been a deal for us, but never a big deal. Learning to see abortion in self-adorationist terms was hugely useful, but that was a matter of filling out the map. The issue only got interesting to me as I watched Yaron Brook, the Ayn Rand Institute and all of organized libertarianism-writ-large evade the Planned Parenthood videos.

We are a civilization of cannibals. We seek to prosper by devouring our own young. Church this week is what you can and should do instead – how you can work now to terminate abortion:

Just in time to spotlight Bob Dylan’s disgrace, Leonard Cohen sings sweetly from beyond the grave:

Art is an emergent phenomenon. It happens only when the work works its wiles on its victim – that would be you.

Good art changes you forever. Bad art changes nothing, except your ability and willingness to confront better art.

We lost an actual artist last week. This week’s Church of Splendor homily explores why that matters:

I cite a number of songs in the video, and here are some good representations of those compositions:

Tower of Song

Sisters of Mercy

Tonight Will Be Fine

Now that’s an opaque headline. I’m pretty sure the only person on earth who pays close attention to the things I say is me. That might be a definition of madness just by itself, but that doesn’t make the statement false. To the contrary, if I am the only person learning from me, at least I’m learning a lot.

Witness: Just now, this morning:

The objective of the empathy strategy each one of us is deploying in his DISC profile is TheUniverseWhereIFitIn or TheUniverseThatFitsMePerfectly.

There is no alternative to the existential, obviously, and yet we each one of us continuously insists that the universe will only make sense when it conforms to our expectations.

The DISC behavior is shaling, the persistent propitiation of that universe, the one that works properly at last.

This is madness, of course, life-long habituated madness – and each one of us is doing it all the time!

Among other interesting corollaries, that is what makes horse races.

I’ll have more in due course. At least one of us will learn from my efforts.

Bad news: No matter who wins today’s presidential election, everybody loses.

Here’s how you can choose to win instead:

Stop looking for the other guy to solve your problems and fall back on the one person you know you can always count on to come through for you:

You.

You’re in this all alone. Respond accordingly.

I wrote this yesterday:

This woman sold middle America to Wall Street and the War on Terror to Saudi Arabia. Trump is a buffoon, but Hillary is an actual instantiated Marvel-Comics™ super-villain, right before your very eyes.

In preference to thinking about what might happen in tomorrow’s election, consider what will happen when America falls fully under the big fat thumb of the Cautious tyranny too many Americans already worship.

We’re talking about DISC, so educate yourself, if necessary. A Cautious tyranny emerges when the social machine falls under Cautious control and escape is blocked.

So this question came up last week: “Who thought suspending someone over a chicken nugget was a good idea to begin with?”

And the answer to that question is simple, once you understand my way of thinking:

There is only ever Driven or Cautious leadership.

The Sociable decline leadership roles because they alienate.

The Incandescent in power will become ever more Cautious, over time – or more likely, they will flame out.

Driven leadership consists of rewarding the behavior the boss wants, where Cautious leadership penalizes his pet peeves.

Every Cautious leadership style will tend to ossify over time, since only being less-wrong matters, never being more-right.

This can still work – as in grind-it-out business models with reliable-if-razor-thin margins – but it cannot grow or change.

Because both fear and fascination transfix, all Cautious leadership strategies must eventually end in failure.

Everything that lives must grow or die, and only Driven leadership can grow anything – every social or business entity, but also every successful family and each thriving individual.

Marxism is the temporary and catastrophic mutiny of the Cautious over the Driven.

Accordingly, under Marxism, the perfection of Cautious tyranny, it is not suspension but (in due course) extermination that is the appropriate penalty for every act of disobedience.

This is simply the DISC of Sister Mary Elephant. Backseat drivers are not a (more…)

Church this week: The world may be going to hell in a hand-cart, but you don’t have to go there with it.

There could not possibly be a more propitious time to learn how better to provide for your self and for your family – and how better to cultivate your family to make it stronger and more reliable for everyone you love.

If you want more than that from a church, you’ll have to conjure it up yourself…

I mentioned my new verb, shaling, a week or two ago in Church. I’m writing a novel called Traindancing, which will document a lovely and inspiring kind of shaling.

The purpose of a new coinage is to illuminate a manifestation of reality that has always been there, but which we have overlooked because we didn’t have a name for it.

Shaling is the actions taken in observance, celebration, propitiation or palliation of the god of a cargo cult. I can demonstrate the ontology of shaling, the form and functioning of all acts of worship, as pre-conceptual animal behavior. A simple example? When your dog campaigns for dinner, he is shaling.

That’s interesting to me, because I can distinguish religion from worship from community, with the community being what is of interest to me. At its best, a church is the storgic love of the family scaled to the larger congregation. Diluted, of course, since the relationships are much less intense, but still a place for families to turn when they need more than they can do on their own.

That’s a good thing, but it’s hard to make those connections in worlds where we are evermore distant from each other, and evermore divergent in our views.

In my everyday praxis, I’m playing with The Affectionate Display as a vector-changing agent in human social environments, a very simple way of building communities of shared interests out of aggregations of strangers.

That means what? I’m establishing a cargo cult of pandemic habituated friendliness as a way of building a very informal, hugely ecumenical community of serious, thoroughgoing, very loving parents.

Said another way: I’m shaling for grown-ups.

I admire Bob Dylan’s inaction over his Nobel Prize, even as I recognize that it may be less a principled stand than it is typically-sphinxlike Dylanesquitude: The answer, my friend, comes with putting your finger to the wind to know which way the mob glows.

My guess: When people in tuxedos claim they want to honor you, it means that want a photo of you accepting their paycheck for services rendered. The Voice of a Generation™ would rather look like a rebel than risk seeming to be a yet another grasping toady.

What might settle the question for me? I would love it if the great Bob Dylan – truly worthy of veneration, even if not in the Nobel committee’s outrageously inflated currency – would hunt down this surly, snotty, drunk, high, hideously-underfathered punk-ass kid and give him the thrashing fatherly cultivation he is so desperately begging for:

Church this week:

As the Wikileaks leaks make ever more obvious, we are living in a world of unconstrained deception.

Now more than ever, you must think for yourself.

I speak in the video of an essay by The Cul de Sac Hero. That’s here: The Rot of Abstract Lies.

And I mention “How you came to be enslaved.” That’s here: How you came to be enslaved – and how you can free yourself.

I mentioned the DISC profile of The Band the other day in church. Here is a fuller explication, first posted last August. Note that in the video I put Levon Helm on Si, but that was a mistake. He was Is, as I have him here. Other than Neil Peart (Ci), I can’t think of a non-Incandescent drummer. –GSS
 

There ain’t no more ’cane on the Brazos?

Sad but true. It’s all been ground up in resentments. Nothing left for anyone to do.

Do you love The Band like I do? Deep, meaningful songs, call and response vocals, layered harmonies and a rich, loving, very familial instrumentation on stage. Of the roots-music revival acts that broke in 1968, The Band was the most original in is rootsiness – the most authentically rooted.

But as a social machine, they were doomed from the outset – a house divided against itself from the time they went out on their own. If anything, they lasted longer and achieved more than they could have been expected to, given the DISC profiles of the members of the group.

Witness:

• Robbie Robertson – Ci
• Levon Helm – Is
• Rick Danko – Sc
• Richard Manuel – Sc
• Garth Hudson – Cs

The Band was very proud to tell the world it never had a front man. That was true on stage. The vocals were split among Levon, Rick and Richard, with the look-at-me! lead guitar role held by a Cautious introvert.

But every social machine needs the energies of the Driven to get anywhere, and The Band had none. Or double-none, if you prefer. Their original fuel came from Ronnie Hawkins, an Id, who was their front man when they were Ronnie Hawkins and The Hawks. That energy was massively fortified by Bob Dylan, very much Di, who was the force who made The Band big enough to play stadium shows.

With those two father figures off stage, the drama of The Band plays out like Mister Maybe’s divorce: When The Hawks sent Ronnie Hawkins packing, Levon Helm was to be the boss. Except he was an Is good ol’ boy who found being (more…)

Where can you go to hear the truths no one else will tell you? The Church of Splendor.

This week we take up the biggest scam of the twentieth century: Bob Dylan’s massive success at convincing the post-modern world of the literary merit of obsessive larceny and putatively-profound word salad.

For which he has now scammed himself a Nobel Prize.

For literature…

I wish I were making this up, but at least I can tell you how it all happened:

On Facebook, Luke Williams observes: “I couldn’t understand the word(s) at 4:16 ‘…it was nothing but ________'”

In response to him, I append these notes:

“…it was nothing but phoning it in.”

I don’t explicitly say so, but a lot of this analysis turns on knowing how writers on deadline work. By the time of the motorcycle accident, Dylan was so overcommitted that almost everything he did was phoning it in. The word salad would have started as a Loki joke, just to see if he could get away with it, but by then he was dependent on his verbal BS blender to get done everything he was contracted to do.

Hey, sad-eyed minstrel, why is it an Arabian drum? Because Scandinavian drum didn’t fit the scansion, that’s why. Any other reason anyone gives, inlcluding Dylan, is bullshit. I’m betting there have been PhDs awarded for pretending to understand that atrocious nonsense.

I thought about illustrating phoning it in with another artist – John Prine – but in the end I avoided mentioning anyone else, so as not to do a who’s whom of songwriters, none of whom produce literature.

The funniest part of that video, for me? Trump didn’t vet Trump, and the Nobel Prize committee didn’t vet Dylan. I just did a gloss on the few parts of the man’s career that might claim to be aspirational, but in the end, to the (more…)