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FREE this weekend for Kindle: Why academics get empathy all wrong:

Empathy ultimately is imagination – the invocation of the presumed mental states to be found in other people’s minds, but also the contra-factual insistence that one can experience at first hand the interior existence of another entity – and there cannot be an act of imagination that is originated by and for the benefit of anyone other than the actor himself.

You’ll note that I used the word “entity” in that definition. Of the nine kinds of empathy I want to explore, only three concern real people, the next three essentially fictional people, with the last three illuminating ideas of empathy for things that are not even alive – or not even real things!

Imagination about the completely imaginary? Who ever heard of such a thing?

A poet, of course, and I approach this as a poet, so just as we move from the most real of empathies to the most fanciful, so do we move from those empathies that are nearest to one’s own experience to those most remote – and from the most to the least actionable. I can do a lot of immediate benefit for my niece. My contributions to the ideas of self-adoration, human sovereignty, the family – and now empathy – may take a little longer to come to fruition. These are all expressions of empathy for the idea, the most fanciful, most remote and least actionable of empathies, but the one that can make the greatest and most enduring of differences in real human lives in the long run.

Changing lives? That’s the leadership of the poet.

Virtually all of philosophy, not just reductionist science, labors under the delusion – an empathy for the impossible – that people can be controlled from the outside, and can thus be impelled to betray their own interests and values. My impression is that the sole interest academia takes in empathy is to try to figure out how to build a better shmoo.

I work the other way. I know the self is the cardinal value of the uniquely-human life (more…)

Despair is worse that pointless, but cultivating admirability – in yourself and in everyone around you – will pay huge and ever-increasing dividends. How self-loving is that?

And how Church of Splendor is that?

You say you want to make a difference in the world? This is a difference you can actually make.

Writing for San Diego Rostra, my friend Brian Brady reminded me of this BloodhoundBlog post from 2007, echoed here below.

Have things changed since then? Why, yes, they have. They’ve gotten substantially worse.

“Rotarian Socialism” is not mine, nor is “Brother, you asked for it!” But, no matter who wins this election, there is more “Rotarian Socialism” to come – in real estate and in every other business – and it was 108 years ago that “Brother, you asked for it!” –GSS
 

Business Week’s Hot Property wrote yesterday about the NAR’s having gotten into bed with Hillary Clinton — who is “sponsoring a bill that bars commercial banks from hiring real estate brokers/agents” — but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. The National Association of Realtor is routinely, habitually, congenitally anti-free market.

I’m doing the prep work to defend the traditional practice of real estate, but this is my radical yelp: The original and on-going purpose of the NAR is anti-capitalist. The organization was formed to limit entry into the residential real estate business — to push Chester the Barber and others out of the business. The NAR wrote the original state real estate laws to achieve this goal — however poorly. This on-going legislative campaign against banks competing for real estate transactions is just more of the same: “Protecting” mediocrities from fair competition.

It seems never to end. If you’re a member of the NAR, you get hit with spam about once a month about some vitally important piece of anti-free market legislation: Coerced health insurance for real estate brokerages, keep WalMart out of banking, keep banks out of real estate. The NAR is hardly alone in making appeals for legislation, so it is perhaps easy to forget that legislation is imposed by force of arms. What the NAR is doing is taking control of the massive firepower of the Federal government and deploying it to hijack potential competitors.

It’s a protection racket — vicious, awful, evil crime — dressed (more…)

Church Sunday, to cleanse the palate of all that news, a fun way to make the most of your marriage:

Church Sunday: A year after the Planned Parenthood videos, where do big-foot libertarians stand? Blank out.

I’ve written a ton on the subject. Who else has?

Comes this week yet another spree-killing, this time a massacre of Dallas cops. As the headline indicates, I think these guys are more alike than they are different, and their differences – Islam, race, sexual politics – come down to pretexts. They are attention-seeking time bombs.

Hence Church Sunday, a clip from last October: Spree-killers in six minutes: Under-fathered, over-medicated, involuntarily celibate and universally rejected. Feminism kills fatherhood – and under-fathered boys sometimes kill indiscriminately.

The saddest news of all? There are by now too many of these wretches to take note of or remember. Less a blaze of glory than a brief spark of ignominy, soon supplanted by the next flash in the pan. The pretext meant nothing all along, but in the end the act itself means nothing – nothing beyond the pain inflicted on innocents in a failed bid for notoriety.

Church Sunday: “Devoured by local predators only!” is not a proud boast.

Birthing a child is one of the biggest bets you can make on the future, a gamble my niece and nephew Maddie and Tim Brannum just took on in the form of a brand new baby boy named Sebastian.

I got to meet him last night, when he was about 18 hours old. An engaged and engaging mind. I got him to play a stick-out-your-tongue mimicry game, the youngest kid I’ve ever done that with. That’s voluntary muscle control plus interactive play, all-the-way human from the first bat of his eyelashes. Just as with older children learning to make hand signals, which we discussed a few weeks ago, if you can stick out your tongue at will, you can perform brain surgery. It’s all just a matter of learning how.

We take up the risks and salutary consequences of giving birth in this week’s Church of Splendor homily:

From December 10, 2015:

Call this a movie treatment. I’ll flesh it out and make it farcical fiction when somebody’s check clears the bank. For now, the bare bones:

Act I: Donald Trump is looking for a way too goose his reality TV franchise when Ted Cruz comes to him with a bold plan: Trump is to run for President as Cruz’ stalking horse, yielding his support to him before the GOP Convention. Trump agrees on the condition that he can later repackage his campaign as television: Presidential Apprentice.

Act II: Trump clowns it up – since he’s making television – and Cruz clamps it down, acting like the Captain of the football team indulging his goofy kid brother. But where both expect the clowning to flame out in short order, instead it grows to a conflagration. And since Trump is built to believe nothing but his own bullshit…

Act III: Life will be what it turns out to be be, but imagination is what you want to have happen. That’s masturbatory, if all you’re doing is indulging yourself. But fiction can present a simulated future that spares you the pain of living through that reality.

So: Trump cannot prevail in this story, since he is an inherently tragic figure, the unloved love child of Aeschylus and Oscar Wilde.

Cruz should win in the end, given the idea of benedy, but since he is being creepily crafty in Act I, I will want to see him prevail by means of the moral improvement he masters in Act II.

That’s benedy as farce, and I can think of a dozen different ways to write it – with my favorite being as a high school comedy of manners.

Do send that check if you’d like to see more, but, in the mean time consider this:

What if this scenario is not fiction?

Fathers should learn how to change diapers? No. Fathers are tasked to learn how to change the world.

Church this week:

It’s not defended in the video, but the argument undergirding this is that all of civility – the stuff of civilization – emerges from fatherhood.

The sophistry of nihilism is nothing new in philosophy – more’s the pity. Now Elon Musk goes that ancient game one better – by insisting we are all living in a video game.

No one actually believes any of these absurd anti-reality, anti-human-efficacy claims. The people who mouth them are simply jacking off in public, trading astounding anti-intellectual pronouncements for evanescent Incandescent rewards. But their claims are not without consequence, and that’s why this matters.

Church this week takes Musk to task, but it also takes to task the people tasked with defending reality, most especially the ever-evasive Ayn Rand Institute:

There is a semi-brutal chapter in Nine empathies called “Empathy for the untouchable.” It’s about the individuals who are cruelly scorned by everyone else in a particular social context and what that says about them – and us.

There is often a corresponding role in that same context: The irreproachable. Where the untouchable is the person no one dares to treat as a human being – and, possibly, the one everyone else feels obliged to mistreat by some more-overt means – the irreproachable is the person that no one in that group dares to reject, criticize or chastise.

Prom King, right? Head Cheerleader. Attractive, talented, prosperous, well-groomed and popular – where popularity literally means the imputed power to reject, criticize or chastise anyone else on the ladder of irreproachability. The untouchable is in the corresponding role: Putatively denied any right to reject, criticize or chastise anyone higher up.

From Chapter 7, “Empathy for the machine.”

But not all social groups are evil – just most of them. People generally kiss up and kick down. They brag over or at least don’t complain about injuries inflicted upon them from above them in the social hierarchy, perhaps because they’re too busy inflicting injuries of their own on those further down. Status amounts to who you can reject peremptorily, expecting them to take it without rebellion, and who is putatively empowered to reject you in just that way. The untouchable is scorned by everyone, of course, but his counterpart – the irreproachable – is prized by all the others precisely because he scorns them – with their own consent.

That’s kinda sick, huh? Pretty ugly. Have you ever seen anything like it before?

I’m (more…)