SelfAdoration.com

From March of 2014:

Imagine yourself dying. Are you joyful or gloomy? Does your mind frolic in a meadow of happy memories, or are you failing to escape a dungeon of regrets. Are you surrounded by people who love you? By people you’re paying to take care of you? By no one?

You are living by a hierarchy of values right now. To which sort of death are they guiding you?

What if you don’t want to lose at the game of life? What if you want to find a better way to win…?

“How can we destroy monogamy?”
Their answer left me dumbstruck, breathless, disbelieving my ears. Was I on planet earth? Who were these people?
“By promoting promiscuity, eroticism, prostitution and homosexuality!” they resounded.Photo by: msmornington

Imagine this: a girl of seventeen or eighteen at the kitchen table with Mom studying the syllabus for her first year of college and there’s a class called “Women’s Studies.” “Hmmm, this could be interesting,” says Mom. “Maybe you could get something out of this.”

Seems innocuous to her.  How could she suspect this is a class in which her innocent daughter will be taught that her father is a villain?  Her mother is a fool who allowed a man to enslave her into barbaric practices like monogamy and family life and motherhood, which is a waste of her talents.  She mustn’t follow in her mother’s footsteps. That would be submitting to life as a mindless drone for some domineering man, the oppressor, who has mesmerized her with tricks like romantic love.  Never be lured into this chicanery, she will be taught.  Although men are no damned good, she should use them for her own orgasmic gratification; sleep with as many men as possible in order to keep herself unattached and free. There’s hardly a seventeen-year-old girl without a grudge from high school against a Jimmy or Jason who broke her heart.  Boys are learning, too, and they can be careless during high school, that torment of courting dances for both sexes.

By the time Women’s Studies professors finish with your daughter, she will be a shell of the innocent girl you knew, who’s soon convinced that although she should be flopping down with every boy she fancies, she should not, by any means, get pregnant.  And so, as a practitioner of promiscuity, she becomes a wizard of prevention techniques, especially abortion.

The goal of Women’s Liberation is to wear each female down to losing all empathy for boys, men or babies. The tenderest aspects of her soul are roughened (more…)

“Why in the world would smarmy hucksters gull the gullible just for a government paycheck? That could never happen!”Photo by: GoToVan

From my own corner of the web, I would offer two additional considerations. First, science of all sorts is done by highly-Cautious personalities. This results in a doubled imbalance in the results reported by researchers, since high-C’s have little respect for any perspective other than their own, and since they are unduly convinced of their own infallibility. And second, as a matter of predictable inevitability, every government jobs program becomes a cargo cult in very short order. #BrotherYouAskedForIt!

The hagiographies of science are full of paeans to the self-correcting, self-healing nature of the enterprise. But if raw results are so often false, the filtering mechanisms so ineffective, and the self-correcting mechanisms so compromised and slow, then science’s approach to truth may not even be monotonic. That is, past theories, now “refuted” by evidence and replaced with new approaches, may be closer to the truth than what we think now. Such regress has happened before: In the nineteenth century, the (correct) vitamin C deficiency theory of scurvy was replaced by the false belief that scurvy was caused by proximity to spoiled foods. Many ancient astronomers believed the heliocentric model of the solar system before it was supplanted by the geocentric theory of Ptolemy. The Whiggish view of scientific history is so dominant today that this possibility is spoken of only in hushed whispers, but ours is a world in which things once known can be lost and buried.

And even if self-correction does occur and theories move strictly along a lifecycle from less to more accurate, what if the unremitting flood of new, mostly false, results pours in faster? Too fast for the sclerotic, compromised truth-discerning mechanisms of science to operate? The result could be a growing body of true theories (more…)

Want a happy marriage? It’s easy. Whatever he is at work, at home the husband should manage his behavior as a Driven Sociable: A definite agenda with a focus on affection and enjoyment. And whatever she does outside the home, within it she should be a Sociable Driven: Affection and enjoyment in pursuit of valid and valuable goals.Photo by: Danumurthi Mahendra

Take note: There is nothing wrong with Cautious or Incandescent people. You are what you are, and what you are is very useful and valuable – deployed appropriately. A Driven who is not in charge of something important to him will be disruptive – and eventually destructive. Sociables without direction will get a lot of schmoozing done, but not much else. Meanwhile, if you want something counted, organized or micro-managed, the Cautious person who will always become a tyrant in power will be a critical asset under Driven management. And nothing ever got sold a second time without the blinding enthusiasm of the Incandescents.

Each of those strategies is immensely valuable in a properly-organized business: Run by a Driven with Cautious research and development and accounting, executed by Sociables, with Incandescents handling the sales and marketing. That works, where a business run any other way will fail, either to bankruptcy or as a prison camp grinding its way ever-so-slowly to that same inevitable bankruptcy.

It’s easy to task-specialize in a business – and easy to fix staffing errors when you discover them. It’s not so easy in a family – nor should it be.

I want to talk about three different dualities, all of which make a difference in a marriage:

First you are male and female, and this is a natural condition, not a social construct. In a normal romantic relationship, the man will be dominant as a matter of biological necessity and of precedence of action and because a woman will yield to a man’s on-going dominance, but a (more…)

You wanted to know what explains the Incandescent/Cautious female harridans and the Cautious/Incandescent male involuntary-celibates of the libertarian movement: It is this formula for human misery concocted by Ayn Rand.

> So given the horrors of family life in Rand’s world view, it shouldn’t surprise anyone why she celebrates sterility as a virtue.

Damn straight. In my darker moments, I wonder if this was the plan all along, to give Cautious temperaments a nefarious enemy while taking away their actual threat to the ruling class – their power to breed massive armies of reinforcements. We talked about that here:

Is the Ayn Rand Institute’s indefensible stand on abortion part of a clandestine intelligence op?

Occam argues for incompetence over malice, of course, and everything of Rand is easily understood from my interpretation of the DISC personality assessment. Ayn Rand was a Ci, a Cautious Incandescent. The Cautious insist that theory trumps experience, and the Incandescent abhor the humiliation emerging from the admission of error. (In this way The Ayn Rand Institute is the perfect imago of ‘Miss Rand.’)

Hank and Philip Rearden can be understood in DISC terms. Rand’s ideal man – very different from her actual character – was a Dc, the Driven Cautious temperament who is in actual reality the ideal corporate CEO (from the owner’s if not the employee’s or customer’s point of view). An older Dc brother is all but certain to push his younger brother into being an Is or an Si, since the younger brother will not be able to compete for attention by expressing Dc virtues. This is the DISC of birth order, and there is a book in here. Philip Readen is Is. Doug Stamper’s younger brother on ‘House of Cards’ is Si. Give good writers credit: They may not understand DISC, but they understand how family dynamics play out. In the same way, older brother James Taggart, as an Ic, made (more…)

If you look for DISC discriminations, you’ll find them everywhere. Here is Martin Luther King showing you DISC as he saw it [with my annotations in brackets]:

Cowardice asks the question, is it safe? [The Cautious temperament.]

Expediency asks the question, is it politic? [The Driven temperament.]

Vanity asks the question, is it popular? [The Incandescent temperament.]

But, conscience asks the question, is it right? [The Sociable temperament.]

We each of us are who we are. We are not doomed live out the consequences of our DISC profiles over and over again, but we will not change simply by wishing we would.

To everyone but the Sociables, my advice is the same: Less Driven/Incandescent/Cautious, more Sociable.

My advice to the Sociables? More Driven. 😉

Who is John Galt? Ayn Rand’s moral ideal, in the world she prayed for and achieved, was sold as spare parts, with the rest of him left to stain discarded rags.

Yaron Brook[’s] actual job consists of pretending […] that Howard Roark’s and John Galt’s mammies, had the condoms failed after 1973, would not have devoured their unborn genius babies on Ayn Rand’s own advice.

Shocking? You’re an idolator. But shockingly true, certainly. Rand makes a big point of celebrating the accomplishments of thoroughly unwanted babies.

What happens to babies like that, post Roe v. Wade? Do you want to blank out like Yaron Brook and the entire Ayn Rand Institute?

So which others of Ayn Rand’s major characters would have missed the cut by curettage?

From The Fountainhead: Gail Wynand, surely. Catholics is Catholics, but poor Catholics is a smellier kettle of fish. Katie Halsey, too, though Peter Keating might have scraped (ahem) by. Mike Donnigan, the only all-the-way decent person Rand ever wrote, could easily have fallen to the knife, and I have my doubts about Steven Mallory.

From Atlas Shrugged: Hank Rearden would have found his future in medical waste, and possibly Dan Conway, too, along with half or more of the Colorado upstarts. And Eddie Willers and Cheryl Brooks might have found each other at last – in the dumpster behind the clinic.

When the Planned Parenthood ghouls argue for abortion, they are at least claiming to seek a eugenic end to justify their homicidal means. The abortion championed by Ayn Rand and the The Ayn Rand Institute is outrageously dysgenic: Its goal and its actual practical outcome is to rob humanity of its best exemplars in each new generation.

Who is John Galt? Ayn Rand’s moral ideal, in the world she prayed for and achieved, was sold as spare parts, with the rest of him left to stain discarded rags.

When you see the lights go out in New York City, remember whose hand was on the switch.

Busily butt-bussing billionaires: Yaron Brook is pimping a book about being a full-time professional pimp for full-time professional rent-seekers.

Yes, the evader-in-chief of the Ayn Rand Institute has let nine precious months slip away as he avoids acknowledging the hell on earth the goddess of his idolatry midwived as her sole philosophical legacy.

Yaron Brook has been busily butt-bussing billionaires, this because his actual job consists of pretending, first, that full-time professional rent-seekers are somehow idols of the free market, and, second, that Howard Roark’s and John Galt’s mammies, had the condoms failed after 1973, would not have devoured their unborn genius babies on Ayn Rand’s own advice.

I would feel more pity for the man if he were not so much a profiteer on his own self-loathing. Meanwhile, the ruling class can’t but help to classify his importance to them. David Daleiden, the man behind the gruesome Planned Parenthood baby-mining videos, is being subjected to a multi-state persecution worthy of the Roman Empire. Yaron Brook is pimping a book about being a full-time professional pimp for full-time professional rent-seekers. None so deserving.

Brook evaded all my questions on his proudly-touted “ask-me-anything” radio broadcast, so herewith are they all repeated. Do note that he cannot answer these questions, nor can Leonard Peikoff or anyone at the Ayn Rand Institute, nor can anyone in the libertarian-movement-writ-large, nor can anyone anywhere. We are done with abortion.

If I could ask Yaron Brook some of the questions he has evaded so far, and will no doubt continue to evade, among them would be these:

Do you admit that being instrumentally involved in an abortion is self-destructive to the the actor?

Do you agree that the pro-abortion argument is necessarily incompatible with egoism?

Do you concede that Ayn Rand’s position on abortion is at war with humanity itself – most especially the humanity of the people who knuckled under to Rand’s domination?

Can you concur that by being so resolutely anti-family, big-O Objectivism and all liberty-seeking movements have destroyed their own future impact?

Is there any doubt that, by killing their own offspring, ‘students (more…)

From Man Alive, Chapter 1. You’re in this all alone.

Your fundamental independence from all other people is the most important – and therefore the most deliberately obscured – issue in all of modern philosophy.Photo by: Kumar Jhuremalani

What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form, in moving, how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals!

That speech is from Hamlet, of course. Shakespeare, dead four-hundred years, loved your mind much more than does almost anyone alive today. If you read contemporary authors – theologians or philosophers or academics or artists or journalists – they will insist that your reason is either impotent or incompetent, your faculties inept, your simplest movements clumsy and chaotic, your actions and apprehension diabolical, your every attribute a manifestation either of an ugly corruption or of meaningless chance, your very existence an insult to all of existence. You will have to dig through a lot of garbage to find someone who will come right out and say that the universe would be better if the human mind did not exist, but this is the philosophy undergirding modern claims made about humanity.

The culture at large, all over the world, is at war with the human mind – and you don’t know it.

The world you’ve always known is collapsing around you – or has it already collapsed? – and you don’t know why.

Does it occur to you now that those two observations might have something to do with each other?

If we assume that Shakespeare is correct – as Shakespeare’s corpus itself proves! – what might be the objective of all those people hurling insults at your mind? Where might they be hoping to land, as the grand edifices of Western Civilization crumble to rubble? “Cui bono?” – who benefits? The truly awful truth is that no one does. The people lecturing you about how vile you are surely hope to reign over you and to seize your wealth for (more…)

In the end, the truth will out. It always does.

The book presented and developed a brand new theory of egoism, arguing from the origins of the reflexively-aware self-image to an exploration of the ontologically-consonant values of that self, the object of every truly self-interested act.

You should read Man Alive if you haven’t – and read it again if you have – but here’s the crux of the matter, the reason I make the seemingly outrageous claim that I invented egoism:

The name philosophers give to any ethical doctrine promoting self-love or self-interest is egoism. I use that term myself to describe the system of ethics I am elaborating here, but I’m not crazy about it.

First, most creeds that call themselves egoism actually refer to invalid ideas of the self whose interests are to be served. Either “self” is used to mean the reflexive idea of the bodily self or to self-identity – the object of sentences like “I clothe myself” or “I promote myself on the internet.” Or “self” is deployed as a matter of bodily or pecuniary utility: “It was to my self-interest to take a loss on this one deal in order to hang onto a valuable client.” There is nothing wrong with any of these behaviors, they just don’t have anything to do with the actual human self, the self as we documented it in the last chapter.

The second type of ethical creeds called egoism is actually other-centric. Whether the philosopher claims that his egoism permits him to dominate other people, or that his egoism forbids other people from dominating him, the focus of the doctrine is not the self at all – not the self as I describe it nor even the reflexive or utilitarian self – but is instead those other people.

I’m inclined to think that most philosophical or theological arguments – of all sorts (more…)

We’re coming up on the fourth anniversary of the publication of Man Alive, and that seems like a propitious time to take on some big ideas. So why don’t let’s go after the biggest idea of all, cosmology, the structure of the universe?

This week’s Church of Splendor homily takes up everything that really matters in the universe: You and your values.

I’m doing everything churches should have been doing all along, giving you a better way to live. Tell your friends about The Church of Splendor and we’ll all do better together.

When the only thing that matters is putting miles behind you, this is how to get the job done.

Photo by: Dennis Yang

Not mentioned in the video: It pays to pre-plan your stops from the map. You’re looking for decent-sized towns or, at a minimum, places where a major road transects the freeway. If you are low on gas and your only choice is El Camino sin Nombre, you’ll only have one or two stations to choose from, the gas will be over-priced and the restroom will be awful. Still worse, those kinds of gas stations can put a huge credit hold on your card, so you may not be able to use it at the next stop – or for the next day or two.

From last September, some very good words for fathers for Easter Sunday. –GSS

Where do self-responsible children come from? Self-responsible fathers. Welcome to my church.

Photo by: Erin

So: Reflecting on a blog post from the @TheCulDeSacHero, we swing out in a huge arc to encompass all of the universe in one ultimate benediction.

Why? Because if I’m going to traffic in good words, I’m gonna make ’em big ones. This is The Church of Splendor, and we don’t let our atheism, our egoism or our anarchism get in the way of the concerns that have always mattered most in church: Life and death.

How can you tell for sure this is a church? Because there’s a offering plate. I’d be grateful if you would pay me what you think I’m earning from you, more grateful still if you would scare up a donor who can help make this church grow.

Meanwhile, here are some good words about making everything – even death – better: