SelfAdoration.com

Spring will come, but in the mean time we will deck the halls with the colors of Spring to remind ourselves that things can always be better.JD Hancock via Foter.com / CC BY

It’s the season for giving, so Marxists and their dupes will insist that trading love for love with your loved ones is no different from pissing away your wealth on strangers. That is an egregious error of identification – but they know that and you do not.

In this week’s Church of Splendor homily, we take up an eight-word admonition you can use to undergird your everyday praxis of rational egoism: “In what way does this advance my interests?”

I have been sitting on some questions from Luke Williams about taxation and property rights for the past two weeks. I wanted for the news cycle to tamp down, but I also wanted to try to think of a way to address these issues without further sliming Ayn Rand and her slimy familiars.

The latter consideration is not a huge deal: The folks at the Ayn Rand Institute are clearly time-servers, bovine blunderers who think their function is to bleat and re-bleat the big-boss bloviator’s atrocious arguments. But I gain nothing from lamenting their uninterruptible ineptitude, so I would rather just put paid to the whole pathetic lot of them.

Here are the issues Luke raises, growing out of his admirable and highly-recommended deep reading of my writing:

I was reading an article on your site and have a question.

You say: “Your money was stolen from you, yes. But once it was, it became part of a vast pool of stolen funds, and none of that money is yours.”

My question: then whose is it? Who (if anyone?!) has the valid claim to the money? Surely not the looters?

Also, if innocent taxpayers have no valid claim on that pool, how could they rightly claim a tax refund, ask for it back, or sue, since the funds would inevitably come from that pool? (The latter two you suggested Ayn Rand should have done here.)

I do accept your point that the pool is draining, hence the dollar value of any tax victim’s justified claim must shrink over time, eventually to zero.

That’s actually more and less than I said, but these are great questions. My answers are matters of both ontology – what is true – and teleology – what you should do about it.

So my argument – old enough to be unemployably college-miseducated by now – is that you own your property to the extent you can defend it. People love to talk about “rights” as if a right had a tangible existence. This is false to fact. Rights are useful fictions, but they are never (more…)

One line from Shyly’s delight:

A Driven who is not in charge of something important to him will be disruptive – and eventually destructive.

To be rational is to be rational about everything – including oneself. I am very Driven, and much of the advice I give amounts to Drivenism – how to work harder, how to lose weight, how to think and feel better by adopting Driven habits of mind. But I am too much aware of the dark side of the Driven state of mind addressed in that quote: Leadership is the amplification of one man’s will, and, accordingly, Driven people build amazingly well – but they also destroy amazingly well.

The headline of this post is a shorter statement of this very short statement:

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

2. Islam is the enduring but persistently failed mutiny of the Cautious over the Driven.

3. History is what happens when the Driven wake (or sober) up.

The Driven are never not leading, even when they’re putatively out of power. If they’re not leading people toward their own ideals, they’re leading them away from yours – or simply leading each other to their own destruction.

The whole world is a Runaway Minivan by now – and if the Driven won’t drive, nobody’s going anywhere – except backwards. But while it’s good news for a family when Dad takes back the wheel, when the Driven put down a mutiny, rivers run red.

The Hellenism of the Hoplite Greeks creates peace by being continuously prepared for war. But the foreign policy of the ancient Greeks and Romans – still very much the foreign policy of The West – consists of negligence punctuated by exterminations. Multiculturalism is Act I in a story for which Monoculturalism is Act III.

If you want to avoid the extermination of the people the suddenly-diligent West will exhort you to kill, share Hoplite civilization now, by your affectionate displays. Our way of thriving is immensely better, while the victims of Marxism and Islam may (more…)

I’ve been talking, this week, about mananging conflict egoistically by reflecting on this essay: How do you live happily among people at war with all joy? Cultivate indifference and press on regardless.

That led in its way to this, from Saturday: Yes, emotions are tools of cognition – and emotional repression is a time-tested tool of tyranny.

And thinking about all of that led me to church yesterday:

I’m talking about a specific praxis for making your recurring transactions – from everyday commerce to love, marriage and family – work better by means of the affectionate display – but the what is not nearly as important as the why: Your self-interested motivation for treating other people with affection wherever possible is not for their benefit but for yours.

And that is how you go about habituating egoism. Whatever other church you go to, you should be bringing your family and friends to mine.

Adam Talbot, may fortune smile upon him, asks a question that’s not about San Bernardino or Donald Trump:

I am wondering about dealing with emotional reactions. What do you think of this attitude: you shouldn’t try to control your emotional reactions. By which I mean, if you feel angry, you shouldn’t attempt to salve that anger, instead you should acknowledge its reality and respect it as genuine. The opposite of this would be denying anger, attempting to diffuse it when it arises, or to attempt to explain it away in your own mind.

That is not to say that the emotion should be acted upon, or even that it should influence your decisions. But shouldn’t it be acknowledged and accepted as a valid part of your subjective experience?

I think this is exactly right, both the ontology and the teleology – the being and the shoulding.

An emotional response is an existential fact, an actual, undeniable phenomenon of nature. To affect to pretend that this reaction is unreal is an obvious error, as the pretense makes plain. Likewise to attempt to reject it post hoc. Ghosts do not become real by your affected belief in them, and remorse does not vanish because you wish it would.

Moreover, emotional reactions are important facts of reality: They are the feedback mechanism of your body, of your mind – ultimately of your whole life. Your emotions are providing you with vital information about what is going on right now, but they are also the barometer of your whole emotional life, going back to your birth and possibly before and going forward to your demise.

How is that so? Because your emotional response to the event you are reacting to is the instant manifestation of your pre-established habituated empathy strategies. How you feel now is a reflection of how you have felt in the past, and that rolling history is itself the best predictor of how you will feel in the future.

Who you will be is who you have been, yes, but who you have been (more…)

I love the idea of The West, but I’ve never not hated The Ruling Class that seems determined to run it into the ground. I want to be proud of how the Islamic Workplace Terrorism in San Bernardino is being handled, but the minions of the world-leaders-pretend sow doubt with every breath they vocalize.

The American Spectator wonders, “Where is the third gunman?” – and I’m with them. What was it those dogs were searching for?

I’ve waited day upon day to see the surveillance video from the parking lot and hallway cameras. The facility has liability for its patients and employees. Even if the conference room had no cameras, there should be a lot of video from other parts of the property. Where is it?

That video – that plus traffic-camera video from the streets – could be assembled into a very compelling narrative: This is what did happen, in verifiable sequence, and, accordingly, nothing else was happening in those places at those times. The FBI says, “Who are you going to believe, the FBI or your lyin’ eyes?” That’s an easier proposition to sell when your eyes have seen nothing to put the FBI’s testimony into doubt.

Am I being cynical? I don’t want to be. And yet, if someone drew in the breath to speak, he had an agenda, which may be unknown to you. This is universally true, the iron law of all testimony: It is necessarily misleading in the sense that you are being led to the speaker’s point of view and away from your own. This may be benign, and it need not be nefarious in intent even if not. But it is always so. Testimony is inherently misleading.

And when we are being told what is so but not being shown what must be many minutes, altogether, of apposite surveillance footage, I want to start sniffing around for rats.

I HATE this. I want to think they can tell the truth in a crisis. But the TV ‘news’ is aswarm with front-porch videos right now. We (more…)

A Facebook friend asked some questions about my political philosophy, and I am echoing my answers here for posterity. If you have questions for me, I encourage you to ask them. I know that I can be tough to take, but I also know that I talk about things you have never heard about from anyone ever before. I’m happy to help you see the world as I see it, if I can.

Here is my Facebook response:

> Anarchy?

Actual disgovernance, to use Vernon Vinge’s term, is probably not a near-term likelihood. Governmental collapse, on the other hand, may be imminent.

> You would take things that far, no government.

There is no government. Never has been, for the simple reason that all human behavior is exclusively self-controlled. Most individuals seek peace and plenty, which is why everything works so well. A few individuals — criminals — strive to live by predation. When a gang of criminals gains enough power to affect to dominate everyone else, we call that gang the government. Yet the actual domination imposed by government is never anything other than a pose, as “The War on Drugs” illustrates. You can bind or imprison human beings, or you can kill them or inflict permanent but non-lethal brain damage upon them, but as long as a genetic Homo sapiens is alive as a human being, there is nothing you can do to control that person’s purposive actions, choices or thoughts, and everything you might think of to try — and fail — to do to control other people will make human life worse, not better, starting with your own life.

You cannot eat rocks, but you can kill yourself trying to eat rocks. My take is that, since government cannot exist in the way that you want it to, the sensible thing to so is to accept reality for what it is and respond accordingly. You cannot control other people’s behavior, no matter how strident your laws, how bellicose your threats or how mammoth your prisons. But other people control their own behavior perfectly, and accepting this fact and letting them live as they (more…)

From Chapter 11 of Man Alive, Indomitable you.

If you have been paying attention to the slow-motion train wreck going on among the allegedly capitalist nation-states and their undeniably socialist central banks, you will have heard terms like “crony-capitalism” or “entitlement mentality.” Perhaps the pundits you have read have been honest enough to use a more comprehensive coinage – such as “moochers.” All of these ugly phenomena, and many others, are manifestations of a practice economists call “rent-seeking.” That term is used to mean market or legislative manipulations by which someone collects economic “rents” without providing any value in exchange. Crony-capitalism – more accurately characterized as Rotarian Socialism – is rent-seeking by means of government loans or subsidies, special favors or legislation inhibiting or outlawing competition. The entitlement mentality is the testy insistence that I should profit from your labor but you should not.

Suppose I show up at your house with a couple of my henchmen. We grab you and lock you up in shackles. We frog-march you back to my place and jail you in my basement. In the morning, we take you over to my neighbor’s house and compel you to do his yard work – for which service he is willing to pay me a princely sum. He doesn’t pay you anything, nor do I, but I do provide you with food, shelter and clothing – “Do not bind the mouths of the kine that tread the grain” – along with all the locks and chains you can stand. That is rent-seeking in its naked essence. I am providing none of the economic value. You are, albeit at my command. But I am collecting all of the “rents” for the value received.

That’s slavery, of course, and every form of rent-seeking is simply a more-attenuated and more-complicated form of slavery: I profit from the economic values you own or produce and you do not. We are apt to think of slavery as being a two-party transaction – you work on my land (more…)

Here is a simple fact of nature that just about anyone can accept without objection:

You are self-controlled.

Beyond obvious, yes?

Here is the corollary to that proposition, which just about everyone vehemently rejects:

So is everyone else.

What is the purpose of a statute law if not to affect to pretend to make believe that other people do not control their own behavior? What is the objective of a threat — like the threats of fines or imprisonment undergirding every statute law — if not to attempt to effect external control over other people’s lives?

What is it you hope to gain from traffic laws, the ones you and everyone else routinely violate? What do you expect to happen as the result of passing ever more onerous business regulations? How is that War On Drugs working out for you?

You are self-controlled and you know it, and, in consequence, you do as you choose without worrying about the law or its blustering, empty threats.

Everyone else is also self-controlled, and you devote massive amounts of frenzied effort trying to come up with schemes to contravene that simple and obvious fact — even though you know the whole while that their own frenzied efforts to control you cannot possibly work.

So here’s a question you might want to contemplate calmly and carefully in the silence and solitude of your mind:

What the hell is wrong with you?!?

Cognitive dissonance consists of striving to uphold two contradictory ideas in your (more…)

I had a time of it, this week just past, trying very hard not to talk about the Islamic Workplace Terrorism massacre in San Bernardino.

I took care of most of this by revisiting my own past writing:

• Redeeming Western civilization by curing the incuriosity of the East.

• Praising Cain: Change the world forever by learning to love your life the way you actually live it.

• Cain’s world: Spreading Western Civilization with Persephone’s second coming…

But the best expression of my values came in the form of the birth of a new young friend:

Saved by Grace from Islamic Workplace Terrorism: Even in the midst of carnage, hope springs eternal.

I wanted to avoid the topic for Church this week, and at that I failed completely:

At times like these, we are apt to offer up some form of the Not All Muslims Are Like That argument. That much is obvious. Almost all Muslims are not like that. But: So what? Almost no one is like that, but, of those who are, an astounding number of them are exponents of Islam.

That’s hardly surprising. Islam began as an organized crime syndicate, with the Koran offered up as an elaborate rationale to justify its blood-thirsty predation. I find it easy to believe that most Muslims abhor the atrocious violence effected in the name of their faith – and yet they do nothing either to purge their doctrine of its anti-human ferocity, nor to purge their ranks of the ferocious.

Birds of a feather? Not so much. But do they wake up with fleas? Oh, yes – to their chagrin and to our sorrow.

Islam is at war with human civilization – with Hellenic culture, the only truly human civilization that has ever existed. This would be true for every other religion, as old as Judaism and as new as Marxism, but only Islam and Marxism are actively at war with The West.

The rest of (more…)

March 9, 2004

I sing the praises of Western Civilization, and it might seem as if I am speaking solely of ancient civilizations. I am in league with the Greeks, after all. We think of the Greeks and we think of Euclid or Aristotle, of a cool and deliberate people enthralled by a cool deliberation. We can find the same sorts of things to admire in certain Romans, the reason of Seneca, the wit of Horace, the sly inventiveness of Ovid. But if we turn an eye to Catullus or Juvenal, we see a very different Rome. And in the Philippics of either Demosthenes or Cicero, we catch sight of something very far removed from cool deliberation. In his account of the Catiline conspiracy, Cicero graces us with the Latin phrase “consputare coeperunt” – “they began to spit together.” What man among us can say he is still an individualist once he has joined his brother men in attempting to drown their opposition in spit?

The West I praise is not the West of the ancients, but rather the West we have inherited from the ancients and improved upon by vast degrees. This Western Civilization is not just Greek and Roman but also Christian and Germanic. Especially Germanic. Reading Roman accounts of the people they called the Germans can be very funny – except when those comical Germans are sacking Rome, as they did again and again. But the Germanic culture that so influenced the West was the Romanized Germanic culture of the late Middle Ages and beyond. It is the Germanic culture that became Austrian and Nordic and French and English culture, the trans-national Bourgeois culture that ultimately became American culture.

It was and is Cain’s world in the way that I describe it, a culture of capital and commerce and conciliation, rather than the Warrior culture advocated if not avidly pursued by the raging sons of Abel. The Germans and Gauls slain and exiled and conquered by Marius and Sulla and Caesar were Warriors. The Germans (more…)

Imagine this: You are the High Priest of a nomadic tribe following a herd of foraging sheep. When the tribe needs food, a beast is slain and the meat is shared equally. The political structure is hierarchical, but even the Chieftain is governed by the unchanging traditions of the tribe.

One year the herd wanders toward the seacoast. You encamp a short walk away from a trading post built by a sea-faring civilization.

For the first time in their lives, your tribesmen discover a way of life different from their own. The traders live indoors, sleeping on beds! Their diet consists of more than meat and foraged nuts. They eat grain, fruit and fish, flavoring their water with delectable nectars.

Wealth is not shared. Villagers trade with each other to get what they need — and each family owns its own land! Disputes are resolved by reasoned conciliation, not by fiat. Even so, each family seems to own more weapons than your whole tribe combined.

Anyone can introduce a new tool, technique or idea at any time — upending the whole civilization if it comes to that — and not only is this not forbidden, it is avidly sought!

This is horrifying to you as High Priest, but your horror is nothing compared to the apoplexy of the Chieftain. As he watches tribesmen disappearing into the village one by one, never to return, he turns to you for a solution.

Now you understand the story of Cain and Abel.

Cain, the trader, made a sacrifice of grain, Abel of meat, and the meat — the wealth of the herders — was pleasing to the god of the tribe. Why does Cain slay Abel in the story? To scare the tribesmen back into the herd.

The Greeks found a better way to live, spreading it with capitalistic abandon. Those who abhorred the Greek way of life crafted their mythologies to portray Hellenism as evil.

Would you like to change the world, forever, for the good, one mind at a time? (more…)

Only Hellenism brings that which is without within, in her sciences, and that which is within without, in her arts.Hani Amir / Foter / CC BY-NC-ND

This is me writing in May of 2003, in the build up to the last war on Islam – about which I was too much mistaken, alas. Some (or many) of the links may be broken by now. Meanwhile, I can see this much more clearly now: The Cautious strategy is aboriginal – and yet still very much like the “Instructions For Making Coffee Properly” procedure that was posted by the high-C in your office’s break-room. Hoplite civilization is Driven because fathers are Ds ex officio. So simple… A question for the very clever: Is this the string Marx was actually tugging on? –GSS
 

Intrepid weblogger Billy Beck pointed me to this ‘Why Do They Hate Us?’ piece by John Derbyshire in The New Criterion. I think Derbyshire was padding his thesis to a pre-set length; the article is long, rambling and unfocused. Funny in places, though. Like this:

Try to imagine that your own notion of life in the United States was constructed entirely from American movies and TV programs. You would perceive my country as being inhabited by a mix of gigantic, steroid-enhanced basketball stars, exquisitely beautiful young people with perfect teeth and musculature, gangsters, detectives, lawyers, and freakish pop singers. We live in palatial apartments, do very little work, sleep around a lot, and get our way mainly by murdering each other.

Beck was intrigued by a different part of the article, in which Derbyshire detailed an aborted engagement to speak before a party of Chinese media bigwigs who were visiting Washington just at the time of the World Trade Center attacks:

The Chinese media types came over on September 8th. They were in a room together with some State Department minders, receiving some kind of cultural acclimitization, when the World Trade Center was hit. There was a TV set in the room, and everyone got to see the second plane hit. When this happened, some of the Chinese party stood up and cheered.

We were told about (more…)

Yesterday, while the whole world was watching San Bernardino get shot to shit, I was showing off that baby picture to everyone I met.

Her name is Elizabeth Grace Trbovich, but I’ve thought of her simply as Grace since first I heard that name. She is the brand new daughter of my friends Mary Frances Cheney and Dan Michael Trbovich.

She was born on a day of turmoil, but every day is rife with turmoil if you focus on distant noises instead of the values that actually matter in your life.

I’m sad for the people in San Bernardino – including the attackers, who gave their lives for nothing. But I am graced by Grace, by the simple fact of her being.

I wrote this last night to Dan Michael:

I’ve been smiling all day, despite the TV news. A child is an anchor cast into the uncharted harbor of the future. She may be Grace, but she’s hope, too.

The future is a minute or a day or a month from now, but The Future begins on the day your child is born, since now you are striving for someone who will live for decades beyond your own demise.

It is reported that the San Bernardino inventors of Islamic Workplace Terrorism left behind a six-month-old infant – which argues to me that they did not believe in The Future. Sad for them, sad for us, saddest of all for their child.

But: Press on regardless. While the rest of America was watching carnage on TV all day yesterday, I was showing that baby picture to perfect strangers.

Why? Because goodness thrives, hard work pays off, hope springs eternal – and Grace abounds.

Q: If you came upon the Buddha in the guise of a hot dog vendor, what should you say?

A: Make me one with everything.

I love that joke today better than ever, since it provides the practical answer to this real-life question someone asked me:

May I ask what your take is on Zen?

I really like being asked questions, and I hope I don’t seem graceless or arrogant or too stupidly off-topic in my answers. Even so, my take on Zen Buddhism is that joke, since I know nothing else about it. That’s not entirely true. I know enough about Buddhism to get the joke – which is not quite nothing, but it’s close.

When I was a workaholic kid in Fun City, I would hear Alan Watts on WNEW-FM in the wee hours every Sunday morning – but I hated it all, especially Watts himself. In the world of internet radio – or even just preset buttons on boom boxes – I would never even have known his name. I don’t know that he actually knew anything about Zen Buddhism – and if he did, he was an awful ambassador – but I don’t remember anything he said, anyway.

Not that it would matter if I did. Doctrines abound, and my take is that all the other ones are wrong. People will always want to cherry-pick for notions they embrace, but a bogus map with pleasing flourishes is a bogus map. We know about Buddhists because of the Greek style of mind, not the other way around, and Buddhists thrive in the Greek world by being Greeks. Like Jews, like Catholics, like Mormons, Buddhists are religious at home and in church, living as ecumenical realists in the rest of the world.

And to there, I truly don’t care. I don’t admire undefended supernatural claims, but I don’t mind if you do – provided you behave appropriately toward me. I think every doctrine but mine is wrong – this with respect to uncontroverted ontological facts everyone else elects (more…)