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After almost three months of exposure of the gruesome nature of the intrauterine infanticide championed by novelist Ayn Rand, Yaron Brook of the Ayn Rand Institute has to-date had this to say: “La, la, la, la, la!”

That’s right. The lady who wrote the book on evasion is now represented by a cadre of evaders worthy of Wesley Mouch himself. Her “philosophy for living on earth” is great for everything – except for, you know, navigating existential reality. Rand’s minions can’t uphold her ridiculous arguments and yet they can’t renounce them either.

That’s sad, but, brother, did they ever ask for it!

Here’s what’s sadder: By affecting to have pretended to have made believe that they are somehow indifferent to the exposure of Objectivism as not just a party to but a key proponent in the wholesale slaughter of innocents – the kind of slaughter Rand railed against in every other respect – Yaron Brook and the Ayn Rand Institute are dropping the ball all over the place.

Witness:

• The world’s economy is a global slow-motion train wreck, the inevitable collapse of Marxist predation. This will not end well, but it may end soon. 
• Huey Long is running for president. If elected, he will instantly turn into Benito Mussolini – the fat, buffoonish, endlessly-needy bully bound in thrall to an even bigger bully, not Adolf Hitler but Vladimir Putin. 
• The family has been eviscerated (with Ayn Rand’s eager assistance, alas). Our children are not permitted to have fathers and our sons are not permitted to grow up to be fathers. The consequences are not pretty.

The first two problems (and every other social conflict) are caused by the third, so it’s easy to see why Yaron Brook would want to evade the further consequences of the horrible advice on love, sex, marriage and family Ayn Rand gave to her slavish followers.

But it remains that the world is going up in flames and Yaron Brook has his fingers in his ears – which is not an easy posture to sustain, considering where he parks his head.

Nice going, Objectivists. You won’t have to wait for (more…)

In August of 2013, Anthony Johnson of The 21 Convention brought me to Orlando to do a video interview. I stayed for a month, for my own purposes, but the flights were on #T21C, and I am endlessly, boundlessly grateful for every bit of this: For the trip, for the interview, for the people I met and the things I saw, did and learned.

The ideas about art – the notions I have come to refer to as benedy and maledy – were spawned on that trip. Uncle Willie went to Las Vegas in July and lost his gamble, then to Orlando in August, where he shed himself of satire. I got my favorite guitar – Cherry Bomb – then, too. I had it shipped Amazon Prime to my hotel, so I first saw the third of my three princesses in Orlando.

The Big-O is a busker town, so me and her saw a lot of sun, as you will note in the video. I am Phoenix brown year around, but Orlando got the best of me. I have never sweat or peed so much in my life, nor have I ever seen so much water on what is reputed to be dry land.

The interview was shot at Socrates’ house, which he himself designed, built and decorated. The space is breathtaking, but you see too little of it, alas. Even so, it was the prefect setting for this discussion.

And ain’t I the proud one? Indeed I am. This is well done all the way around, with the visual style establishing the terms of debate. I was questioned by Anthony Johnson, Socrates and Marilee Johnson, but what you see are my answers, with the questions summarized on intro cards.

We cover a lot, a lot, a lot (more…)

Another month, another mass shooting. Are guns the problem? You bet. Guns in the hands of under-fathered, over-medicated, involuntarily-celibate, universally-rejected young men. Take away the guns (in your dreams) and these boys will kill with knives or cars or bombs – or car-bombs. If there is only one way for them to get your attention…

The moral philosophy explored here will fix all of this – in time. But right now, when everyone wants to do something to #StopGunViolence, here’s something you can do:

Entreat Anthony Johnson to release the remaining two videos he has of me speaking.

That sounds both vain and self-serving, but it’s neither. I don’t know if my vanity comes in at none or total, but, either way, it has nothing to do with you. But I know what you don’t, so the loss here is yours, not mine.

Why am I so arrogant as to insist that it’s a loss? Because I’m talking in both videos about ideas that will serve to cultivate appropriate authority – leadership. All young American men, not just the ones dying to be on the TV news, are missing out on the mastery of leadership skills they could have and should have learned from their fathers – had they been lucky enough to have full-time, vigilant, self-responsible fathers.

Our young men are over-medicated, involuntarily-celibate and universally-rejected because they are under-fathered – and, correspondingly, over-mothered. We can’t give them back their dads, but we can help them learn the lessons their fathers should have taught them.

Oh, yes, they’re not all like that. Or, at least, they’re not all all-the-way like that. But play the song “Creep” in a room full of boys and watch the nodding heads. Radiohead produced an anthem for the victims of divorce culture.

And guys a lot like that are the young men I got to talk to, thanks to Anthony Johnson of The 21 Convention. I spoke at his events in Austin in 2012 and in Tampa in 2014, and I did an interview with Anthony and Socrates from ManningUpSmart.com in Orlando in 2013. Just (more…)

There is no theology in an atheist church, but still I would love to give my catechisms a big, fancy theological name, something like Iconoclasticism.

Consider:

I run an atheist, egoist, anarchist church devoted to the lifelong adoration of one’s own life.

I champion complete chastity before marriage and exclusive fidelity thereafter – all in pursuit of the very best love any human being can make: Storgic love, the enduring love of families.

I insist that the essential component in every succeeding family is the father, that it is his steady hand that cultivates self-responsible adulthood in his children, that his absence is the source of every social chaos, and that Western Civilization will only be redeemed when fatherhood is reestablished in its inescapable preeminent leadership role in the family.

There’s more, tons of it. I am an iconoclast on everything – not for the sake of self-induced iconoclasms, but simply because everything I see is upside down. Indeed, I believe I can summarize my entire life in seven simple words:

If I’m not crazy, everyone else is.

Another man might rebel against those possibilities, but I figure I win either way: I don’t hate being wrong. Discovering and correcting my own errors is how I learn best. But I do hate being dependent on other people – and I think all-but-all-of-them are ass-backwards in their thinking anyway.

All of which makes me immensely popular – with no one. I know how to be happy all the time, and no one else does. I know how to make make marriage an endless ecstasy, and no one else does. I know how to fix everything, and – obviously – no one else does. In a non-ass-backwards world, my particular brand of magic beans would be doing a land-office business. But this is not so in our current environs.

So: Let’s stretch out even more iconoclasticity by taking away yet another scared dogma of modernity, the idea of divorce as a value.

David Brodie asked a couple of questions about the idea of “working at” your marriage: (more…)

[Today is the anniversary of the death of Steve Jobs. This is me writing in 2011, when he annouced his retirement from Apple. –GSS]

Steve Jobs announced his resignation today as CEO of Apple, Inc. From that one little tidbit of information, we can foresee a long, slow roll-out of “news” content.

Tonight and tomorrow we’ll see the newsy stuff — Jobs’ biography, his history with Apple, his successor, the product pipeline and the financial portents of the whole interconnected circus.

Tomorrow and later we’ll have reaction pieces, starting with phony tributes and leading to phony trashings.

The real ugliness will await the magazines — paper, video and virtual: Steve Jobs was a brutal boss. Steve Jobs was a techno-pirate. Steve Jobs was unfair to mediocrities!

Everything you read or hear about the man in the coming weeks will be defensibly true in some kind of you-could-look-it-up fashion. And every bit of it will mean nothing, the endless, senseless mastication of trivial details with not a shred of meaning to be found in the mash.

So let’s cut to the chase: Here is what actually matters about the working life of Steve Jobs:

With one incredible product after the next, with one brilliant strategic move after the next, with one astounding financial milestone after the next, the most wonderful thing Steve Jobs made in his working life was:

You.

Don’t believe me? Let’s look at the record.

Start with an obvious proposition: Steve Jobs has made you amazingly richer. You don’t have to own Apple stock — but bully for you if you do. But Apple’s products — computers, music-players, phones and software — have enriched your life in hundreds of ways.

Better, faster, cheaper, always — always the very best of capitalist efficiency. But almost always categorically better. The products that Steve Jobs brought to market redefined those markets.

So you owe Jobs not just for your Macintosh, but for all of modern desktop, laptop and notebook computing. Every high-end phone was designed, essentially, by Apple, as are all of the ephemeral tablet computers.

Before Steve Jobs pioneers a new product line, the competition is superficially different and uniformly lame. Afterward, everything looks (more…)

As I write this, thirty-seven seventy-eight days have passed since the first of the Planned Parenthood infanticide videos was posted. In that time, I’ve written more than a dozen posts on the fallout. How many essays, do you suppose, has the Ayn Rand Institute posted?

The think tank built to champion the views of strident abortion proponent Ayn Rand has offered up precisely zero observations on the videos.

I find it easy to fault them for this: A casual disregard for the lives of other people is the soul and substance of ‘asking another man to live for my sake,’ number two on John Galt’s short-list of cardinal sins. But at the same time, I do understand their paralysis – plausibly better than they do.

First, Ayn Rand’s anti-objective “piece of protoplasm” claim has now completely fallen apart. Objectivism has always been at war with the obvious, uncontested facts of human gestation. That war is now all the way lost. You’re not clipping your toenails, you are murdering your own child. Who knew?

Second, and much worse, Ayn Rand’s defense of abortion is rank utilitarianism, a puerile hit-’n’-run rationalization for evil. It’s hard to blame the ARIvians for being unable to defend this atrocious rhapsodization of atrocity.

Third, and still worse, by championing infanticide, Ayn Rand made war on the putative egoism she sought to promote. People who uphold abortion lead miserable lives in the end, but the attendant abortion culture retards all human flourishing. There is nothing more “anti-man, anti-mind, anti-life” than slaughtering innocents for convenience.

There’s more. Ayn Rand was a Cautious Tyrant by the end of her life, and the Ayn Rand Institute is built in her image and likeness. It cannot do anything even remotely like admitting error, even though its ignominious silence is itself a resounding confession of intellectual bankruptcy.

Oh, they don’t know they’re being called out? Wanna bet?

There is really (more…)

Theory is a fine thing, but it don’t get the eggs fertilized. The everyday praxis of “working at” your marriage is actually pretty simple: All you have to do is make love all the time. How cool is that?

I made this video last fall, but I posted it on Sunday as this week’s Church of Splendor homily. Even so, it’s ideal Friday content, so I’m positing it here today. Gents, do you want to plant the seed to plant the seed? Here’s how to get the job done:

As further reflections on the matter we took up this week in church – how modernity has managed to strip love, marriage and even reproduction itself from human sexual expression – some notes rom Man Alive:

 
Back in high school, you knew a young lady I call the Swoop Girl. Someone said that high school is taxpayer-subsidized dating, and that observation was probably hard to dispute back then, as you threaded your way through corridors blocked by kissing, cuddling couples. When a stable couple hit a rough patch – perhaps he wanted to dance horizontally, but she wasn’t ready – the Swoop Girl would swoop in to collect another pelt, seducing the guy, who was only too mindlessly delighted to be seduced. Her motive was not love, nor even sexual gratification. What she wanted to do was inflict pain – on the other girl. In that way, her sex act was essentially homosexual, girl-on-girl, an act of perverse psycho-sexual sadism. Did she move farther left on the number line than anyone involved, much farther left than the nice girl, and farther left, even, than the not-so-nice guy? You bet. But there was nothing of self-adoration in her motives. She hated her life, clearly, and all she wanted was to spread that hatred to other people.

Men can do the same kind of pelt-collecting as the Swoop Girl, with the same sort of homosexual overtones, boasting to each other about the (mostly imaginary) “notches” they put on their belts. The so-called Pick-Up Artists are an even more perverse symptom of this kind of intellectual (more…)

Love is in the air? Lust is in the news, anyway. I’m connecting dots from these three news stories:

• Former prep school student convicted of sex charges

• Tinder and the Dawn of the “Dating Apocalypse”

• Almost None of the Women in the Ashley Madison Database Ever Used the Site

referencing two of my own essays:

• Fifty shades of bleak: Looking for love everywhere it isn’t.

• Fifty shades of pink sock: Facing up to and fixing the hook-up contradiction.

all in support of these seven virtues of an enduringly happy love life:

1. Chastity
2. Loyalty
3. Fidelity
4. Probity
5. Sobriety
6. Liberality
7. Prodigality

And that is church!

People who are fans of talk-show host Stefan Molyneux and who are not (yet) in the thrall of his cult-of-personality like to make baby/bathwater analogies, asking why I don’t sort the good from the bad in his doctrine.

Here’s why: Because there is no good side to his arguments. To be anti-family is to be anti-humanity. I don’t waste time on people who are wrong at the second value in the hierarchy of human values – and wrong in the way that best destroys the first, self-adoration. Stefan Molyneux could not be better news to Marxists if he were in their pay.I am amused to discover that I’ve been an anti-Molyneuxvian for decades without even knowing it. For example, what should you do about your obnoxious relatives? Defoo them? Kill them before they kill you? Or simply take them as they are?

Cultivate indifference. I will not make the world more beautiful by making my own soul ugly. If I don’t care for the turn of conversation at the dinner table, there is always something fun to hear about at the kid’s table.

What will your life look like in fifty years as a result of the choices you’re making today?

How can you begin to heal the wounds you have inflicted upon yourself and the people you love?

All of this is all the same thing to me: Cultivate indifference and press on regardless. What matters is what matters to me, and if I am too busy living my life to attend to yours – that’s what your life is for. Meanwhile, if my crate is always all-the-way full of my oranges, there is no way for you to stick me with one of your lemons.

Building on that argument, consider the problems of the practical anarchist. You will note that I don’t talk much about anarchism. Why is that so? Three reasons:

1. I’ve already done what I need to do for now.

2. I (more…)