SelfAdoration.com

How to close on the people you want to persuade with mutually-beneficial results. What church is more about the successful execution of human life than The Church of Splendor? This is me from Tampa, in advance of my presentation to The 21 Convention.

Shyly’s delight, the book discussed here, is FREE today and tomorrow, and all of my Kindle books are on sale for 99¢. Opportunity is fleeting. Regret is forever. Respond accordingly.

The 21 Convention is an amazing event. I spoke at it in Austin in 2012, but I wasn’t even half-equipped, then, to reap the full benefit of the show. Since then, I’ve done a lot of work with Anthony ‘Dream’ Johnson, and every bit of it has been rewarding to me. The idea of helping young men reap the most and the best of their adulthood and their masculinity is powerful, and the young men who rise to the challenge are amazing.

I’m speaking again this year, and my talk will be built out of ideas developed in Shyly’s delight – specifically, the DISC of everything, including poker. Accordingly, I’ve made the Kindle version of the book available for free from today until Monday, and all of my Kindle books are on sale for 99¢ each.

The truth is, I’m not selling books, I’m selling you on my ideas. If I could get more people to read what I have to say for nothing, that would be my ideal price. Shyly’s delight is a 45-minute read, a very easy introduction to my style of thinking. If you find you want to know more, I’m making that graduation as painless as Amazon allows.

Opportunity is fleeting. Regret is forever. Respond accordingly. Meanwhile, I’m off to have my mind blown at #t21c.

Watch this:

Yes, everyone knows Saturday Night Live is not funny, but that sketch is interesting, even so.

Why? What is that bit actually saying?

Actors are puppets for writers, never forget that. What are the writers of that unfunny little skit trying to say?

Imagine this: Your parents spent a ton of money to send you to Brown or Yale or Dartmouth, and now you have the thoroughly unsexy job of writing unfunny comedy bits for an unwatched variety show that can’t even sell its own advertising time.

Do you want to believe that some mouth-breather in Dubuque can get an education just as useless as yours at, say, one percent of the cost your parents paid out?

Worse, what if that guy’s education is better than yours? What if he can get a job that amounts to something, in an industry that is growing, not dying? What if people make or lose money — or even live or die — based on his academic performance?

He doesn’t have your class ring, and he doesn’t belong to your network of drunken dissipates — each one of whom is stuck in a going-nowhere job just like yours. But, but, but: He doesn’t feel himself endowed with the centuries of effete sneerpower to which you lay claim but have done nothing to deserve.

The truth you don’t dare admit is that your education distinguishes you in no way at all. You studied nothing serious, and you learned nothing of what you studied. You put in time and you made connections, but you don’t actually know anything, you can’t actually do anything, and if you are ever required to be anything more than an expert at supercilious self-pity, you will be dismissed at once. You are nothing but your vaunted pedigree, and that pedigree is based entirely on the accomplishments of other people — the vast majority of them long since deceased.

This is the naked essence of that fake advertisement, the snarling envy and resentment of an entire social class composed of nothing but empty suits.

Welcome to the disestablishment, y’all…

The question is, what if we’ve really screwed the pooch this time. (more…)

I love that phrase — “You’re not the boss of me!” — those words, that order, that emphasis. Children say it when they’re put upon, and I love it so much I write it into their mouths in fiction, too.

The sentence has that structure because the child has self-abstracted the genitive idea, the idea of “of-ness” — the relationship of dominance defined by every form of possession. “You’re not my boss!” is a learned shortening of the same idea, but “You’re not the boss of me!” is a completely self-abstracted, self-constructed sentence, which in turn expresses in the most succinct possible form a completely self-abstracted philosophy.

We spend a lot of time laughing at how silly children’s ideas are, but we never stop to marvel at everything they had to work out in order to have ideas of their own. To say that one simple sentence — “You’re not the boss of me!” — the child had to work out the idea of his own undeniable, inescapable ontological autonomy.

I could spend a month defending the idea of an “undeniable, inescapable ontological autonomy,” but I had to understand the raw essence of that idea as a four-year-old — and so did you!

We were all children once, and we had amazing minds — before we trained ourselves to be stupid. And we were vessels of pure truth — before we learned how to lie. Before we learned how to say anything other than “You’re not the boss of me!” Or, worse, learned how to say “I am the boss of you!”

The world is wide, and I have seen it in little more than glimpses, but it would not surprise me if the first complete sentence to emerge from the mouth of any normal child would take this form: “Mine!” It amounts to using the imperative to express the genitive: “That is my property, and I will thank you to get your grubby mitts off of it!” Compared to a child of that age, just about any dog could do better job at making the point, but the child has already done what the dog (more…)

In Nine empathies, I raise the idea of the empathy for the opposite, trying to make conjectures about another person’s mental states in those circumstances where you are least well-equipped to understand them.

When you invoke an empathy for the opposite, you are explicitly attempting to empathize with another person in precisely the context where you are least competent to get the job done right. That much is a useful reminder that empathy is all conjecture, based entirely in the false claim that you can “know” something by a means by which valid knowledge cannot be acquired. You can’t read minds, even if it sometimes feels as though you have.

That particular chapter of the book demonstrates why the idea of storgic love – the enduring love of families – is so important for understanding mutually-rewarding expressions of empathy, which are typically the only kind we think about.

This extended extract illuminates how that love is expressed, and how it quickens over time:

I’ll give you an example of the empathy for the opposite that you may not have thought much about, this on the way to exploring another one that you may never even have considered.

So: It is easy to understand that the relationship you have with your dog is an empathy for the opposite. The things that make him least like you give you the most trouble connecting, but the things that make him most like you – your shared love for playing and cuddling together – are the basis of the bonds of storgic love between you.

Yes, people can love animals and animals people. This is well known to anyone who doesn’t shield his mind from facts with a clipboard. Human storgic love is mammalian in origin, not a product of human conceptual cognition. This is why you and your dog can love each other so completely – with him loving you far more than you love him – and why your dog would never think twice about risking (more…)

The idea that ideas scale is addressed in the last chapter of Nine empathies.

If I am a lizard and a fly lands on my extended tongue – a common reptilian “hunting” strategy – I got me some lunch. One munch, no share for you even if I was the sharing kind.

If I’m a predatory mammal, I may bring home the family-sized gazelle, but there is no possible way for me to feed more than a few.

But since ideas scale, if I am a human being, I can learn to feed millions, as many brilliant men have done again and again in human history.

But ideas scale yet again from even that cornucopian abundance: If I teach others what I know, they will feed billions.

And scaling yet again, if I teach other people how to see the world my way, each one of them will be rich enough in human values to mutually-enrich all the others.

I think that’s the most wonderful thing about us, and the fact that we are able to communicate abstract ideas at all, which no other organism can do, is proof of its wonderfulness.

I talked about the scalability of ideas, among a host of other other ideas about empathy, with Steve Mayeda in a podcast promoting The 21 Convention’s upcoming Tampa show, at which I will be speaking:

I was full to bursting with the empathy for the idea, with the result that I end up out-talking the normally very-loquacious Mayeda by about nine to one. I cover a lot of ground, if that’s any consolation.

I took up some of these ideas at Sunday’s Church of Splendor telecast under the theme of “Free the Earth Seven Billion.”

As part (more…)

Under the wide and starry sky,
Dig the grave and let me lie.
Glad did I live and gladly die,
And I laid me down with a will.

This be the verse you grave for me:
‘Here he lies where he longed to be;
Home is the sailor, home from sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.’
      —Robert Louis Stevenson

This is important: Everything that matters in human life is to be found to the right of the zero on the number line. Zero is never greater than one, so concentrating on the zero or on negative values is necessarily anegoic – contrary to the true interests of the ego.

Can it sometimes be needful to attend to negative values? Yes. I speak of eradicating bugs all the time, since this is a useful metaphor for understanding the actual meaning and importance of disvalues. If my food is being devoured by ants, I need to to exterminate them. If there is a scorpion in my home (it happens here), I have to crush it – grind it to a gooey pulp. If a two-legged predator attempts to confiscate my wealth, I must be prepared to defend myself.

But this is not what human life is for. Some days are cloudy, but if I focus on the clouds rather than on the illimitable sunlight I can produce by using my mind to its fullest, I am throwing away the only life I will ever have in pursuit of nothing.

But: Even so: I can foresee that there will come a time in my life when the pursuit of Splendor will no longer be possible to me. Until lately, I thought the most likely scenario would be that the accumulated effects of aging would render me incompetent to continue to thrive at a fully-human state of being. Given the resurgence of Marxism under President Obama, it seems plausible to me, of late, that I might be imprisoned for my philosophical positions. And there is also the (more…)

You’ve been told your whole life that all the troubles of the world owe to selfishness, and that the only true path to happiness is to renounce the self and to damn the only life you have ever known. Who told you this? Amazingly enough, it was thugs, priests and politicians — and their many, many minions. I expect you know by now that every bit of this is a lie, the Big Lie that has been used in infinite variations over the course of all of human history to con decent, honest, innocent people like you into giving up everything you have for the benefit of the worst sorts of people.

This is a premise I believe can be defended in reason to infinite precision: Everything squalid on the face of the earth, for all of human history, is the consequence of selflessness, of the deliberate, conscious, completely voluntary renunciation of the self by a person who has self-induced the belief that some objective he seeks can only be attained by an act of self-destruction.

But that argument is just the corollary of this one: Everything we know of Splendor, within our own minds and in the world around us, is an artifact not just of selfishness but of the most profound and most profoundly-beautiful self-love. If there is any normal state for human beings — normal as a matter of ontology, not statistics — this is it: To be so much in love with the things you make with the time of your life and the effort of your mind and your body that you cannot bear for those things to be less than perfect.

Think of that: Whether you’re looking at a skyscraper or listening to a symphony or simply teaching a child to read, the source of the Splendor you experience is self-adoration and nothing else — not just your own delight at being alive, or the (more…)

Where do Good Germans come from? They come from the same cowardice that reputedly-decent liberals are expressing right now with a vast, self-incriminating silence.ModernDope (old account) / Amazing Photos / CC BY-NC-SA

I noted this in passing on Facebook (with Facebook being the first draft of bloggery, certainly):

The silence of the liberals on Facebook is a wonder to behold. You don’t have to admit out loud that you’ve been wrong about everything all along. But you do have to turn around. Until now, you could claim you were duped. Going forward, if you choose to go forward as you have, you will know you are complicit in naked evil.

I was reflecting on this piece of stirring rhetoric from Questions and Observations:

I now assume that if I have good reasons to believe something, the assertions of powerful or influential people don’t change my mind. I assume they are simply ignorant, willfully blind, or actively deceptive. This round of scandalous outrages by the Obama administration is just another confirmation of that assumption. If media types and establishment politicians didn’t realize these problems existed before last month, then they are f*cking fools, no matter how high they have risen in the political class.

This is right up Man Alive’s street, so I’m loving it.

But the larger episode — progressives discover their leaders are tyrants in just the way they have always denounced — is an education to watch.

What’s that question you’ve heard all your life? “How could the German people just stand by as the Nazis exterminated the Jews?”

Why don’t you let that one sink in for a minute?

More from me:

This is not about liberals versus conservatives, it’s about the inescapable sovereignty of the human mind versus the delusional insistence that, with enough coercion, human beings can be domesticated.

The immediate issues make it plain that that ultimately boils down to predators versus prey, and the decent people of the left are stuck here:

When your rhapsodizing about the heroic is contradicted by the people you affect to hero-worship, which will you throw under the bus?

What matters more to you, justice — about which you have been too (more…)

The Cautious are always cowards: Theirs is a teleology of fear, after all. Whether you are heterosexual or an extreme outlier suffering from a putative birth defect that no one is permitted to call a birth defect, it is surely to your interest to keep gun-wielding thugs dressed up as the high priests of an unquestionable religion out of your marriage. This chapter from Father’s Day will show you a better way to manage your marriage, bulletproofing it from divorce from the outset.

 
Chapter 18. A Better Marriage Contract

The academic/feminist ideal of love, sex, marriage and family is destructive of everyone’s interests – especially your children’s. Men and women are both encouraged to behave as clowns, as loosely-committed meat mannequins, but only women are given the power of the state to repel their children’s fathers by force, when they are in their turn counseled to blow their families to bits.

A man is necessarily the leader of his family, but he is never its dictator. He leads by his nature as a man, by order of precedence, by consensus, but most especially simply by acting first and decisively. He is normally larger and stronger than his wife and children, and he is almost certainly able to beat everyone up. Even if he restrains himself to mere bellowing, he can win any battle of belligerence. Yet almost no men do these things, despite the awful things feminists say about them. Why don’t they? Because they don’t want to, for one obvious reason. Belligerence – war – is the opposite of love. But it’s also because intimidation of any sort does not work as a leadership strategy. You may get what you’re demanding right now, but you will never get anything else – and you will have turned yourself into a target. A man who beats or bellows at his wife or children is Mister Divorced without one more (more…)

If consciousness is an illusion, why would you have a luggage tag?

This came up in email, but I want to take on a piece of it here, because it’s interesting to me, and because it illuminates a discussion I had with The Cul-De-Sac Hero.

The question is, how can I say that “human behavior cannot be determined by anything other than free will” when people do such crazy, messed-up shit? Note please that I have never said that “human behavior cannot be determined by anything other than free will” — that’s the kind of loose terminology that leaves everyone lost — but do take full account of the context: The issue is not just everyday human spitefulness but the actions ensuing from mental illnesses.

So we need to have a language lesson first.

Determinism in philosophy is the doctrine that all human action occurs as the result of some prior unavoidable cause and is therefore itself causally unavoidable. (Note that the topic of discussion is human behavior, not The Grand Order Of The Universe. All of philosophy (and therefore all of scholarship) is about nothing but human beings and how they behave.) The primal determinist argument is watchwork physics: Every event in the universe for all of time is causally fore-ordained from the birth of the universe. The quantum mechanics swapped in chance for necessity. The social “scientists” trucked in determinist theories like wheelbarrows full of manure. Religion has always had a piece of this pie, but the big newsmakers, lately, have been neuro-biologists and evolutionary-charlatans — academics who try to figure out how to con cavemen.

Big yawn. Different town, same damn play: Whatever is the scientific consensus of the day, it is always the scientific consensus that human behavior MUST be determined by something (anything!) other than rationally-conceptual volitionality — informed discretion — free will.

Determinist theorists will try to tap-dance around this, but every damned one of them has “please return to” tags on his luggage, so you know without having to ask that each one of them believes that, should his bag go missing, the person who finds it (and each one (more…)