SelfAdoration.com

So.

It’s like two months since I’ve made a movie, and I’ve been feeling overfull of things to say.

I spent a lot of time thinking about what I had wanted to say to The 21 Convention, and I ended up getting to do my schtick twice, which was ideal for me. I could have done it thirty more times without becoming boring — to me, at least!

What I’m doing here is a sort of commencement speech, a celebration of my moving on to a different state of excitation — even if everyone else stays exactly the same.

But I’m using extended arguments about the idea of preferring the subjunctive to the existential to defend my way of thinking in a comprehensive way.

I’ve spent my whole life thinking about how to talk to you — I say that in the movie — and this little clip may be the most comprehensive job I have done so far of communicating at least this small idea: We are not talking about the same things.

I don’t trade in your currency — I say that in the film also — but I am trying to convey to you why my currency is so much better for you than the stuff you’ve been trading with until now.

This stuff ain’t easy, I know, and it is plausible to me that my take-no-prisoners approach makes things harder for you, not easier. Oh, well…

This is me at my most me, the meest of the mes I have presented in these videos — all of which are intended to acquaint you with my style of being as the result of your having spent time with me being me.

I love this movie. I hope you do, too.

The audio-only version of this video is linked below, or you can find the SelfAdoration.com podcast on iTunes.

By way of @bensima, who I met at The 21Convention, a lovely story about hi-tech hearing aids opening up the world of music to a severely deaf man:

I’ve never understood it.

My whole life I’ve seen hearing people make a fool of themselves singing their favorite song or gyrating on the dance floor. I’ve also seen hearing people moved to tears by a single song. That was the hardest thing for me to wrap my head around.

I was born profoundly deaf and all music sounded like trash through my hearing aids.

That is until a couple days ago when I put on a new pair of hearing aids for the first time in years.

The first thing I heard was my shoe scraping across the carpet; it startled me. I have never heard that before and out of ignorance, I assumed it was too quiet for anyone to hear.

I sat in the doctor’s office frozen as a cacophony of sounds attacked me. The whir of the computer, the hum of the AC, the clacking of the keyboard, and when my best friend walked in I couldn’t believe that he had a slight rasp to his voice. He joked that it was time to cut back on the cigarettes.

That night, a group of close friends jump-started my musical education by playing Mozart, Rolling Stones, Michael Jackson, Sigur Ros, Radiohead, Elvis, and several other popular legends of music.

Being able to hear the music for the first time ever was unreal.

From the wacky world of academic “science” comes news that exercising self-control can help you to, you know, control yourself. I wish I were making this up:

Thinking about the big picture instead of the little steps required along the way can help to give us the self-control we need to reach a goal, according to new research.

Woah! You don’t say! Science is so much in love with determinism that anyone who concedes the existence of free will deserves a medal. But don’t get too excited. Even an academic who has accidentally discovered reality can manage to obscure the truth with inane jargon:

Ultimately, the study suggests that “high-level (more…)

This is me speaking at The 21Convention earlier this month in Austin. The title of my talk — “Ontologically-Consonant Teleology” — was a joke, an early intimation that I intended to be dry, pedantic and boring. In reality, I gave them my pure schtick, hard-core egoism delivered with a garage-band attitude.

I enjoyed myself hugely, but I always enjoy myself when I get a chance to speak in public. The audience dug it, too, judging from the reactions during and after my presentation.

I want more opportunities like this. If you would like me to speak at your event, let’s talk.

I’m back from Austin. The 21Convention was an extraordinary experience, and I may write more about it sometime soon. There’s this much for now:

I hadn’t realized how much I was putting my head into the lion’s mouth until well into the first day of the conference. Anthony Johnson, who built The 21Convention, had told me about its history in the world of pick-up artistry, but I hadn’t realized that history is on-going. I don’t know how many people at the conference have read Chapter 10 of Man Alive!, but they were all uniformly sweet to me.

Meanwhile, the lion’s head I expected never manifested itself. Yaron Brooks of the Ayn Rand Institute spoke at the conference, as did Eric Daniels. I have had nothing but trouble with official Objectivists, so I was expecting to take grief from that corner. But, even though I ended up presenting twice, the Big-O bigfeet ignored me.

I had a great time talking, though. Man Alive! is a short book, but it has the whole universe tucked in there between the covers. I can expound on the ideas in the book indefinitely. The video for the address I delivered on Saturday was eaten by electronic gremlins, do I had to do a redo on Sunday. I had a lot of surprises in Saturday’s speech that I did not want to repeat, so Sunday’s talk was substantially different. Not that big a challenge: I could have done a different show 30 days in a row. It was fun for me, though, because I got to explore a lot of theory that I had left out on Saturday.

There were many impressive speakers, which is why I may write more about the conference, but one who blew me away was the first man on the line-up, a blogger called Socrates who runs Manning Up Smart, a weblog devoted to helping adult men manage their relationships like adult men. Many of the ideas he discussed meshed with topics raised in The Unfallen, as we will see in the extract appended below.

I made this book available on Amazon.com now because of this conference. (more…)

Fun, interesting links in no special order:

Las Vegas is a wonder to behold, and it’s even more wonderful by helicopter. This panorama web site almost as cool as Vegas by helicopter.

What happens when the State of California bans foie gras? Lovers of over-fattened duck cluck defiance.

Meanwhile, it’s vampire versus vampire in Los Angeles. Who should decide how real estate should be developed — hi-rise zoning advocates or their lo-rise opponents? Anyone but the people who risked their own money to buy the land, apparently.

Susan Callaway has this to say to you: I carry a gun. Get over it. Her essay is a nice defense of the continuous-carry idea.

From the bulging universe of net.based education: “Online courses free for the taking” and “Online universities are the future of higher education.” Ya think?

And here is a question that I can only answer with conjectures: Why is there Fathertongue? Here is an interestingly plausible answer: Because only the very smartest of proto-humans survived a mass extinction. It’s possible that all human beings are descended from one single tribe of survivors.

I love that image. My friend @TeriLussier fingered it. The original is at Street Art Utopia, a photo of a poster from Athens, Greece. I love it that it comes from that city, since all of Western civilization comes from Athens. What the kid’s name? You may think you don’t know, but I do. His name is Socrates. So is yours.

I love that ikon today, especially. My “You’re not the boss of me!” post was linked from a wooly-headed academic who insists, albeit unintelligibly, that he is so the boss of me:

Flourishing is more than a state of mind. It is an assessment that all is right with both my own world and the rest of the world. The kind of autonomy pictured above is completely incompatible with flourishing and thus with sustainability as I define it. Sustainability demands that the world be working in such a way so that all the parts are in harmony; there is no place for disconnected pieces. The absence of the conditions for flourishing to emerge can be traced to many factors. One of the most important of which is the presence of actors who behave as if they are autonomous by nature or essence. Their eyes are closed to the world as it is. There is no possibility is this kind of world. When people choose to act as autonomous nodes in an interconnected world, flourishing won’t show up either, but there is possibility in this case. The eyes can open and see that other choices are available. Sustainability is a matter of choice, but the choice must be the right one. Autonomy isn’t it.

Academics think very poorly, so you can absolve yourself from trying to parse that mess of words. “Flourishing is more than a state of mind” because it “is an assessment” — which of course is a state of mind. Human autonomy — an undoubted fact of nature — is falsely conflated with isolation to construct a very scruffy straw man. “Sustainability” — a made-up word — somehow issues demands, which suggests to me that the “place for disconnected pieces” just (more…)

This is me commenting on an article at Forbes.com about the use of 3-D printers to manufacture firearms:

This article is a nice illustration of why government as such is a futile undertaking. Human beings are indomitable: They cannot be dominated by other people except by direct and continuous coercion. You can shackle me or lock me in a cage, but, if you do not, I am free as a matter of ontology to do as I will.

All of government is based not in actual domination — which is not possible — but in the individual person’s completely self-initiated, completely voluntary, instantly revocable capitulation to the state’s demands, which are backed by threats of fines, imprisonment, torture or death.

In the first place, no one is obliged to capitulate to the state’s threats, no matter how dire or bellicose these might be. And in the second place, as this article makes plain, the easier it is for individual people to evade, avoid or defy the state, the less effective those threats are in any case.

It’s time we stop trying to treat human beings — free moral agents — as though they were domesticated animals. This has never worked, but the failures of this absurdly anti-human political philosophy will only become more obvious as the cost of access to all of the world’s human capital plummets.

All human wealth is actually embodied Fathertongue — human capital. The idea of guns that can be stored and transmitted as data raises interesting questions. As the article implies, banning or regulating firearms just got a lot harder. Meanwhile, the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, completely expendable to statists, just got married to the First Amendment, which is precious to many liberals. Indeed: Information wants to be free.

Of course, gun control really is a free-speech issue: If you are deprived of the power to defend yourself, you will be much more tractable when the SWAT team shows up at your door. But ultimately none of that matters. Human beings are indomitable as a matter of ontology. This is fact, not opinion and not doctrine. Because human beings cannot (more…)

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
        –William Butler Yeats, The Second Coming

The first thing to do is laugh, of course.

We stare tragedy right in the face, so close to it we can smell its stale breath, and it is reaching for us.

Everything we say should not, must not, cannot happen — every bit of it does happen. Teenage gang-bangers with AR-15s car-jack Sally Suburbanite and toss her baby out the window. Middle-aged speed freaks imprison their own mothers and force them to write bad checks. One-hundred-thirty years after emancipation, people are owned as slaves and the value of their labor is stolen from them. The falcon cannot hear the falconer and Vicky Weaver and 81 Branch Davidians lay slain.

Should not. Must not. Cannot. Does.

And there’s plenty more, of course, and every bit of it is tragic. Except us, for we are tragic and ridiculous. We wag our fingers and deliver pithy little lectures on morality. Or we wag our fingers and deliver pithy little lectures on utility. And we argue amongst ourselves and hone and polish and perfect our pithy little arguments until they are fit to be inscribed on parchment. And we wag our fingers and deliver them from whatever soap-box we can find.

And until lately no one was listening. And even though we (more…)

I will be doing an hour-long presentation on my book Man Alive! at the The 21 Convention in Austin. The convention runs from August 17th – 19th, and I will be speaking first-thing in the morning on Saturday, August 18th.

My topic? Intellectual self-defense amidst the last-gasp collapse of Rotarian Socialism. Not too surprising if you’ve read Man Alive! My plan is to go through a number of specious arguments, with examples, showing you how to defend your self from the pandemic deceptions deployed by demagogues to defend tyranny.

The 21 Convention is put together by Anthony “Dream” Johnson. It seeks to “surface, restore, and actualize the ideal in man” — a goal I can heartily endorse. There will be a total of 18 speakers over the three days of the event, including Yaron Brook of The Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights and Richard Nikoley of FreeTheAnimal.com.

Anthony Johnson runs his events like Brian Brady and I should run ours, very professional and strictly business. If you want to come see me or the other speakers — with topics ranging from philosophy to politics to health and fitness to sexual relations — you can buy tickets by clicking on this link. That’s an affiliate link, which means that I’m getting a piece of the business, if that matters to you. You can buy three-day or one-day tickets, with upsells, but note that the prices go up on July 31st. There will be video of the presentations available for sale after the event.

I’m interested in doing more of these, if you have a microphone available for me. I’m doing philosophy at the 21 Convention, but there are a lot of topics covered and touched upon in Man Alive! that I would like to bring to an audience. As an example, I can do an hour on orgasms that will change your life forever. To see what I can do without an audience — on philosophy, not orgasms — visit the Videocast category at SelfAdoration.com. Meanwhile, if you’re going to be in Central Texas next month, come give me a look. I plan to put (more…)

“A citizen with a gun stopped a knife wielding man as he began stabbing people Thursday evening at the downtown Salt Lake City Smith’s store.”

Two people suffered knife wounds before an armed citizen pulled his firearm and put the rampage to an end. No shots fired. Had the people in the store behaved as sheep and waited for the police to arrive, many more people could have been hurt.

The actual purpose of gun-control laws is to force people to be sheep for the state — sheared today, slaughtered tomorrow. But a secondary consequence is to deprive them of the natural in-born ability to defend their own lives — thus self-inducing a sheep-like state of cowardice clamoring for the monopoly state’s “protection.”

It’s vampire versus vampire at the National Review. In response to President Obama’s “you didn’t build that” attack on individual initiative, a New Hampshire contractor insisted that he did so build his business. Except, as Think Progress reports, the guy is a rent-seeker. He built his business by the sweat of the tax-payer’s brow in the form of government-subsidized loans, grants and contracts.

The Think Progress article is disgusting, and the comments are worse, but the National Review piece isn’t much better:

This man pays taxes that support this government endeavor (and many others he does not benefit from),

That would be the logical fallacy Two Wrongs Make A Right.

and he is operating in a business environment in which all his competitors have access to government funds.

And that is the logical fallacy Tu Quoque.

This is me in Man Alive!:

The paths to error are infinite, but two landmarks I have learned to rely on, in listening to people trying to justify their evil actions, are the logical fallacies Tu Quoque and Two Wrongs Make A Right. Tu Quoque is Latin. It means, “You do it, too.” When you catch your teenager swiping a beer, the pre-fabricated rationale will surely be, “Well, you drink, why can’t I?!?” And you were probably very young when you first heard some little proto-brute justifying his vengeance by bellowing, “Well, he hit me first!” — ergo, two wrongs make a right. You should probably be on your guard against any statement that starts with a “well” and ends with an exclamation point. That particular verbal construction seems to fit very comfortably in the mouths of liars and thugs. But when you hear those two logical fallacies being deployed in tandem, what you are hearing, almost certainly, is a cunningly-crafted rationalization of an abominable injustice.

This is the comment I left to the atrocious argument at National Review:

Taking money from the government in any form is welfare — receiving stolen funds.

You can’t avoid using government roads; the state is a coercive monopoly on roads and other so-called “public services.”

You definitely can avoid taking money that has been stolen from innocent tax-payers.

When you (more…)

A “lone gunman” shoots up a Colorado movie theater, and already the craven opportunists who know they cannot enslave an armed population are demanding still more gun control. The point is not to save you from events that cannot be prevented by any means. The objective, always, is to take away your power to resist statist tyranny.

How was a shooting like this possible? It was because no one else in the theater audience was armed. We have trained ourselves to rely on an imaginary cosmic Batman to protect us from the vicissitudes of life, delegating the responsibility of self-defense to self-important “professionals.” In reality, we are safe to go about unarmed not because cops are actually capable of defending our lives, but simply because virtually all of us are sane, normal, non-violent people.

It’s possible the Colorado gunman counted on his victims being unarmed. It’s also possible he’s too crazy to care. But in fact the audience was unarmed, so no one was equipped to take out the gunman before he could effect his killing spree. He murdered 12 people and injured 50 and yet he was alive and unharmed when he surrendered to police. Batman was camped out at the donut shop, as always, and the hapless victims of Gotham City were armed with nothing but throaty screams.

How can we prevent tragedies like this? We can’t. But we can end them after only one or two shots have been fired, instead of praying for the villain to run out of ammunition. There is no alternative to self-defense. When the shooting starts, if you are not prepared to shoot back, Batman will not swoop in to save you.

The good news, which will largely go unreported, is that the gun shops and shooting ranges will be busier than ever in the coming days. Batman is an illusion, always has been. But last night’s massacre illuminates this morning’s epiphany:

The only person who can defend your life and the lives of the people you love is you.