SelfAdoration.com

I’ve been sitting on this article from the Wall Street Journal because I had feared it would go behind a paywall. It seems to have survived that fate, and it’s an interesting read — a discussion of the widespread, banal and pathetic cheating that ordinary people undertake in their everyday lives. The article exists to promote yet another EZ-reading non-fiction book, and so, of course, it takes absurdly extreme positions:

We tend to think that people are either honest or dishonest. In the age of Bernie Madoff and Mark McGwire, James Frey and John Edwards, we like to believe that most people are virtuous, but a few bad apples spoil the bunch.

Do you hold that view? My experience is that most people are lying in stupidly inconsequential ways virtually all the time. They will highlight their virtues and conceal their vices, but mostly what they do is try — and fail — to portray the person they seem to think the people around them are looking for.

Because you have been indoctrinated to despise the self, you might want to condemn these pandemic dumb-shows as being “selfish,” but it is the self that is being destroyed by these abominable displays. As a ransom for permission to exist at all, we imagine that other people are demanding that each one of us hold the self hostage: You are free make manifest any behavior except those actions you most want to take. We are liars and cheaters not in pursuit of our values but only in their despite. How sick is that?

This is right where I live, of course, and people who live this life of lies — that is to say, most people — do not enjoy my company. That’s sad all around, but there is no cure for it except for those folks to change their way of thinking. I’m willing to help with that process, but I cannot cause it to happen.

Meanwhile, for all of me, this is the most interesting part of the article:

There’s a joke about a man who loses his bike outside his synagogue and goes to his rabbi (more…)

A free-wheeling anthropological history of the idea of conservatism — the fanatical preservation of the status quo — illustrating why you will not be released from your self-imposed bondage by anyone but your self. In other words, a typically light-hearted exploration of existential egoism.

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

My first exposure to the Khan Academy was a John Stossel video in which a public school teacher was bragging that her students were actually excelling in math, now that she was no longer boring them with her ed-school-cultivated ignorance. She wasn’t smart enough to leap to the obvious conclusion — what do we need her for? — but presumably the taxpayers can do the math. If not, they can learn how for free on YouTube.

The Khan Academy makes this promise:

With over 3,200 videos on everything from arithmetic to physics, finance, and history and hundreds of skills to practice, we’re on a mission to help you learn what you want, when you want, at your own pace.

It’s fun to watch, in the Stossel video, as children do what they should do, as an expression of their nature as human beings: Revel in the process of learning new skills. But it goes for you, too. If you want to pick up where you left off in the maths, the Khan Academy has what you need. History? Art? The sciences? Dig in. They don’t have foreign languages, but now that this model exists, that can’t be far off. And you can work from any browser anywhere, as well as from your smartphone or tablet computer.

This is what human beings can and should do. Every excuse you can come up with for refusing to improve your mind — money, time, resources — is gone. Your choice now is to step up to the plate in the world-wide agora or get left forevermore behind. How cool is that?

One of our cats scratched me on the nose about a week ago and I ignored the wound until it turned into impetigo. Consequently, I’m not all that pleasant to gaze upon, just now. I thought about doing an audio-only podcast, but I’m well and truly messed up by the antibiotics, so I think I’m just going to pass this week. If perchance you heart is broken, I vow to make it up to you. And now I’m going to change my dressings and take a nap.

From this week’s videocast, a short discussion of the nature of groups and why they are most fundamentally anti-self, and that a person seeking the benefits of self-adoration must anticipate that most groups will strive to frustrate that objective.

Just a couple of topics this week.

The idea of dead-end teleologies is vital I think. If your philosophical claims about human behavior are in conflict with your actual everyday existential behavior, the intellectual error can cascade into a self-destructive cognitive dissonance.

In that segment of the video, I dismiss Artificial Intelligence as a Dancing Bear Theory — an invalid conflation of canned-human intelligence with an illusory “machine” intelligence. From my past, an argument that current Artificial Intelligence theory has not and probably will not achieve the claims made for it:

Every organism is aware of its environment to some degree, but there is no such thing as computing hardware or software that is aware in this way. Siri is not as smart as a helpful child. Siri is not even as smart as an amoeba. Siri is not aware of anything, ever, nor is any other piece of AI technology. This is a fundamental ontological misidentification, and it is the source of all the absurd claims made about Artificial Intelligence.

We also take up the idea of organizations in general and their built-in propensity to frustrate, punish or purge the sovereign self.

What dishes more fulfilling could we serve up on Mother’s Day? We close with an appeal to win the world by Splendorday, August 21st, 2013.

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

Henry Hazlitt’s Economics in One Lesson is a classic of freedom-seeking economic writing. Starting with Frédéric Bastiat’s idea of the seen and the unseen, Hazlitt takes the reader through one economic fallacy after another. It’s a wonderful book, a priceless value, but it can be yours for free by clicking the link above.

I’m going to quote one chapter below, to give you a taste of Hazlitt’s thinking. This book was written in 1946, just after World War II. If the dollar amounts Hazlitt uses seem absurdly low to you, do be sure to Chapter 22 — The Mirage of Inflation.

 
From Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt

Chapter 18 — Minimum Wage Laws

We have already seen some of the harmful results of arbitrary governmental efforts to raise the price of favored commodities. The same sort of harmful results follows efforts to raise wages through minimum wage laws. This ought not to be surprising; for a wage is, in fact, a price. It is unfortunate for clarity of economic thinking that the price of labor’s services should have received an entirely different name from other prices. This has prevented most people from recognizing that the same principles govern both.

Thinking has become so emotional and so politically biased on the subject of wages that in most discussions of them the plainest principles are ignored. People who would be among the first to deny that prosperity could be brought about by artificially boosting prices, people who would be among the first to point out that minimum price laws might be most harmful to the very industries they were designed to help, will nevertheless advocate minimum wage laws, and denounce opponents of them, without misgivings.

Yet it ought to be clear that a minimum wage law is, at best, a limited weapon for combating the evil of low wages, and that the possible good to be achieved by such a law can exceed the possible harm only in proportion as its aims are modest. The more ambitious such a law is, the larger the number of workers it attempts to cover, and the more it attempts to (more…)

Richard Nikoley, owner of premier paleo-blog FreeTheAnimal.com, totally gets Man Alive! In consequence, Richard’s review of the book is full of interesting insights.

Richard made a Skype video of the two of us talking about the book. I think the conversation is interesting, but I am an uncontrolled fidget, so I can be hard to watch at times. The electric guitar I use in my weekly videocasts does a lot to slow me down.

Richard’s discussion with me is also linked below as an audio podcast, of you can find it on iTunes.

This is the first of the Skype video interviews I plan to do. In this videocast, I talk with Brian Brady, a California Tea Party activist and Ron Paul supporter, about a wide range of strategies for achieving greater political liberty in the America we live in now.

If you want to talk to me, I want to talk to you. I’m interested in talking about just about anything, and, as you will see here, a free-ranging conversation among actual human beings, as opposed to TV talking heads, can be very interesting.

An audio-only version of this video is linked below, or you can find it on iTunes.

A short clip from this week’s videocast. This segment evangelizes your ego.

There is no subject on earth so obvious that an academic won’t study it — on someone else’s dime, of course.

In the weekly videocast a few weeks ago, I mentioned that dogs dream, jokingly suggesting that this could be some academic’s Ph.D. thesis.

Guess what? The world we live in is beyond satire:

Fido’s expressive face, including those longing puppy-dog eyes, may lead owners to wonder what exactly is going on in that doggy’s head. Scientists decided to find out, using brain scans to explore the minds of our canine friends.

The findings?

“These results indicate that dogs pay very close attention to human signals”

Really? No kidding? Who knew…?

This week’s video and podcast are linked below. The headline summarizes the content fairly badly, but that’s your incentive to watch the video, ain’t it?

The audio-only version of this video is linked below, or you can find it on iTunes.

[I grew up in a grimy little industrial town called Danville, Illinois. It wasn’t until I was four years old that I stumbled onto an atlas and discovered why I had felt so much out of place from the day of my birth. I graduated from Danville High School two years early — and left town the very next morning. My sister was in that same graduating class, but she has never felt herself to be anything but comfortably at home. She got as far away as the University of Illinois in Urbana, forty miles west, then came back to teach Shakespeare to the college-bound minority of Danville High School. She throws in one Ibsen play a year, and I wrote this essay as a hand-out for her classes. –GSS]

 
The latter half of the nineteenth century was a time of amazing progress for the West. Average life-expectancy doubled. Infant mortality was halved. The fruits of science and industry were spreading to even the poorest of the poor — hygiene, sanitation, bountiful harvests, rail and sea travel, the telegraph and the telephone, abundant cheap fabrics from the much-maligned mills of England and America. The simple innovation of gaslight, precursor to Edison’s bulb, effectively extended human life by half. The year of 1848 was the year of triumph for the Enlightenment, and monarchies fell all across Europe. The ideals of Voltaire and Jefferson were everywhere ascendant and humanity emerged, dazed and wan, from the prison of tyranny, seeming to dance in the clean, sweet air of liberty.

The latter half of the nineteenth century was a time of joy and beauty and purpose in life and in art, and this is one of the best kept secrets in the history of the West. Marx convinced the world that people who lived twice as long and no longer lost half their children in infancy were not just worse off but much worse off. The philosophers and artists who had brought the Enlightenment to full flower fell into disrepute and images of dark foreboding overtook the leisures of the theoried classes. In the life of the (more…)

If you can’t indulge your self, who can you indulge?

It’s not mine. Frank Zappa has it with yourself as one word. But it seems like a fine idea to me, in every respect. I’ll give you the best of me, you give me the best of you, and to hell with trying to second-guess our best.

I have more.

Jim Klein asks libertarians, conservatives and especially philosophers, Where is Man Alive! wrong? I have posted my own challenges, including this one, still unanswered. Meanwhile, in the world of newspaper news, Paul Ryan cannot run fast enough to get away from his past infatuation with Ayn Rand.

As a matter of fact — not opinion — your life is yours to do with as you choose. That sounds like an “ought” — an expression of hope or desire or whim — but in reality no one but your self can cause your purposive behavior. Your enemies will insist that your avid pursuit of your own values is evil and selfish and wrong, but they do this precisely because only you can control your actions. If they could drive you like a car — or even like a horse — they would have no need to hector or wheedle or threaten you all the time.

This is the fact that Paul Ryan is unwilling to uphold. The sad part is that, most probably, he fears the savagery of the Marxist collectivists less than the scorn of religious collectivists. In any case, the entire libertarian/conservative movement is unwilling to defend the self — not as a matter of fact, nor even as a matter of right. In consequence, they cannot but yield to collectivism in any conflict. The collective (which does not exist) cannot control individual people (who actually do exist), but if those individuals lack the philosophical rigor and the intellectual vigor to defend the undeniable facts of reality, everyone involved will affect to make believe to pretend to renounce the self — which is what Ryan is doing.

Sez who? Ayn Rand:

When opposite basic principles are clearly and openly defined, it works to the advantage of the rational side; when they are not clearly defined, but are hidden or evaded, it works to the advantage of the irrational side.

To make things even easier for the folks who can’t bring themselves to take a stand on this issue, below I am quoting from the last half of Chapter 6 of Man Alive!

If you really, really (more…)