SelfAdoration.com

Money quote: “Five hundred days from today, we could be living in a different world.”

This is more from this week’s video/podcast.

In this clip, I discuss the idea of evangelizing egoism. Here’s why it matters:

The typical libertarian/conservative strategy of lamenting everything in high dudgeon is useless. It’s preaching to the choir, but, much worse, it serves mainly to convince the choir that things can only get worse.

This is completely false. Any problem created by the human mind can be solved by the human mind. But that tautology illuminates the path we must take, doesn’t it? It’s not the state we need to change, nor the legislature. It’s the people.

Human liberty is the consequence of individualism, but individualism is the politics of egoism. We will not turn socialists into libertarians by yelling at them or about them, but we can turn anegoists into egoists — and hence collectivists into individualists — if we can show them why self-adoration offers a better way of life for every human being.

That’s where Man Alive! comes in. People who understand the value of the self can work out everything else on their own. People who do not are frail converts at best, doomed to be burned out in short order by all the bad news libertarian and conservative pundits constantly spew.

If you want to change the world, evangelize egoism. Nothing else that you do will even slow — much less reverse — the tide of tyranny.

My friend Richard Nikoley, who runs FreeTheAnimal.com, turned me on to Call Recorder for Skype. I’ve had Skype on my iPad since I got it, but I’ve never played with it. And I tried to make video-interview-style broadcasting work a few years ago, with limited success. For one-on-one calls, at least, Call Recorder seems to be a big win.

What I’d like to do is record video conversations by Skype and then make the recordings available here. Think of it as talk radio with moving pictures. Big commitment on your part, since I’m a no-holds-barred kind of guy. But I think it could be illuminating for everyone involved.

So are you game? You’ll need a free Skype account plus a webcam and some kind of audio input. If you have a recently-made computer, all of that is probably built-in. Hit me by email if you’d like to give it a try.

I took up the fundamental immorality of abortion last week, and I addressed some additional issues in this week’s video/podcast. That particular chunk, about twelve minutes, is shown in the YouTube clip below.

In the video, I focus on specious pro-abortion arguments, in particular those put forth by Ayn Rand. I link this back to a bogus idea called the “prudent predator,” illustrating why both claims are essentially equivalent — and equally invalid.

I am thus a very mixed blessing for the self-anointed “students of Ayn Rand.” I take away the pain inflicted upon their minds by an argument they could never answer, but at the cost of ripping away a bit of their holy writ.

A special note for the followers of Ayn Rand’s intellectual errors heirs: Where am I wrong? If they won’t illuminate their disagreements with Man Alive!, the logical inference to be drawn is that they can’t. The emperor is naked. Now everybody knows.

As with everyone reading here, if you find you like my arguments better than the ones you’ve been reciting so far, there’s a reason for that: I’m working from an accurate understanding of human nature, not trying to shoehorn humanity — and your mind — into an arbitrary dogma.

Watch me work:

“Lamenting vice is not virtue.” Greg wrote that, and I wanted to argue. But of course, he’s right. Here’s more — lamenting anything is not virtue; only virtuous action is virtue. Duh.

OTOH, doing something about vice can be virtuous, at least if that vice somehow interferes with your life. Greg likes to speak of a “calculus of loss,” whereby each choice of an alternative is negative on the number line. I can go along with that, but if one is faced with such an alternative, surely choosing the “least negative” is an instance of virtue…assuming there’s no choice available that’s actually positive on the number line.

I mean, we have to live in this universe, after all. So this is not about lamenting, but about doing. Take a gander at this, and tell me if this has anything to do with your life — if it puts you in the position of having to make some tough choices going forward. H/T to commenter Ellendra here. Feast your eyes on what others are doing with your life…

http://regulations.gov

I know, I know…”What can I do about this?”

My answer? Start simple. Learn who you are, and start that by learning what you are. Read the book and understand. Once you have your mind, you’ll know what to do.

I started this morning with a link to this post. In it, I see that my post, “Where Is He Wrong?” is linked. Why? According to the title, “Right-wingers mistake humorous Audi ad for Obama policy; embarrassment should follow.” It’s about a link to here, that I got from here, concerning Federal policy with regard to “environmental justice,” and it was one of seventeen distinct links in my post above concerning the sorry state of our current society, caused largely by government encroachment into private lives.

So what does the author say? Nothing, of course. Like everything else in the world babbling from the mouths of “thought leaders,” it says nothing, or it says lies. This is exactly what Greg’s book deals with, and one could hardly ask for a better example. Words are thrown out there, declarations are made, conclusions are implied, but no facts.

I could write a whole essay just on the title. “Right-wingers”…moi? No right-winger here, just a guy looking to live his own life. Maybe that’s “right-wing” compared to the commie-libs who want to live everyone else’s life, but I think that just makes me a person.

“Mistake”? What mistake? The link was to a site which I believe was the source of this story, but it wasn’t the story itself. The story is in a pdf document, put out by the government. No mistake — the document exists and it says what the source says it says.

“Humorous Audi ad”? The story, nor the pdf document, is about the Audi ad; it’s about government policy and it’s a direct cite of government policy.

Get it? Even in the title, words are bandied about as if they create reality, rather than reflecting reality. Here we have another “profound thinker,” who will tell you what to think, the facts be damned. Check out some of this “support” in the essay…

“…dull, run-of-the-mill document out of the Department of Homeland Security.” See, there’s nothing there, so move along folks. It’s just a “dull, run-of-the-mill document.” Well, what does that mean? How many people — how many millions of dollars — were involved in this? (more…)

This week’s video and podcast are linked below. The headline summarizes the content fairly well. With respect to the subjunctive, I’m hitting four ideas fairly briefly: Wanting, dreading, fearing the disapproval of other people and trying to have efficacy in the past. I mention a post I wrote at SplendorQuest.com called How you came to be enslaved — and how you can free yourself:

You live your life cowering in terror of one imaginary catastrophe after the next, but every one of those supposed disasters really is the same one fear: You live in horror of being on the wrong side of someone else’s bad opinion of you. You can come up with as many names as you like for that horror — shame, guilt, fear, embarrassment, mortification — but these all come down to the same thing, to be the object of public opprobrium — any disapproval at any time, from anyone or any group of people. Your only real hope for safety is to become one with the group, whichever group you happen to be in at that moment. If the massed force of collective scorn is to be deployed, your furtive hope is to be among the folks doing the sneering or snickering, not the poor sap being held up to public ignominy.

Here are links to other posts cited in the video:

Evangelizing egoism.

The morality of abortion. There is a link within that post to a google search of “prudent predator” arguments.

The works of Richard Mitchell.

And with that, on to the show. The audio-only version of this video is lined below, or you can find it on iTunes.

I stole that title from here. I don’t like plagiarizing, but that’s all I want to know. Man Alive! has been online for a baker’s dozen days now, and the silent response is deafening.

Get it? That’s all I want to know. Where is he wrong?

I’m a bad hero-worshipper and I don’t worship Greg Swann. He’s been a good friend, plus he’s a productive businessman, an honest guy and just generally a man of integrity overall. So am I, and this is why I give him the credit he’s due. As I’ve written elsewhere, Crick & Watson discovered the nature of DNA and Greg Swann discovered the nature of the self. That’s all. Yes, it’s extremely important and yes, it can change the world…but to me, it’s just a simple identification and that’s about the size of it.

The function of our minds it to identify things. Our eyes are to sense wavelengths of light, our ears are to hear audible sounds, our noses are to smell various chemicals, and our minds are to abstractly classify that which we sense and that of which we’re aware. How tough is that? Is this not obvious?

Here’s how I really wanted to title this post…

Chicken-Shit Philosophy

Thousands of people have now seen Man Alive!, including a whole host of supposed “thinkers” and “philosophers.” And while there have been some overwhelmingly flattering comments to Greg, mostly in email, there’s been nary a public word from these “philosophers,” formal or otherwise.

Well, why the hell is that? Are there falsehoods in the book? If so, let’s see ’em. Set ’em out. I don’t want to go around believing any falsehoods, especially about stuff this important. There’s a link right up top just for that, but nothing appears.

Does this mean all these thinkers understand that Greg is exactly right? Then why no comments about that? Is it too obvious, too minor? If it’s so obvious, then how come nobody else has ever written or expressed these ideas? Sure, many people have come to similar conclusions…all the way back to Epicurus and as recently as Ayn Rand. But none of them hit (more…)

This weblog and Man Alive! both continue to suffer from a dearth of inbound links. That’s shameful, even if it’s completely predictable.

My name may be unfamiliar to you, but I am very well-known to net.connected libertarians, as is Jim Klein, my partner in this adventure. Silence from the state, the church and the academy are to be expected. They won’t know what’s hit ’em until our war is already won. But the silence from the libertarians is simply disgraceful.

We actually lost a link this week. Apparently Jason Stotts got yelled at for linking to Psalm in last week’s Objectivist Round-Up. Very sad, considering that the essay Stotts spiked was the best short rendition of the existential experience of self-love I have ever written. Sadder for Stotts and the “students of Objectivism” that their proudest expression of intellectual independence is to stick their fingers in their ears.

They have worse troubles. I destroyed every pro-abortion argument this week, including Ayn Rand’s anti-egoistic political mis-directions. Since it is based in actual human nature, the moral philosophy presented in Man Alive! dispenses with every boojum under their beds, but the price of entry they must pay is very high: They have to stop aping Rand and her intellectual errors and learn to think for themselves.

None of this matters in the long run. Man Alive! will surely be the most popular piece of samizdat in the American gulags, if things come to that. But I don’t want for things to come to that. Very much the contrary. And that’s why it is disgraceful that libertarian pundits are not linking to the book. Egoists — human beings who fully understand the idea of self-adoration — are the only people who can stem the tide of tyranny, and Man Alive! exists to massively increase the number of egoists. If you are not working help people become egoists, you’re working for the enemy by default.

So what can you do?

Very simple: Link. Linking free slaves, because linking is the way we share the riches of the internet with the people we know and love. Here are three very easy linking (more…)

Man Alive! doesn’t have a dust-cover, but if it did, that headline would make the perfect jacket blurb. It comprises a pocket summary of what the book is intended to do: I want to show honest people how to more perfectly express their until-now-stunted self-adoration, and I want to drive the enemies of the human self out of their minds.

Meanwhile (memewhile), the pretend-friends of human liberty are forming an echo-chamber orchestra to play and replay a smarmy video called “If I wanted America to fail.” I have no idea who is behind this funereal lament. The putative web site doesn’t resolve. If I had to guess, I’d say the money to pay for the video came from oil and mining interests, but I suppose that comes down to (oil)well-poisoning.

But that doesn’t even matter. Here’s why:

If I wanted civilization to fail, I would devote my life to pissing and moaning about the collapse of civilization. I wouldn’t do anything at all, and I wouldn’t say anything except to bitch that no one else is doing anything, either.

Do you want to know what Starnesville looks like? Take a long hard look in the mirror.

If you don’t like what you see, at least you know what needs to be fixed if you want civilization and America and your life to succeed.

We don’t need more Republicans. There are plenty already, and they’re useless. The Libertarians are doubly useless: Ineffectual and pedantic. What we need are more egoists. Each one of us is indomitable as a manifestation of human nature. But egoists know they are indomitable.

Do you want to change the world for the better? Start by changing your self. Once that project is begun, take up The Conversation with your spouse, your kids, your parents and siblings, your friends, your net.friends, the people at work.

In other words: Don’t mourn. Proselytize.

Everything starts with you. If you want civilization to succeed, succeed.

And if you want it to fail? Just keep pissing and moaning. It worked in Starnesville, and it will work for you, too.

04/23: Kicked this back to the top of the blog to highlight the irony of it all. Hundreds of people have seen this post, perhaps thousands more by echos and emails. Cum taces, clamas. The silence of Libertarian pundits, bloggers and activists is a concession by default. See the movie-of-the-week to find out what it all means to you. –GSS

 
I swear to god, for the first time in my life I cannot seem to make an enemy on the internet!

As a matter of strategy, this is what Man Alive! seeks:

To disintermediate the ruling class.

Disintermediation means cutting out the middle-man, and, by teaching you a new way of thinking about human nature and about your own unique self, the book puts you in charge of your own philosophical affairs. You no longer have to turn to so-called “thought leaders” — most of whom are frauds anyway — for answers — which answers are almost always contrary to your own interests in any case.

My objectives are precise and concise:

I want to take the claim of justice away from the state, the mantle of epistemic authority away from the academy and the experience of reverence away from the church. I want to put all of those things back where they belong — in your mind. There is no middle-man on truth.

If you didn’t catch all that in the book, you need to read it again. My own practice is to read any serious book at least three times. Like this: 1. What is the argument? 2. What are my questions? 3. How are those addressed?

I don’t much care for the way thoughtless “thought leaders” squeal, squawk and squall when you call “Bullshit!” on ’em, but I thought for sure they would at least rise to the bait challenge I’ve laid down. What do I hear, instead? Crickets.

I know we’ll be hearing from those folks in due course. When they come to notice that the traffic at the door is all one-way, outbound, they will find plenty to hate on these pages.

But I was expecting that the libertarians would be all over Man Alive!

Why? Because it’s the magic (more…)

Episode Two of the podcast. You can find the video version here.

Here is the link to the iTunes page for the podcast.

I made another video, this one highlighting some of the issues we dealt with here this week. I don’t know that I’ll do this every week, but it’s not terribly difficult, so it’s a possibility. I’ve got a YouTube page half set up, and I’ll build an iTunes site, too, to echo the videos as audio podcasts.

In this weeks’ action packed episode, we take up The Conversation, the global dialog about self-adoration that I am trying to incite. I talk at some length about the fiasco that was The Army of Cartmans. To flesh out the idea of the existential, taken up in last week’s video, I explore the idea of the subjunctive. And to conclude, I discuss the idea that “Linking Frees Slaves” — linking from your own work to the sources you are citing is a transparent demonstration of your own credibility.

I’ve written at length about linking as a proof of reliability:

The purpose of linking is to demonstrate to your audience that you are telling the truth. By means of the link, you provide your reader with the means to check up on you, to verify your claims, to follow up on the sources you say buttress your case, to find out if they really do reinforce what you are saying.

I am scrupulous about linking, and I always have been. I encourage you to follow up on my outbound links to assure yourself that I am not misrepresenting other peoples’ positions.

And with that, the video:

I talk a lot about logical fallacies. If I were shipwrecked, I might have a lot to say about water. Fallacies are not quite as plentiful as water in the ocean, but they are everywhere — and they’re just as deadly in the long run.

What is a fallacy? It is a path to error. That’s all. People hear the word fallacy and they think it means “false.” That’s not so. An argument defended by a logical fallacy may in fact be true. It’s just that the defense itself — at least the fallacious part of the defense — is not a good reason to embrace the argument. It is posible to reconstruct the argument without logical fallacies, creating a rhetorical structure that is logically unassailable.

Of course, most arguments defended by logical fallacies are madly, badly, stupidly wrong. And a significant number of those stupidly wrong arguments will be defended with logical fallacies because the proponent knows his argument is false. His objective is not to discover the truth, but to gull you into acting against your own interests and values.

This is why you need to learn how to identify fallacies in the informal arguments you hear every day. The best benefit to this undertaking will be to make your own arguments better. But as a matter of self-defense, even if you seek to persuade no one of anything, you need to learn how to tune in to the cunning deceptions of demagogues.

Below are links to some resources worth looking at. I’m not endorsing any of these sites, and I think it’s a fine idea to read more than one site when you want to know more about a particular logical fallacy.

• The Nizkor Project — Rigorous and easy to navigate
• How to construct an argument — The author is no friend to religion, so if you are, bring your A game
• Fallacy Files — Discussions of fallacies augmented by a blog of current examples
• Logical Fallacies — Broken out by taxonomy

You would never think to deliberately seek out bad food, or to ingest poison inadvertently from a careless indifference to the consequences. But you will (more…)

You come into the house by the kitchen door, and mama is there at the table. Her head is in her hands, her hair is a mess and her eyes are swollen, red and wet. She’s not crying, not quite, but you can hear the catch in her breathing and you know she has been sobbing, and she’s trying very hard not to break out in tears again. She smiles weakly, and you know she doesn’t want for you to see what she’s going through, but there’s really no way to hide it.

What do you do in that circumstance?

You want to help, don’t you? You want to soothe and comfort and console. You want to take the pain away, to take a tissue and wipe away the agony as you wipe away the tears. You want to make it all better.

That’s the way I’ve been feeling about a column Peggy Noonan wrote for the Wall Street Journal. It’s a compendium of tragic episodes, and on reading it you might think there is no connection between the events. But there is. The connection is Noonan’s pain, the despair she feels for a modernity that seems to be nothing but ugly and twisted and wrong:

A tourist is beaten in Baltimore. Young people surround him and laugh. He’s pummeled, stripped and robbed. No one helps. They’re too busy taping it on their smartphones.

I reject pain. I refuse to let it have my mind, I rid my life of anything that might cause me pain, and I forget all about it as soon as it is gone. I’ve never been any damn good around people in pain, because I don’t see why anyone should ever feel anything but Splendor. But there’s mama crying in the kitchen, and a stirring lecture on the avid pursuit of values may not be the best medicine in the immediate moment.

But that really is the cure, the topical ointment and the general vaccine: Pursuing your values.

The world is full of news, good and bad, and all of it matters to you to the exact extent you tell yourself it does.

If (more…)