SelfAdoration.com

We are getting some inbound links, despite my kvetching. I’d like to see more, but for that I have to wait — which is the human behavior I am worst at.

Psalm was cited in the Objectivist Round-Up, a blog carnival. The carnival recap is echoed here as well. I am very far from being an Objectivist, but I think that post speaks to the best within us, a quality I strive to cultivate.

Psalm is also linked from a very link-rich post at Not PC.

Both Man Alive! and this site have been blessed by much attention from Libertarian Information, a daily Paper.li newspaper. Publisher Jack Oughton (@koukouvaya) seems to have a good nose for news.

Ken McManigal is re-pinning out a lot of our images on Pinterest. All of the pix on his board are fun for me.

In my own behalf, I am trying very hard to live by this admonition: “What would Socrates do?” So, while it is very easy for me, when I am met with opposition, to roll right over people, I am trying to think more carefully and to answer questions in ways that light fires in my interlocutor’s mind. You can see me doing some of this here, still more on FaceBook.

This is a new praxis for me, and I’m growing into it. You can see some of my best Socratic rejoinders at FreeRepublic.com. I’ve been posting there periodically since 1998 or so, and Jim Robinson and his moderators have been very gracious hosts to me — especially taking account of who I am.

Here are some of my favorite responses from the past two weeks:

> If you do not accept this principle

How successful has this approach been for you? Do you find that other people like having their values dictated to them? Do you like that, when other people do it to you? I know I don’t.

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> I don’t think you know yourself very well.

How much first-hand experience of my life are you able to share with me?

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> That’s what I like about Aristotle and Aquinas.

You’re seeing what I like about Socrates. 😉

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> Interesting and well-written, but what’s (more…)

Ahem:

1. Saul Alinsky was evil, as are Jon Stewart, Bill Maher, etc. There is no benefit to a self-loving mind in emulating their vile, rhetorically invalid tactics. Breitbart was wrong: Tu quoque is not okay.

2. No matter how much you revile or ridicule your opponent, this will not make you a better person. Two wrongs don’t make a right.

3. Everything you do that does not advance your objectives retards them: 1 > 0 > –1.

4. Mobbing up is always self-destructive — for every member of the mob.

As it happens, I wrote a book about these ideas.

The walking irrelevancies who call themselves libertarian and conservative “thought leaders” could have read it today, instead of wasting their time and soiling their characters making dumb-ass dog-meat jokes.

Suitable for framing — just like you.

Click here to get one for your front door.

The woman has style. I am so proud to know her.

Meanwhile, my challenge to the libertarians is still unanswered. Apparently, the crucial responsibility of making dog-eating jokes is more important.

A question for you: By whom are you led — and why?

A not-so-brief movie about philosophy and guitars. I address the four issues raised in the heading above, among them a post I wrote for Richard Nikoley’s FreeTheAnimal.com about mastering difficult tasks.

This comes down to being a body, demonstrating the reality of my own person. Here are some other videos I’ve done. This clip exists, primarily, so that you can see for yourself how I conduct my intellectual life in existential reality.

This is pure housekeeping. The two videos I’ve done so far are now also available in audio form. The first video, which you can find here, is echoed below.

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

This project was built to be viral — to be spread by propagation by internet users. Viral memes are spread by “sneezing,” by people sharing the meme with each other. My objective is to get as many people as possible to read Man Alive!, ideally as quickly as possible. We’re disintermediating “thought leaders,” plain and simple, helping people free themselves to think for themselves.

That’s where you come in. If you want to see these ideas spread, there are things you can do that can make a big difference. I’m going to list some I’ve thought of, but I know there are plenty of other ideas. Please feel free to share your thoughts in the comments.

• Blogging. If you have a weblog or web site, or if you post to public forums, writing about the book is a great way to introduce people to the ideas taken up in Man Alive! So far, Sunni Maravillosa and Kent McManigal have written blog reviews of the book. Avail yourself of the propagation kit and the image library to work your magic.
   
• Commenting. Leaving apposite comments on web sites with a link back here can be a great way to draw people to SelfAdoration.com. People are looking for answers. Some will click through to learn what you know.
   
• Twitter. @TeriLussier is becoming a goddess among libertarians at #tlot (top libertarians on Twitter). If you tweet, you can retweet Teri or @gswann — that’s me. Links are the coin of the realm on Twitter, so a good Twitter entry is a reflection on a particular post or link. The “share” buttons at the bottom of each post make linked tweets easier to compose.
   
• FaceBook. What’s not to Like? 😉 FaceBook is a great resource for viral propagation, because your own network of friends will take your recommendations very seriously.
   
• Pinterest. Kent McManigal is taking our image library to the streets. People like to express themselves icongraphically, and we’ve got the most-compellingly iconic ideas around.
   
• Other social media sites. There are tons of these sites by now. My desire: If you’re there, I want for Man Alive! and SelfAdoration.com to be there with (more…)

Nathan Stocker was gracious enough — and talented enough — to do what I could not do: He built Kindle Reader and iBooks versions of Man Alive! To use them, you will have to “Open in…” your eReader of choice. Here are the links: Kindle Reader or iBooks. Nathan did me one better by building a table of contents into his versions.

The photo is from my own iBooks collection on my iPhone. You can tell a lot about people by looking at their books, and, clearly, I am no exception to that rule.

I’ve built an Image library, as well. In it you will find the images I have built for weblog posts and promotional purposes. Please feel free to use these images in your own efforts to spread the word about Man Alive!

Chapter 6. Evaluating values.

The name philosophers give to any ethical doctrine promoting self-love or self-interest is egoism. I use that term myself to describe the system of ethics I am elaborating here, but I’m not crazy about it.

First, most creeds that call themselves egoism actually refer to invalid ideas of the self whose interests are to be served. Either “self” is used to mean the reflexive idea of the bodily self or to self-identity – the object of sentences like “I clothe myself” or “I promote myself on the internet.” Or “self” is deployed as a matter of bodily or pecuniary utility: “It was to my self-interest to take a loss on this one deal in order to hang onto a valuable client.” There is nothing wrong with any of these behaviors, they just don’t have anything to do with the actual human self, the self as we documented it in the last chapter.

The second type of ethical creeds called egoism is actually other-centric. Whether the philosopher claims that his egoism permits him to dominate other people, or that his egoism forbids other people from dominating him, the focus of the doctrine is not the self at all – not the self as I describe it nor even the reflexive or utilitarian self – but is instead those other people.

I’m inclined to think that most philosophical or theological arguments – of all sorts – are essentially Cargo Cults: The doctrine in all its interminable, incomprehensible verbiage exists to justify some desired end-state goal the proponent had already upheld in advance of writing his supposed defense of that “inevitable” outcome. The theorist works backwards, from the conclusion to the allegedly-validating premises and evidence, tying everything up with a tidy rhetorical bow. This is completely invalid as a matter of method, of course, since the map is not the territory. It is simply absurd, when you cut through all the fog, for the champion of some doctrine to insist that human nature is what his theory commands that it “must” be. If you tell me these folks are deliberately fooling themselves, I will (more…)

Chapter 4. The greatest invention in the history of humanity.

That chapter heading is really just a tease. What’s the most important invention ever devised by the mind of man?

Fathertongue, of course. All other inventions flow from it. Without it, we are badly-adapted hairless apes, ultimately doomed to an ignominious extinction. With it, human beings danced on the Moon.

In the last chapter, I raised the idea of your being stranded on a desert island. That’s a hugely unlikely scenario, but it’s interesting to think about because everything that is true of you, as a type of entity, is true of you in isolation. You’re in this all alone, recall, and there is no factual statement that we can make about your nature as a human being that is not true of you even – especially! – when you are isolated from all other people.

In later chapters, we will take up the implications of your fundamental ontological solitude. For now I want to focus on the existential solitude of being stranded. Is there anyone for you to talk to? To cuddle up to? To fight against or to make love with? No. You possess everything you were able to recover from your plane crash or your shipwreck, but there is no one else with you, and anything else you might want you will have to provide for yourself – if you can – or else do without.

But cheer up, Bunkie! You don’t have a knife, but you know that knives exist, and you can apply yourself to making one. It may turn out to be a crude thing compared to the knives you can buy in a store, but close enough is good enough. You don’t have a calendar to keep track of time, but you can easily make one with stones or sticks. With but a few exceptions, you don’t have any of the artifacts we take for granted in Western Civilization, but you have owned a great many of those tools and toys in your time, and you can recreate some of them as you wait to be rescued. You are (more…)

Chapter 3. Speaking in tongues.

I told you I use the words “human being” as a term of art. Here is why: Because there is a valid and valuable distinction to be made between a genetic Homo sapiens (the surviving issue of the recombination of genes) and a human being (a genetic Homo sapiens within whom has been cultivated the gift of mind). A genetic Homo sapiens can have the potential to become a human being – although this capacity or its existential realization can have been damaged or destroyed by disease, injury or birth defect. But until the mind has been cultivated within a particular genetic Homo sapiens, that entity will not be a human being.

A human life is an artifact, a man-made thing. The existence of a genetic Homo sapiens is a manifestation of nature, just as with any tree or reptile or kitten. But the existence of your life as a human being is a consequence of a vast number of conceptually-conscious choices made by your parents and other human beings when you were just a baby. Had they failed to cultivate the gift of mind within you, you might have survived as a genetic Homo sapiens, but you would never have become a human being. You owe your biological life to nature, but you owe your life as a human being to choices made by other human beings.

It’s funny for me to listen to abortion ideologues, pro and con, argue about when human life begins: Conception or birth? The truth – as a matter of ontological fact – is that, for normal children raised in normal circumstances, human life begins at age four or five. The transition from toddler to child is slow and gradual, but the distinction is obvious once you know what to look for. A toddler is little more than a very smart dumb animal – an exceptionally talented dancing bear. He does amazing things, compared to the clumsy efforts of trained animals, but like a trained animal, he does not understand conceptually what he is doing or why. A child, by contrast, is a (more…)

This came to me by email:

I read your book last night. I got the impression that you believe you can liberate the bulk of the population by helping them to free their minds. I think you are doing electoral politics, and trying to get people to check “none of the above”. I don’t think that will work. Only perhaps 1% of the population want freedom; these people are called “freethinkers”. The rest want a kind master. If a master isn’t already present they will invent a master in the form of god, government, or gaia. Early American history had perhaps the largest percentage of freethinkers in history, who had concentrated themselves by emigration. Still, are you recognize, it very quickly went bad.

If freedom is going to happen, I think it will be because someone invents new ways for the permanent 1% minority of freethinkers to keep the permanent supermajority 99% of statists at bay.

This is a fairly common sentiment. The writer is clearly a serious libertarian, but people from every walk of life have this view of their fellow men. There is a hint of the Fallacy of Special Pleading in the claim, in this case maligning the norm with the exception: “I have what it takes to live a free life, but no one else does.”

My reply:

So, in summary, your plan is to bet against humanity?

I think you’re wrong. I think everyone wants to live the life I live, they just don’t know how. We won’t know for a while which one of us right — and we can only run the test because I wrote Man Alive!

Meanwhile: Will you love your self more tomorrow and enduringly by betting against humankind?

I think I’m the only game in town, and you have nothing whatever to lose by betting with me instead. If I’m right, you win big, and if you’re right, you lose nothing you have not already lost. I’m a free roll of the dice, but I’m also your best shot at making a difference in the world. Are you going to (more…)

Chapter 2. The nature of your nature.

Everything I have to say about anything starts with carrying the claim back to the object. The essence of philosophical error, deliberate or not, is creative solipsism: “The nature of the thing under discussion is what I need it to be to make my argument work out.” This is useless, of course, since no amount of creative map-making will turn a mountain into a valley. The map is not the territory. If we want to make useful, cogent arguments about what humanity is, we must look to actual human beings, not to incomprehensible maunderings about what humanity “must” be – regardless of the facts.

This is ontology, the study of the nature of real things, irrespective of what anyone thinks about them. And as we will see repeatedly, as we go along, ontology really matters only when we are talking about human beings. There is no one who claims that there is anything controversial about the nature of rocks or trees or reptiles. Only human nature is deployed in one bogus argument after the next, each one devised to induce you to try to violate your own inviolable ontological nature.

There is another big word we need to deal with, so we might as well get it out of the way. Teleology is the branch of philosophy concerned with oughts – what real things should do. Again, it only matters with respect to human beings. A rock should sit around doing nothing until something else acts on it. A tree should grow toward the sun until it is felled by disease or collapses from its own weight. A reptile should eat, mate and moult until it is devoured by a starving bird. These are all non-controversial statements, ultimately of interest only to lab-coated academics.

But ontology and teleology matter a great deal as soon as the conversation turns to human beings. Recall that the most important question in philosophy is, “What (ontology) should (teleology) I (ontology) do (teleology)?” Accordingly, the sole topic of philosophical and theological writing, for all of human history, has been teleology: What should you (more…)

That headline is my favorite advertising joke, a send-up of all those hokey old matchbook covers. I don’t know if anyone still advertises on matchbook covers. I don’t even know if anyone still makes matchbooks. Presumably, by now, smokers can light their cigarettes with the fire of indignation in other peoples’ eyes.

But I have always believed that ordinary people should be able to save the world from going to hell on a hand-truck. Our problem is not the tyrant-of-the-moment. The only real problem humanity has ever had is thoughtlessness — the mindless acquiescence to the absurd demands of demagogues.

That’s the subject of this little book: The high cost of thoughtlessness — and how to stop paying it. It weighs in at around 75 pages. I’m nobody’s matchbook copywriter, and I would have made it even shorter if I could have. But it covers everything I know about the nature of human life on Earth — what we’ve gotten wrong, until now, and how we can do better going forward.

Why did I bother? Because the world we grew up in is crashing down around our ears. Nothing has collapsed yet, and there is no blood in the streets — so far. But as the economists say, “If something can’t go on forever, it won’t.” My bet is that you have been watching the news and wondering what you will do, if things get ugly.

Doesn’t that seem like a fate worth avoiding? And yet: What can one person do? My answer: Read — and propagate — these ideas. The book itself is offered at no cost — and it always will be. Even so, the price I ask is very high: You have to pay attention.

If you find that you like this book, I encourage you to share it freely, far and wide, in any form, with anyone you choose. Print it, photo-copy it, email it — shout it from the rooftops if you like. You can read it here at SelfAdoration.com, or you can download an easy-to-share PDF version (back-up server) or Kindle Reader or iBooks versions. If you post to public (more…)