SelfAdoration.com

Why is the idea of an ‘ideal man’ so self-destructive? You ain’t him, so you will in due course either reject your ideal or you will affect to be him in your behavior.That’s anegoism – selflessness – either way.The man you want to be is the man you have always wanted to be. Be that man –be yourself, but better. Be yourself better now.

What’s perfectionismism? A passive-aggressive Inverse-Tiger-Momism-by-Proxy: We don’t want to be perfect – nor even simply better, for that matter – we just want to rhapsodize perfection in anyone else, especially anyone other than our own loved ones.

Anything they do is to be held up to the ideal – and is always to be found wanting: Either ‘truthfully,’ with an ‘honest’ comparison of tree-houses to skyscrapers, or in the form of treacly lies that cheat all ambition with counterfeit praise.

Want to know what’s worse? The ‘elite’ don’t believe in themselves, either. They live in terror of being compared to something they cannot themselves attain. They live in a binary world – where !1 = 0, and if you’re not Dutch, you’re not much – so if you’re not the ideal, per your own insane perfectionismism, you’re nothing.

“What would Jesus do?” Heads up, kiddos. He’d hang from a cross. Why aren’t you doing that? You ain’t him – and we’re all of us lucky for that.

“What would Mohammed do?” Oy! Don’t get me started!

And, of course, we’ll never know what any real life Howard Roark might do, because, per the doctrine, his mammy had him killed.

But that’s hardly incendiary enough, so I decided to do those three moral ‘ideals’ what I had already done to myself: I PEAK scored their DISC profiles.

I know I’m nobody’s moral lodestone. I am odd-beyond-odd as a matter of odds, just to begin with, plus I am a full-on Di – a prick boss – by my own steady admission. I’m working to burr down my prickliness, (more…)

You say, “Self-improvement?”
I say, “Go PEAK yourself!”

PEAK is DISC, weighted. We’re going to teach DISC to kids, practically from birth. They will grow into their humanity already knowing how to see and understand everyone else, even as they are already all well-practiced in the arts of human striving.

What kind of world will THEY make?

This is what I said to Sindre:

Imagine a world of kids who can see each other this well. Imagine them grown up, raising sons who will raise ever-better sons.

Seriously: Why not?

If you’ve seen me present, you know I strive to bring the goods in all four PEAK categories. In real life, though, not so much.

I am Di – which means hard work, good show, rough edges – and poor accounting. 😉

PEAK me live and I’ll send you home with dinner plates for eyes, but when you PEAK my LIFE, I’m the guy on the left in the chart – a D+ at best.

The guy on the right is who I am working to be – and that man’s a solid B.

I’m never going to have a day-to-day interest in Cautious pursuits, but by gaining strength where I have been weak, I can make myself a better man over time.

You can, too. So can everyone else. PEAK will make the process easier.

What will you find at the skatepark?
All the motivation absent from school.

Photo by: Noah_Diamond

You’ll see a thriving Institute of Persistent Excellence composed entirely of peaceful, purposeful, playful volunteers.

Dutch Uncles and their adhocracies? Simultaneously abundant and evanescent.

Performances? Duh.

Accountability? Not just right here, right now, but enduringly: The skatepark ethos is reputation-based and hugely honor-bound. Responses to violations are immediate, clear-cut and universally-enforced.

The corollary, perhaps obvious only to me: Zero mutinies.

Most children learn nothing in school, but many of them learn how to live a more-human life at the skatepark.

Oh, but you don’t respect skaters’ values? How very snooty of you. They don’t like you, either.

So go to the skeet range, instead, or to the homebrew rocketeers’ blast-off event. Same culture, different gear.

What we call “hobbies” or “avocations” or “diversions” or “dissipations” are typically anarchies of self-and-mutual-education-without-coercion.

All of those things are ThriversEd. We’re just formalizing play to make it even more productive of human virtues and values.

If you read my magnum opus yesterday, you know a lot more about ThriversEd than you did before. Here’s something I figured out only later:

Schooling : Education :: Rape : Love-making

The way we’ve done schooling so far – not just lately, but since the introduction of the classroom model of “efficiency” – has been a graduated consensuality in the same way that the rape college women protest is borne of partial-but-not-dispositive consent.

What would work better than coercion in – and to – the classroom? Why might work better than rape in your marriage?

Photo by: JOHNNY LAI

Rancorous transactions do not recur voluntarily. Schooling is for its every victim every day more rancorous. Why must this be so? Escape is blocked. It’s a Cautious tyranny. You know, like rape. Thirteen years’ worth, at least.

Yes, it’s a purely metaphorical rape – mere coercion, not a visceral scourging. But a violation is a violation, and to to deny your own past violations by classroom bullies – both by the paid professionals their sadly-underfathered freelance enforcers – is to confess either to deceit or delusion.

Why do teachers have such a tough time with their charges? Why do all of them hate school – the kids and the teachers?

It turns out people don’t like to be raped, not even metaphorically and in bulk.

What would work better than coercion in – and to – the classroom?

Why might work better than rape in your marriage?

What could be more obvious, right?

“You’re following all this, right?”Photo by: Daniel X. O’Neil

Are we there yet?

If not, I can teach you the best-ever car game, guaranteed to drive everyone but you crazy. It’s called “What’s Annoying?” and it consists of asking that one question over and over again, with as many different flavors of spin as you can put on it, for as long as you can keep it up.

Seriously: I’ve been talking about these ideas in public for two weeks now. We’ve covered a lot of ground, but it’s kind of all over the place: Where I am now and where I want to be soon, but also every blue-sky way I have of thinking about these notions: TV, internet, Yelp-slaughter, global reconquest, etc. It can be hard to tell precisely what it is I’m juggling.

I can clarify at least that much, with text I wrote the other day:

“A Di is cultivating Ds in the victims of Cautious/Incandescent educationism.”

Oh, wait, that’s not clear, is it? If you’re not up to speed on where I am on DISC – and that’s a moving target, I’ll concede – you’re not going to get any of this. By now, I can diagnose and suggest repair strategies for any broken social machine. And that’s what the sentence quoted above is saying:

Education (and all of Western Civilization) has been crippled by the imposition of Cautious/Incandescent pedagogy in place of Driven/Sociable schooling. I’m undoing all of that – and building in defenses to keep it from happening again.

What’s hubris squared? I am become worlds, destroyer of death! Who could find that kind of exuberance wearing?

Someone – Heinlein? – said a school need be no more than a log with a student at one end and a teacher at the other. I like that, but I think the hierarchy (more…)

You bring what you’ve got. I’ll bring what I’ve got. Together we’ll have a feast of the mind.

Photo by: Paul Joseph

The game described in this short video – made to answer questions raised by David Brodie – is geared toward Toddlers, but the Stone Soup game works at any age. You’re soaking in it.

Vide:

You might think that sounds like ‘Show ’n’ Tell,’ but the similarities are superficial: We’re much less formal, much less stressed, and much, much, much more frequent. ThriversEd is structured play, and Stone Soup is an easy structure for Toddlers to play in.

You may also note similarities to the Socratic style of instruction. We’re more formal than that, but you can see how this model of interaction – growing together by sharing in each other’s growth – will carry through as Toddlers grow into Children and then Adults.

There are other Performance games in ThriversEd – Family/Jam Band is one I’m dying to show off – but you could argue that, just as all ThriversEd activities are Dutch Uncle games, all of our Performance games are Stone Soup games.

Big things are made of little things. Lots of them.

“Where’s my added-value?”

I threw off a social network, but who who needs another one of those? Mine has recruitment, participation and retention incentives, where none of the others do – and no need for advertising and all the staffing that goes with it – but maybe that doesn’t amount to much of a difference.

I threw off a few smaller businesses and implied a bunch more: Branded-and-packaged versions of the ThriversEd games, a publishing house/content marketer, even a career plan for writing kid-lit best-sellers.

And throwing off a plan to influence one-third of all discretionary spending – “You know, for kids!” – seems like kind of a big deal to me.

Maybe not. The best question any prospective buyer can ask is, “Where’s my added-value?” Apparently I need to build more value into my efforts.

Rebuild education so it actually works?

“Eh.”

Restore, refortify and renew Western Civilization?

“Meh.”

How about I figure out a way to kill Yelp?

“Now you’re talking!”

Just teasing. Any dog can nose out a proximate meal, but only Bloodhounds go sniffing for more-distant victuals. Even so, an API built out of the PEAK matrix could eat Yelp, eat the ‘Like’ button and piggy-back on anything, recruiting new end-users and API clients as it goes.

I’m not even going to plot this out, it’s that simple. The dataset is just four one-to-five-star scores weighted to yield the overall score, along with the housekeeping details: Event, date, Dutch Uncle, evaluated, evaluator and perhaps a brief comment field. You could pack the whole thing into one net-packet – a microformat.

That’s just details, trivial and pointless unless the underlying strategy is right. The PEAK idea – everyone evaluates and everyone is evaluated – contains within it a lifelong habituated self-improvement praxis (but who needs that?), so evaluations of things – from restaurants to blog comments – could yield that same kind of trend analysis.

PEAK seems ideally brief to me, where the ‘Like’ button is useless and the long-form Yelp-style review rewards only corruption: Hyperbolic outrage or sweet, loving lies. Plus which, since kindness is the key to PEAK, unkind – hence, unreliable – evaluators will (more…)

Q: If a kid has a fidget toy, what doesn’t he have?A: Enough to do with his hands.Photo by: fidgetcircle

A good example of good content is geometry. Why would any normal person ever need geometry? In order to have learned how to think. You bend your brain around one inference problem after another, and at the end of the year you are a lot harder to fool.

The Cautious love juggling abstractions and the Driven may admire the mechanical perfection of Euclidean logic. The Incandescent are shining it on and the Sociables are muddling through. But everyone thinks they’re studying math when in fact they are mastering logic. That’s why every American child born before 1970 or so had geometry in high school.

Another good example? Penmanship.

What!? Who needs that?

By now penmanship, particularly cursive hand-writing, seems comically obsolete. (Full disclosure: I write a lot, but I type more than I dictate and dictate more than I inscribe – and my scribbling is a challenge to everyone, sometimes even me.) But those fussy old schoolmarms weren’t teaching hand-writing – or that only as a side-issue, as with geometry.

What were they teaching? Diligence. Artistry. Persistence. Mastery. Not writing and not even just muscle control – they were teaching muscle control in pursuit of all human values. Without knowing that that was what they were doing, they were teaching DISC, all as a way of delivering a well-rounded education.

And what does well-rounded mean? What are we schooling kids for?

There are some postulated neurological benefits to mastering penmanship, and there are efficiency-benefits generally to analog versus digital notation and display systems. But mastering a good hand as a child matters even if, like me, you rarely make use of that skill later on in life.

Here’s another benefit of penmanship (or of life drawing, to pick a useful and plausibly-equivalent alternative) that has been (more…)

Here’s a fun tweet from me (well, fun for me, anyway):

How East Eats West: Jesus the Sc wed the Dc Greeks to the Ci Jews, yielding the Ds Anglosphere—now being devoured by Ci #Marxism and #Islam.

— Greg Swann (@gswann) June 30, 2017

That’s just me stunting, showing off. I think it’s fun that I can summarize the entire history of The West in 140 characters, but, so far, hardly anyone but me cares about the work I’m doing here. Plus which, I didn’t even deliver on the promise. I showed you the what but not the how. That’s here:

Dc gets Ci and can resist it – and Ci, Dc. Until now, Ds has had no good defenses against Ci, hence East eats West.https://t.co/39cuC38FDf

— Greg Swann (@gswann) July 2, 2017

Sister Mary Elephant always blows her top for this simple reason: Only the Driven can lead.Photo by: Alisha Vargas

Until now, Ds has had no good defenses against Ci

is still not quite true. The offending words are “until now.” Closer to the truth would be “until lately.”

Until lately, education was not awful – very much the contrary. We are having this discussion – we few! we happy few! – because there remains a residual intellectual independence amidst the wreckage of Cautious/Incandescent educationism.

Until lately, educational philosophy was Driven/Sociable, expressed as varying forms of the Loyolan curriculum, begot of the Roman trivium, itself begot of Greek pedagogy. I can do that story in DISC, too:

Di Loyola sent Dc Xavier out with a bible in one hand and a sword in the other and the two of them built an enduringly prosperous Ds love one schoolhouse at a time.

And to this very day, the only decent education to be had, for most kids, is in explicitly-Jesuit schools or in countries where the Union Jack still flies.

Why does education suck everywhere else? And why does everything else suck, more and more, everywhere education sucks? I can answer those questions with one of my all time favorite (more…)