A celebration of me: Man Alive! is alive!

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I just traded two weeks of my life for the rest of human history. That’s what it feels like. It’s funny even to me to live at that level of hubris!

I’ve always been able to work very hard when I need to, and I’ve always loved the way I feel when I finish: It’s the ultimate best kind of soaring I get to do, a tremendous sense of enormous accomplishment that leaves me feeling everything but small. I don’t know where you might sip at your best taste of Splendor, but for me it comes from working hard, working wisely, working well, working beautifully — and getting done. I am the high-D who ate up all the d’s in the alphabet. I like to finish big jobs masterfully.

But today I swim in Splendor. Today my world is all the way won — and won my way. Today I published a book of philosophy that will change the course of human history: Man Alive! A survival manual for the human mind. The subject: Your mind and how you can save Western Civilization and make your own life more perfect by rethinking your moral philosophy.

Just that topic itself is a thing of the most perfect hubris, and yet I swear I have the outlandish effrontery to insist that this one little book will — ultimately, when enough people embrace the ideas I uphold — reverse the tide of tyranny that has overrun the Earth. It’s 78 pages, total, just 32,000 words — a third of the length of a typical novel — and yet it bears within it the seeds of a brand new kind of life for billions of human beings.

Which kind of life would that be? My kind, of course.

I have taken it upon myself to lecture everyone alive — and everyone who will ever be alive in the future — on how to manage their minds. At length. In significant detail. And without much in the way of comfort or consolation.

People who already think as I do, in the large, will love it. Not only do I confirm to them how right they have been all along, I show them strategies for being more right — ever more and more right — enduringly.

People who hate the way I think will hate it, and, no matter where each one of them quits reading — and they will all storm out of this book sooner or later — wherever any one of them stops, everything up to that point will be in his head forever.

My target audience is you, and I will be in your head forever, too, if you read it. Man Alive! will be memorable and moving — and I hope motivating — for anyone who manages to read it all the way to the end. My plan is to change the world by changing lives by changing minds — one mind at a time. Your world is screwed up — not just the world crumbling around you — your personal world is screwed up because your moral philosophy is inverted — turned perfectly upside down. The task I set for myself in this book was to show you how to put it right.

Will you follow through? Your business. I want to show you what I’ve learned in my life, because I think very differently than most people. If you come to like the way I think, and if you put my ideas in practice in your life, you will move closer and closer, over time, to the state of mind I call Splendor. That’s fact, not hyperbole. No gimmicks. No gotchas. I can literally show you the math: 1 > 0 > –1. If you want it, it’s yours, a gift not from me but from your self. If you don’t, your name is legion. We care a lot.

And I do mean that. I don’t care what you do. I believe that sane human beings who want to live the best lives they can attain should read this book, internalize it and deploy its philosophy in everything they do. It’s what I do. It’s what I’ve done my whole life, except that I had to write this book before I could read it.

And that’s still one more reason for me to be proud of myself, this cloudless Easter morning: I wrote Man Alive! in eight days and edited and published it in seven more. You can see me dipping my quill into the ink here. But I’ve been preparing to write this one book since I was nineteen years old. I think destiny is a stupid idea, and yet this is a book I felt I had to write. My own on-going self-regard required of me that I would be the man who wrote this book, and events transpired, just at the right time, to rob of me every chance to fulfill that role at some future date. I believe that my self is the idea whose time has come, and I am proud to have documented my self at the perfect moment — perfect for the world at large, perfect for you and perfect for me. I am the first philosopher of Splendor, but I am its first poet, too, and the book I produced is a scholarly anthem. I sing the mind indomitable, and I will leave you singing — or swearing — all the way to your grave.

But there is still more: Today I accomplished a true life-long goal, the kind of thing few people dare to admit they dream about — and fewer still follow through on. And the task I set for myself was quite literally global — and eternal — in scale. I brunch today with Prometheus. I tore the lid off human joy, and no one will ever be able to imprison it again. I had one job to do in my life, a job that no one I have ever heard of or read about could do. And today I finished that job masterfully.

And there’s still more, for tonight I dine with Socrates. I have erased the white-board of Western Philosophy all the way back to him and reset our course from there. Whatever happens next, starting in five-hundred days or five-hundred years, will be mine. I could say “could be mine” but I don’t believe it. I know what I wanted to accomplish, and I’ve done it.

And you might think that by being so brutally arrogant, I am daring you to prove me wrong. But that’s not so. I’m daring you to prove me right. I’m daring you to stand up for your self the way I stand up for mine. I’m daring you to live your own life in your own behalf, pursuing your own values for your own reasons and delighting in every treasure you win that way. I’m daring you to sip for a while at my fountain of Splendor — and then go home and build your own.

All that from one tiny book! And all of that is mine. You can’t touch it. You can’t even see it. I’m not trying to withhold anything from you, it’s just the way the human mind works: Ideas can be shared, once they have been created, but the creation of any new idea is particular to an individual. Man Alive! is particular to me. I’m happy to share it with you, but you can never have the book the way I have it — the way I birthed it for three decades and two weeks more.

But I’m happy to share it with you. 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. I have a gift from antiquity for you, though, as your extra-special free bonus. If you will propagate Man Alive! — if you will share it freely with everyone you know — you will sup with Archimedes: I will give you my lever and with it you will move the earth.

Am I inverting the inverted idea of “sharing the wealth” by sharing my hubris? I think I am shedding grace. There has never been enough to go around. Give me your mind for half a day and I will show you how to make much more Splendor than you have ever dared to dream to hope to wish for.

My friend Jim Klein talks all the time about production, but this is the only kind of production that matters to humanity. Everything we have comes from Splendor, from the gushers and geysers and waterspouts of Splendor that rain down on all of us when one of us dares to think. Everyone who lives after me will be richer because of me — but that means nothing to me. My own life will be better forevermore because of the work I finished today — and that means everything to me.

Take it? Leave it? It matters not at all to me. I did the job I set about to do. And I will win — in the end — either way. And that is the kind of Splendorous drenching that I want to swim in every day.

How about you?