Category: Egoism in Action (page 1 of 26)

[This is me – Greg – fourteen years ago, when this blog was still a mewling baby. It astounds me to think that the children who were pre-conceptual on 9/11 – aged 0 to 5 – are now the jihadis attempting to destroy Western Civilization from within. We need to do a lot better…]
 

Cathy and I watched The Path to 9/11 on television tonight. I had forgotten that we were in Metro New York for the Turn of the Millennium. My father lives in Connecticut, and we went there that year for New Year’s Day. The photo you see is my son crawling all over a bronze statue of a stock broker in Liberty Park, directly across from what was then the Merrill Lynch Building — on December 30, 1999.

I lived in Manhattan for ten years, from 1976 to 1986. For quite a few of those years, I worked just across from Liberty Park, in the Equitable Building at 120 Broadway. At the other end of that little brick park was the southeast entrance to the World Trade Center complex.

I worked insane hours in those days, and, very often, when I got out of work, I would go sit at this tiny circular plaza plopped down between the Twin Towers. Not quite pre-dawn, still full dark, but completely deserted — and to be completely alone in New York City is an accomplishment. I would throw my head back and look up at the towers, the fourth movement of the Ninth Symphony running note-perfect through my head.

Everything I am describing was either destroyed or heavily damaged on September 11, 2001. Along with the lives of thousand of innocents. Along with the comfort and serenity of their families. Along with the peace of the entire world.

I don’t believe in any heaven except for this earth, this life — the heaven we make every day by pursuing the highest and best within us. The World Trade Center had its faults. I can detail every one. But it was a piece of the sublime, a proud testament to how high, how good our highest and Read more

This is me looking back on looking back on a Labor Day a long time ago. The first extract was written on Labor Day, 2005, as the City of New Orleans was demonstrating for all of us that dependence on government is a fatal error. The second extract was written a year or two before that. And the Labor Day I am talking about there was years before that. Even so, every bit of this is perfectly apposite to the world we live in now – more is the pity.

This is me from elsewhen. I think about this every year at Labor Day. I spent much of the weekend working on business planning issues, macro, micro and meta. I remember from the days when I had a job how much I relished long weekends, because I could build so much on vast tracts of uninterrupted time. I did a bunch of money work last week, but my weekend was virtually my own – to fill with the work that too often takes a back seat to money work. Off and on we had Fox News on in the office, and the whining, pissing and moaning was an effective counterpoint to my entire way of life. My world is where the Splendor is, no alternatives, no substitutions, no adulterations, no crybaby excuses:

The time of your life is your sole capital. If you trade that time in such a way that you get in exchange less than you really want, less than you might actually have achieved, you have deliberately cheated yourself. You have acted to your own destruction by failing to use your time to construct of your life what you want most and need most and deserve most. You have let your obsession or anger – over what amounts to a trivial evil in a world where people are shredded Read more

I swear I have sound reasons for talking about Nine Empathies – specifically the idea of an empathy for the transaction, which could not be closer to any closer’s heart. But today I read Chapter 8 – Empathy for the monster – and it whispered to me in ominous tones. I’ve documented the origins of human character, but this as close as I have come to explicating the monstrous malice we are seeing everywhere just now.

tl;dr? Cliff’s Notes:

The reptilian drives are completely self-motivated, obviously, but also completely devoid of concern for any other entity’s feelings. Mammals care about mutually-beneficial empathy, because this amplifies the playing/cuddling feedback loop – the shared state of mutual enlovingness – all because the behavior is mutually-rewarding. The reptile’s purpose in engaging in this kind of empathetic modeling is strictly self-seeking: The reptile wants to know what you’ll do so he can counter it, oppose it, deflect it, defeat it – eliminate the threat.

This is the monster, basically a monster of misapprehension. Every human being has the mammal brain’s empathy, which is itself the mammalian expression of the reptile brain’s empathy. When the mammal brain is eviscerated by repeated outrages, the reptile brain’s empathy is what’s left – under the seething control of an enduringly-outraged reptile. The incoming sensory information is exactly the same, but the goals being pursued are very different: The mammal brain idealizes infinite love – but it is easily distracted. The reptile brain craves infinite safety – relentlessly.

Need some defense for that conclusion? I should think you would. Here’s the full chapter:

Empathy for the monster.

I can give you a very simple formula for the empathy for the monster: Take your pre-existing dysempathy for the untouchable – your niggardly refusal to attribute human emotions to him – and combine it with a big fat dollop of the empathy for the impossible.

Bingo! Instant monster. You already don’t want to believe the untouchable is Read more