Learning to love your self is the greatest love of all.
Beyond comparison, Whitney Houston:
Category: Egoism in Action (page 5 of 30)
From: Man Alive! A survival manual for the human mind.
Extract from Chapter 5. The greatest love of all.
What’s the purpose of life? Scruffy, bearded teenagers of all ages have been asking that question for thousands of years, and each one of them has come up with an answer even more ludicrous than the absurd prescription put forth by the previous nitwit. But here is the full answer to that age-old question:
The purpose of human life is self-expression.
The purpose of every organism’s life is to be lived, and since your own life, most fundamentally, is the life of your self, the purpose of your life is to make your self manifest in every way you can. This is a matter of ontology – of being. It sounds like shoulding – teleology – but in fact this is what you are regardless of what you or anyone else might say about human nature. Every purposive action you take is taken first by the self upon the self, and this is the unavoidable consequence of your having come to be a self. You didn’t cause this to happen – your parents did – and you could not have stopped the process even if you had known it was happening. Only a mind already possessed of Fathertongue could even conceive of the possibility of preventing the cultivation of Fathertongue in any human mind.
You are a self as a matter of inescapable ontology. The effect was caused by volition, by choice, by an iterative shoulding process initiated by your parents. And of course it can be terminated – by your death or by a serious head injury. But the fact that you are a self is a fact of being, not a behavior to be caused or prevented by shoulding. While you are a self, you cannot not be a self. You can pretend you are not a self, albeit not as deceptively as you can pretend your house-cat is a vegan by feeding it nothing but spinach. But you are a self by no choice of your own, and you cannot stop being a self Read more
From: Man Alive! A survival manual for the human mind.
Extract from Chapter 4. The greatest invention in the history of humanity.
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 poor in practical technology, but you are infinitely rich in technological knowledge.
Why is that so? Because of Fathertongue. We stand on the shoulders of giants. To say the truth, mostly we lounge on the shoulders of giants, Read more
Today is Mothertongue day for Man Alive!, so it seems like a fine time to celebrate the best Mothertongue song ever written, When you say nothing at all, written by Paul Overstreet and Don Schlitz and performed here by the incomparable Keith Whitley:
Here it is again, covered by Allison Krauss and Union Station:
Makes me cry every time I hear it. That’s what art is for.
From: Man Alive! A survival manual for the human mind.
Extract from Chapter 3. Speaking in tongues.
One of the things that protects humanity from all of the philosophers and academics who insist that we are nothing special is the power of speech. Not speech deployed to argue against them; for the most part we are intimidated by their pedigrees and their supercilious posturing. But the power of speech itself defends us, because each one of us can easily see that this is a power that human beings alone possess. Lab-coated academics never stop trying to convince us that chimpanzees or dolphins share the power of speech with us, but regardless of what we say – or don’t dare say – in rebuttal, most of us recognize that these claims are absurd.
That’s just more of the Dancing Bear Fallacy, of course, but it is worth listening to the people who make these arguments – and to the people who chortle their support for them. A laboratory dolphin possessed of rationally-conceptual volitionality would immediately file a lawsuit seeking manumission from the clipboard-wielding sadists holding it captive. Ten thousand chimpanzees sitting at computer keyboards cannot produce the works of Shakespeare, nor even one line of intelligible verse. Not ten thousand, not ten million, not ten billion. The purpose of making these nonsensical claims about the specious verbal abilities of trained animals is not to confer an unearned status on those animals, but to rob you of the status you earned by mastering your mind. Animals cannot make informed choices by reasoning about concepts – nor do they need to. They are perfect the way they are – and so are you.
The goal of modern philosophy – in all probability unknown to you and to the scientific researchers who make these breathless claims about the imaginary conceptual abilities of animals – is to undermine the mind. Slavishly following those knowing philosophers of mindlessness, there are vast cadres of very well paid professional butterfly collectors whose job it is to make tautologically obvious observations about animal behavior in the most exaggerated ways they can. And slavishly following Read more
Trustworthy people do not expect you to take them at their word.
The word transparency has a useful cachet in business, a condition where nothing of material importance in the transaction is concealed from the consumer. When I was a kid, I worked with a print broker who led his clients to believe that he owned his own composition house, his own pre-press facility and his own printing plant. In fact, he worked out of his car and, for all I know, he rented his shoes. Why would his clients really want to know that he was a broker, not an owner? Because it affected his ability to deliver on his promises — certainly a material concern.
In real estate, we hear about that kind of transparency, and we’re one foot on the boat and one foot on the dock. We absolutely hate it, for example, when the other agent in a cross sale fails to disclose a material fact — no doubt hoping against hope that the problem will go away if no one mentions it. But we rebel against the idea of what we might see as an intrusive transparency. As an example, where one agent might disclose to the penny how a listing commission is to be spent, another might feel that this is none of the seller’s damn business. The discussion then would turn on whether such a disclosure is a material fact.
The issue is clouded because the word transparency means something very different in the Web 2.0 world — and in the world of persuasive communication in general. The fear in any advertising or marketing presentation — your own fear, too — is that you are being tricked, sold a bill of goods. That by dishonest or technically-honest-but-non-obvious means, you think you are buying a rabbit when all you’re really getting is an empty hat. The purpose of transparency in this context is to take away that fear.
So in reply to my post last night about video testimonials, John Kalinowski notes that they could be Read more
From: Man Alive! A survival manual for the human mind.
Extract from Chapter 2. The nature of your nature.
The general form of the specious appeal – this seems to have certain traits in common with that, therefore this is that – is a comically obvious error when you state it plainly. The people who make these sorts of arguments can’t state anything plainly, of course, so you need to train your mind to unpack their claims. If there are significant differences in kind between the “this” and the “that” – regardless of their seemingly “uncanny” similarities – the argument is most probably deploying the Specious Analogy Fallacy.
As a sort of pocket-reference to the kinds of bogus arguments made about your mind – claims you will see everywhere if you look for them – take note of these three general categories:
1. “We now know we know nothing!” Either your mind is inherently unreliable or the world outside your mind is fundamentally incomprehensible.
2. “Your good behavior is not to your credit, but at least your bad behavior is not your fault!” The actions you think of as being morally good or evil are either causally unavoidable or are caused by something other than your free will – hormones, brain chemistry, genes, brain defects, drugs, diseases, your upbringing, your environment, your wealth or poverty, memes, etc.
3. “Dancing bears are just like us!” Either animals such as apes or dolphins (or even “artificially intelligent” computer programs) are just as smart as you, or you are just as flailingly ignorant as an animal.
Note that all three of these categories are self-consuming: To uphold them, necessarily, is to deny them. If we know we know nothing, then we must know at least that one something – begging the question of how we can know even that little bit of nonsense. If the human will is not free, I cannot will myself to persuade you of this claim – nor even simply to make it – and you cannot will yourself either to accept or reject it. And if your mind works “just like” an animal’s brain, then you Read more
From: Man Alive! A survival manual for the human mind.
Extract from Chapter 1. You’re in this all alone.
Each individual human being is his own first and best philosopher, like it or don’t, for this simple reason: You are not born knowing how to stay alive, and, absent some sort of cosmic-injustice machine like the Big Mother welfare state, if you don’t figure out what to do – and then do it – you will die. If you do nothing in your own behalf, you will die. If you pursue errors, your own errors or the kind that come with a tony religious or academic pedigree, you will die. If you attempt to exist as an animal does, trying to steal the values you need to survive, you will live in Squalor until one of your would-be victims catches up to you, and then you will die.
What is more, you cannot live the uniquely-human life – the fully-human life – unless you think in your own behalf, in pursuit of your own values. The philosophical or theological doctrine you have followed until now has been aimed, most likely, in the opposite direction: It sought to get you to supplant your own reason with someone else’s dogma, and to pursue that person’s values rather than your own.
Why is Western Civilization collapsing? Because you defaulted on your responsibility to defend it – by defending the values that make your life possible.
But, but, but… We’re all in this together, aren’t we? Wrong. That’s just another hustle, devised to get you to give up everything you have earned so that the person making the claim does not have to earn anything at all. This is the truth of your life, which perhaps no one has ever told you before today:
You’re in this all alone.
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 Read more
We had mail server issues today, and I had to update some stuff on Cathleen’s Macintosh.
She uses Stickies, and this was the note at the top of her screen:
There ain’t nothin’ like sweet romance…
One of my favorite jokes about the art of advertising copywriting is a matchbook cover reading, “Save the world from home in your spare time!” 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.
Even so, I’ve always believed that ordinary people should be able to save the world from going to hell on a hand-truck. Our real problem is not a Hitler or a Mao or the Eric-Cartman-of-the-moment. The only real problem humanity has ever had is thoughtlessness — the mindless accession to the absurd demands of greater and lesser demagogues.
So: I’ve written a book about that one issue: The high cost of thoughtlessness — and how to stop paying it. The title is Man alive! A survival manual for the human mind, and it weighs in at a slim 30,000 words. I’m nobody’s matchbook copywriter, and I would have made it even shorter if I could have. But the book 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.
If you have paid attention to my writing over the years, you will have seen me cover some of these ideas on Usenet or at PresenceOfMind, BloodhoundBlog or SplendorQuest. I actually can summarize my thinking very briefly. Take your pick: “Ontologically-consonant teleology” or “Love your self.” That’s the same ethical creed expressed two different ways, and everything I have ever written develops and defends that philosophy. The proud fact of my life is that it took me thirty-three years to write a short book in eight days. You can get a taste of it, if you like, in this short extract: Stop cursing the darkness by turning on your mind!
Here’s what I need: Readers. The book itself will be free. I wrote it to save the world — no kidding. But I need for people to read it in “galleys” to let me know if I have Read more
Jimmy Klein and young Gavin M. George got my Sunday started right. I love Sunday despite the fact that I don’t believe anything I don’t have to, and most especially do I love to start my Sunday with the Sun God of my own idolatry: The blinding brilliance of a fully-conscious human smile. The world abounds in wonders of the mind, and all we can remark on are the travesties of mindlessness.
Me, too, make no doubt, and yet I am thankful this Sunday to President Barack Obama, the Reverends Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, the Black Panther Party, the mainstream media and the entire TwitBook Mafia. I have never in my lifetime seen a racist lynch mob in action, and I am grateful to all the participants for showing me what menacing racial prejudice — judging by race in advance of determining the facts — looks like. If you are worrying about the fate of poor George Zimmerman — whose race, apparently, is white-enough-godammit! — console yourself: He can always avail himself of gay marriage. In the game of identity politics, gay men — born-that-way-godammit! — trump every other card. And that’s a consummation we all might as well be thankful for.
So I guess I should be thankful for Bill Maher, who argues that snarky-on-wry is about all any of us can bring to the show, most days. And I think he and I both should be grateful that no one expects us to be funny like South Park is funny. A demand for actual excellence could put just about anyone into another line of work.
And totally snarklessly, I am 1,500 words into what I hope will turn out to be the most practically useful philosophical essay I will ever write. When I’m done, will anyone read it, all the way through, all the way to the end? I will, again and again over the years, if I get it right. I don’t know that I have improved any life but my own. But I know that what my life is now is a direct consequence of the things I have Read more
My friend Jim Klein fingered this video this morning:
Forget the context. It doesn’t matter. What I want for you to see is that young man’s face just as he finishes playing. This is the face of Splendor. This is egoism in action.
Gavin M. George is a virtuoso pianist in the making, and I don’t want to imply that anything of his is mine, nor mine his. I just want to celebrate his accomplishment. I am in his debt, and I am very grateful to him.
But the delight he himself takes in his playing is the thing that makes us human. No one could give him that soaring feeling, and no one can take it away from him. He shares his gift with us, but the best part of the riches he owns are his and his alone, not to be seized nor even seen by other people.
This is what we are, at our best. This is what you’re aiming for — when you are working at your best.
Here is Teri Lussier’s first post at BloodhoundBlog: Hi. I’m Teri…And I’m aghast.
Teri had to tell me that today is the first day of her sixth year writing with us. I’m not a birthdays and anniversaries kind of guy. But I am nothing but proud of the dawg she has turned out to be, and it’s fun to herald the event.
I didn’t know it at the time, but I met Teri just at the beginning of the end of the golden age of the RE.net. The Project Blogger contest was the first little bit of orchestrated hoke in the real estate weblogging world, and I had just told the mob of cliquey mediocrities the first of many truths they did not want to hear, inciting the first of many failed mass sneerspasms.
In each one of those mob actions, writers at BloodhoundBlog were assailed with entreaties to stop writing here. I think the theory was that depriving BloodhoundBlog of their voices would somehow silence my voice. These campaigns were initiated by Joe Ferrara; all of this mob-maniacal horse-shit originated with Joe Ferrara. It all came to nothing, of course, at least on my end. But a lot of agents and lenders screwed up their careers trying to recreate a kindergarten playground — Lord of the Flies with no points off for spelling errors.
This was evil, awful and wrong — not that I’ve ever made a secret of my opinion of social media and the mobs it engenders. But the whole phenomenon is interesting to me, because my thinking runs entirely the other way.
Teri Lussier has written great essays on BloodhoundBlog, and I’m very grateful for that. But I’m also very grateful to call her my friend. I don’t make friends quickly or easily, and I am very, very quick to push people away from me as soon as I realize they are not friends to me.
But I am a friend to Teri not out of loyalty to her, but out of my indivertible loyalty to principle. Teri lives up to values I admire, revere and worship, and that is the source of Read more