From: Man Alive! - "The greatest love of all."

[Greg]

From: Man Alive! A survival manual for the human mind.

( http://selfadoration.com/ManAlive.html )

by Greg Swann


Chapter 5. The greatest love of all.

When the subject of love and sex come up, our friends in the lab
coats have a field day. For one thing, gibbons and other critters
pair-bond for life, so they're "just like us." And for another,
when you're in the thrall of your best-beloved, your brain is all
but drowning in pheromones and oxytocin and a mad obsession to
rut yourself raw, so you're no different from a house-cat in
heat. Everything they have to say about you omits the
inconvenient fact of Fathertongue, which makes their comparisons
specious and invalid. However, as a consolation to deluded
butterfly collectors everywhere, a genetic _Homo sapiens_ without
Fathertongue really _is_ just like a poorly-adapted animal.

But since no mere animal can think in Fathertongue, no members of
the animal kingdom bother to study the dating and mating habits
of professors and graduate students -- a fact that might raise a
question in the minds of those assiduous researchers, if they
were of a mind to question their contra-factual prejudices. A
plausible meta-goal of reductionist science, arguably unknown to
the scientists but presumably very well understood by modern
philosophers, is to reduce everything to nothing -- to trivialize
everything in order to trivialize the human mind.

It can be useful to judge intellectual causes by their observed
effects, and it is certainly the case that the study of humanity
in the modern epoch has robbed you of the desire to learn more
about your own nature. You see summaries of allegedly
unassailable scientific studies "proving" either that your mind
is no better than an animal's brain or that animals are every bit
as wise and capable as you and -- instead of standing up for your
identity as a member of the only conceptually-conscious species
in existence -- you wince and turn the page. By that means,
_their_ error, knowing or not, becomes _your_ error -- an error I
am working very hard to correct.

And while the subject of romantic love and sex is so interesting
to me that I'm taking it up separately in another treatise, there
is a love-before-all-other-loves in your life, one you have
probably never thought about at all -- and one you will never,
ever hear about from theologians, philosophers, academics,
artists, journalists or other "thought leaders." Yes, you love
your spouse romantically and erotically. And you love your
spouse, your children, your parents, your siblings and the
closest of your friends with a filial love, the love of families.
But there is a love in your life that precedes all those loves,
and, without it, no other love is possible.

What is it? Your love for your self, of course.

Or maybe not "of course." I am writing about being -- ontology --
but philosophers and theologians and everyone who follows their
lead are all about shoulding -- teleology. And the emphatic
shoulding that undergirds every putative argument of being, going
back forever, is that you should never, ever love your self. To
the contrary, the love of the self is held to be the ultimate
evil in almost every philosophical or theological doctrine ever
devised in all of human history. The most important question in
philosophy is "What should I do?" but, in fact, virtually all
dogmas have concerned themselves primarily with what you _should
not_ do -- and what you most emphatically _should not_ do is love
your self.

Are you feeling a little stirred up just now? Queasy in the
bowels, maybe, or a little hot under the collar? All you are
doing is reading. If you are having an averse emotional reaction
to the words you are reading, this is an evidence of the success
of your lifelong indoctrination. My take is that the people who
taught you to have bodily reactions to ideas are not your
friends. By means of fallacious, underhanded appeals to your
emotions -- starting when you were much too young to identify
intellectual dishonesty -- they indoctrinated you against your
self. They taught you to make war on your own life.

And guess what? It worked. The indoctrination "took" -- with
tragic results. You are attending to these words, perhaps against
your better judgment, because the world you thought you
understood is falling apart. And it is falling apart because the
philosophies that have guided human civilization for all of human
history are perverse -- _all_ of them are perverse. And in the
modern world, when you scale perversion up to the size of the
whole globe, you get global perversion. For the entire history of
human life on Earth, theologians, philosophers, academics,
artists, journalists, politicians and other so-called "thought
leaders" have commanded you to betray your own interests in the
service of any interest _other_ than your own.

Guess what? It worked. Your life is wrecked, or close to it. Your
family life has been destroyed or badly damaged. Your finances
are in ruins. You spend huge amounts of your time hoping and
praying that you and the people you love are not living on the
cusp of a new Dark Age. This is philosophy in action. This is the
awesome power of perverse ideas, if they are spread widely
enough. Meanwhile, your despoilers -- all those theologians,
philosophers, academics, artists, journalists, politicians,
government functionaries and other so-called "thought leaders" --
are living the high-life at your expense. Their homes are
gorgeous and their families are intact. Their finances could not
be better, thanks to your generous donations and tax payments.
They, too, are pretty sure dark days are ahead of us -- so
they're snagging onto more and more wealth, as fast as they can.
But while they might seem to "have it all," in reality they are
even more miserable than you are. That's why they drink so much.

But guess what? None of this matters, except for what we can
learn from it. The past cannot be changed. Those so-called
"thought leaders" misled you, and you were more than happy to be
misled. But the future is the only thing subject to change. You
have been wrong -- badly, madly, outrageously wrong -- but there
is no benefit to you in chastising yourself for your past errors.
All you can do in the service of your values is learn from your
mistakes, put matters right to the extent that you can, and then
do better going forward. My job is to help you learn how to do
better.

Start here: All human thought occurs in Fathertongue -- in words
or other man-made symbols -- and therefore all human thought
consists of the mental manipulation of concepts -- ideas. The
ideas you hold inside your mind will be organized into a
hierarchy of importance -- importance to you, not to some
imaginary arbiter of canonical importance -- which, of course,
will change over time. To a young boy, the idea of playing with
toys matters a lot more, to him, than the idea of socializing
with girls -- a circumstance that will change dramatically in due
course. We act upon our ideas iteratively, by thinking about
them, and, in obvious consequence, the ideas that matter to you
the most are the ones you think about the most.

So which one of your ideas do you think about _far_ more than any
other?

It's your self. You may never have thought of your self as an
idea before, but that's what it is. Your self is your own
internally-abstracted concept of your life, and there is a sense
in which every idea you might consider is a manifestation of your
self. Your body is your self's personal, private puppet, and
every purposive, voluntary action you take is an expression of
your self: "This is what I do." "This is how I behave." "This is
how I express mastery of this task." "This is how I display
indifference to this other chore." "This is how I dance with my
cousin." "This is how I dance with the person I hope to marry."

But even though we usually think of the body when we use the word
"self" (as in, "I wash myself"), because of Fathertongue your
physical body is in fact simply an _extension_ of your self. The
you that is the real you, most fundamentally, is the idea of your
self that you hold in your mind. Everything you do with your body
-- with your hands or your feet, with your voice and your vocal
intonations, with your facial expressions, with your stride or
your posture or your gestures -- each one of those actions is
actually a secondary consequence of the mental actions you are
taking _upon_ your self in the silence and solitude of your mind.
Those behaviors we call a person's mien or manner or style or
character are simply the automated, habituated expressions of
that person's idea of his self.

Every purposive action -- every _consciously-chosen_ action --
you take in your life is taken first _by_ the self _upon_ the
self. By an overwhelming majority, _most_ of the purposive
actions you will take in your life will be taken _only_ upon the
self -- with no externally-observable secondary consequences of
any sort. This is the mental process called introspection, but it
is an error to think of introspection as being simply a matter of
rumination, wool-gathering, void of all consequences. To the
contrary, every thought you have either enhances or diminishes
the idea of your life that is your self. Every action you take
with your body is deeply meaningful, since much of your notion of
who you are will come from your having seen who you have been in
your actions. But even actions you don't take -- such as thinking
about doing the right thing but ultimately not doing it -- will
have permanent consequences for your self.

We've been talking for quite a while now about human nature, so
it might make sense for me, by now, to define the nature of human
life.

So: Your life as a fully-conscious human being, most
fundamentally, is your awareness _of_ your life as a
fully-conscious human.

You have a body, including your brain, and not only does it
resemble in some ways the bodies of other organisms, it is also
influenced in important ways by the same sorts of internal and
external goads that influence the behavior of other organisms.
But because you mastered Fathertongue as a child, you are a being
of rationally-conceptual volitionality, and because of that
critical, insuperable, bright-line distinction, your life is
_nothing_ like that of other living things. Non-human organisms
do what they do because this is how they are made, and they
cannot voluntarily deviate from their in-born nature in any way
-- nor even _conceive_ of that nature.

But your own life is the product of nothing _but_ your
conceptions. Your experience of your life in real time can have
bodily manifestations and consequences, but it is your awareness
of that experience that matters to you. I used to say that your
life as a human being consists of your awareness of your
experience of being alive right now, your memories of past
experiences and your anticipation of future experiences. I would
expand that description now to include your awareness of actions
you might have or should have taken in the past, but did not, as
well as empty dreams you indulge about your future, knowing all
the while that you will never follow through on them. All of
these ideas are the substance of your self, and the self is the
essential characteristic of the uniquely-human life.

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 by any act
of volition short of bodily self-destruction.

This is what you are, regardless of what anyone says about it. It
can be worth your while to read all of those descriptions of your
nature promulgated by theologians and philosophers and academics
and artists and journalists. They don't have very much to do with
your true nature, do they? Why do you suppose that might be so?

Everything I have described to you is clear and obvious on its
face, really just thoroughgoing elaborations on common sense.
Truly, there is _nothing_ I have to say that is not plainly
obvious to any five-year-old child newly graced with the power of
Fathertongue. I can express the truth of human life in greater
depth than he can, with greater precision. But there is nothing I
know that he did not come to understand well-enough in that
scales-falling-from-the-eyes epiphany that is the birth of
Fathertongue within an individual human mind.

But don't stop reading yet. There's much more to be covered. Take
note that we have talked about nothing but being so far, even
though I told you at the outset that the most important question
in philosophy is "What should I do?"

So what should _you_ do -- to make the most and the best of your
one, irreplaceable, finite, uniquely-human life?

That's easy: Love your self.





Save the world from home -- in your spare time!

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 at SelfAdoration.com.
( http://selfadoration.com/ManAlive.html )

Or you can download an easy-to-share PDF version.
( http://selfadoration.com/ManAlive.pdf )

If you post to public forums or you have your own
web site or weblog, download the propagation kit.
( http://selfadoration.com/ManAlivePropagationKit.zip )

Why should _you_ bother? Because if anything is going to save
civilization from tyranny, it will be ordinary people like us. _And
there are at least 2.5 billion of us on the internet._ Think what a
big difference some new ideas could make in that many human lives.

How _do_ you save the world from home in your spare time? _One mind at
a time..._