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From: Man Alive! - "A mindful catalog of mindlessness."
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Self Adoration
Apr 17, 2012, 9:23:41 AM4/17/12
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From: Man Alive! A survival manual for the human mind.
( http://selfadoration.com/ManAlive.html )
by Greg Swann
Chapter 10. A mindful catalog of mindlessness.
I told you how you came to be a self, but how did you go about
failing so completely, so consistently, to be a defective,
bungled and botched not-self? You _worked_ at it, that's how.
It really is a testament to your fundamental goodness that you
have tried so hard, for all of your life, to conform to ideas of
moral virtue that _no one_ can live down to fully and yet still
manage to remain alive as a human being. You were thoughtless --
mindless -- and so you did not know that the cause of your
repeated failures at attaining those "virtues" was human nature
itself. But you were damned if you didn't try to be what you
sincerely thought was "good," and that much is all to your
credit. You may have behaved mindlessly, but you gave your
mindless pursuit of ethical perversion everything you had.
But how did anyone gull you into behaving so thoughtlessly so
scrupulously and so relentlessly for so long?
Here's one good way: Inclusion and exclusion. It worked great
when you were five years old and it still works great today.
Obviously, no one can indoctrinate you before you master
Fathertongue. Before then, words are semaphores to you, ciphers,
with no more conceptual content than the wagging of a dog's tail.
If someone had read the _Bible_ to you while you were still a
toddler, or the _Koran_ or the _The Federalist Papers_ or _The
Communist Manifesto,_ what you would have heard, absorbed and
acted upon would have been nothing but incomprehensible sounds,
less meaningful to you, and less interesting, than the dog's
barking. But as soon as you came to be able to think in
Fathertongue, the human beings around you could undertake to
reward you, physically or emotionally, for conforming to their
dogmas, and to punish you for failing to.
How might they do this? Recall that much of parenting consists of
invoking the subjunctive -- worlds not in evidence -- to induce a
child to identify and reflect upon the unhappy consequences of
bad behavior: "Would _you_ like it if little Sally broke _your_
toy?" It is but a short step from there to the Straw Man Fallacy
-- putting words into another person's mouth in order to shout
them down: "You don't want for me to think you're selfish, do
you?" "Do you want for the other children to get the idea that
you can't play nicely?" "Why would you want to hold out to get
your own way, when everyone else is willing to go along?"
_"Surely_ you don't think it's right for you not to share your
toys with Bobby when he is offering to share his toys with
_you?"_
These aren't really questions. They're con-games, underhanded
emotional manipulations of a mind too young to have learned how
to defend itself. The weapon is the subjunctive postulation of
the disapproval of other people -- anyone other than you. The
implied punishment -- the threat -- is the prospect of social
exclusion. Your mother or your father or some other adult or
older child was effectively saying to you, "If you don't renounce
your self -- if you don't back down from this position you have
taken all on your own, for your own reasons -- I will exclude you
from the universe of my awareness. Either yield to my will, or I
will make an unperson of you."
There is nothing morally wrong with a child wanting to live his
own life in his own way, and so the purpose of those kinds of
treacly, smarmy appeals is not just a topical injustice --
pushing you around in the immediate moment -- but the inculcation
of a doctrine of moral evil -- selflessness. Take account that
your folks didn't know -- explicitly, mindfully -- that this is
what they were doing. And, never forget, you owe them a boundless
debt of gratitude for the gift of mind in the first place -- for
the mental prowess you can use to identify and mitigate any
thoughtless errors they may have made when you were young. But
this kind of fallacious reasoning was very probably your
introduction to the infinite varieties of anti-ontological
teleology -- shoulding at war with being.
Your folks may have been taking you to a house of worship all
along when you were young, but before you could think in
Fathertongue, church was just another place where you would
squall, squirm and make eye contact with bored strangers. But
once you could reason in concepts, you were swept off to a
separate room, where a wannabe theologian would terrorize you
with elaborate tales of eternal torment. I told you I don't want
to take anything away from you, and my friend Jim Klein has
convinced me that the statement, "God loves me," to a person who
believes it, can be a benign and beautiful claim, unpacking to
something like this: "I behave lovably in the eyes of my god." A
self behaving lovably is the soul and substance of truly ethical
conduct. This is not something I would want to object to -- or
disrupt.
But the soul and substance of a dogma -- which we can define
broadly as the doctrinal representation of an inverted moral
philosophy -- is a profound mistrust of the human mind. If at any
moment, when a "thought leader" is making a claim that is
comically absurd on its face, anyone in the audience can summon
up the courage and the intellectual fortitude to stand up and
shout, "Say WHAT?!?" -- the rest of the sheep in the flock just
might catch on to the idea that the shepherd is a paranoid fraud
making claims that he could never defend in reason.
At that point, it doesn't matter if the undefended dogma is a
religion or a political philosophy, and it is no mere coincidence
that the biblical book of _Proverbs_ says, "Train up a child in
the way he should go and when he is old he will not depart from
it" and Lenin said, "Give me a child for the first five years of
his life and he will be mine forever." Why would we take a brand
new human being who has just come to be fully awake as a mind --
fully aware at last of all the delights and wonders of the world
-- and immediately demand that he shut his mind down forever?
It's because false doctrines cannot bear up to the scrutiny of a
fully-human mind -- and the "thought leaders" who contrive them
know it.
But all of that notwithstanding, the very most beautiful ceremony
you will ever see in any church is not Christmas or Easter or
Chanukah or whatever. It is not a funeral, although it can be
very moving to see how deeply people can be moved to honor the
deceased. It is not a wedding, even though the celebration of
committed romantic love may induce you to renew your own wedding
vows in the best possible way when you get home. But the most
wonderful thing you can ever see inside a church is any
particular religion's analogue of child baptism.
The child is being inducted into the religious community without
his informed consent -- and most probably without his conscious
knowledge, if the ceremony occurs before the mastery of
Fathertongue. But that child's parents -- and, by concatenation,
all of the members of that congregation -- are doing what they
think is the very _best_ thing they can do for that child, and
that kind of conscious commitment to the ideal of moral goodness
is to be applauded regardless of the anti-ontological teleology
of the underlying theological gibberish.
At about that same time in your life, you graduated to the
playground, a riotously colorful campus of delights and wonders
modeled on the idyllic paradise to be found in _Lord of the
Flies._ And there did you have your first one-on-one
confrontation with the first of the many "thought leaders" you
have known in your life -- which is to say an incipient
malignantly narcissistic paranoid schizophrenic dominating
personality backed up by a mindless mob. And that kid sized you
up perfectly in a glance, offering you the chance to prove your
worthiness for inclusion in the mob by picking on the "goat" of
the group. If you accepted those terms, you got to establish
yourself as yet another mindless minion -- probably for the first
of many times in your life, in the first of many mindless mobs.
And if you refused to go-along-to-get-along, you got to be the
new goat, instead, and the rest of the mob -- possibly joined by
the former goat -- ganged up on you in unison.
In Cicero's discourse on the trial of Cataline, he says of one
forum faction, _"Consputare coeperunt"_ -- "they began to spit
together in unison." We are never very far from that playground,
are we? I won't ask you what you did, with that mob or with any
of the mobs you ran up against later, but I will put a different
question to you, something to think about the _next_ time your
choice is either to gang-up or be ganged-upon. Socrates wondered
if it is better, as a matter of morality, to inflict an injury or
to have an injury inflicted upon you. If we accept that the
problem can only be solved by referencing a Calculus of Loss --
if we assume that _both_ options will move your self leftward on
the number line of self-regard, that both will leave you feeling
less worthy of your own adoration -- my question is this: Which
choice will make you despise your self more, now and enduringly,
and which will leave you better equipped to love your self going
forward?
I can think of other dyads of domination in the undiscovered
country of mindlessness. That bully on the playground and his
mindless minions live out their lives in a mad, sad ballet of
inclusion and exclusion, feigned impotence and omnipotence,
submission and dominance and still more submission. Thoughtless
people run in herds, and every group has its own power dynamic:
The boss in this group will be the minion -- or even the goat --
in that one. And each person who submits to this chaos of
collectivized ethics is a slave to it, most especially the
putative "thought leader."
Ayn Rand said, "A leash is only a rope with a noose at both
ends." There is no one who is more the slave of the mob than the
top mobster. He knows with a frantically-unexamined certainty
that "his" mob could turn on him at any instant. And the worst
tragedy for everyone involved, for the boss bully and all the
sub-bullies, is that gang "thinking" can never result in truly
human behavior. The mindless minions, at the least, may think
they gain something by ganging up together, but human
consciousness cannot be collectivized. "Groupthink" can neither
discover the truth nor identify and effect moral goodness. Too
much the contrary! Whether the group "decides" by the dictatorial
fiat of the "thought leader" or by some kind of consensus
communicated among the members of the group in veiled
Mothertongue displays, the "conclusion" the group arrives at can
neither be validated epistemologically nor justified ethically.
You cannot achieve the end-consequence of mindfulness mindlessly,
and two heads are never "better than one" unless each one of
those heads is working independently. Discovery -- of anything --
is particular to an individual person. This is a matter of
inescapable ontology, a fact that cannot be flattered, wheedled,
threatened or beaten into submission by any mob, no matter how
large or how ferocious.
There is only one truth, but as you are discovering here,
unpacking it in all its sublime perfection is not always easy.
But lies are as abundant as weeds or cockroaches. To pull a weed
or to crush a cockroach can be a needful chore, but it is not a
virtue -- or at least not a very important virtue. And to declare
to the world that you have resolved to make a grand virtue of
pulling every intellectual weed you can find is simply an empty
vanity -- a waste of the finite time of your one, precious,
irreplaceable life on redundant, repetitive busy-work. It is
worth mapping the most common paths to error to avoid getting
lost on them -- or to avoid getting lost on them _again._ But no
amount of documenting and deploring and denouncing vice will
result in a single act of virtue in your own life. If you cannot
rid your life of mental and moral cockroaches without wasting too
much of your time, you need to find a way to get away from them
instead.
But when you find yourself among philosophical bullies and their
mindless minions, you need to be on your guard. If you are not
vigilant, they will try to impose their moral standards on you,
and you will find yourself striving -- in vain -- to defend your
arguments, beliefs or behavior according to their putative
standard of value. It does not matter that they can neither
intellectually defend nor successfully live down to their
perverse ethical doctrine. All that will matter to them is
inducing you to damn your self on their terms -- to apologize to
them and to the universe for _being_ a self and for daring to
live _up_ to your self. They crave this as a bogus "evidence" of
the moral righteousness of their creed, an evidence they would
not seek, and would not _need_ to seek, if their dogma were
actually true.
The general process -- evil people seeking "evidence" of the
"truth" of moral philosophies they _already know_ are false -- is
much too common. The ganging-up on the playground -- and in the
forum and in the tap-room and in the office and on the internet
-- is a form of the same madness, social "proof" of claims no one
doubts are factually false and morally reprehensible. True
intellectual confidence is fearless. If you need for someone to
tell you that you are in the right, it's because you already
_know_ you are in the wrong.
To be unwittingly in error is simply a mistake. It can cost you
some of your self-love, temporarily, but it will not cause you to
despise your self enduringly. By that standard, we can define
true evil as taking an action you know in advance is morally
wrong. This is what your tormenters are doing -- when they are
campaigning to get you to spit in your own face -- knowingly
pursuing evil. You do not have to refute every evil argument you
come up against, but if you cave in to the insane demands of
thugs, then _you_ are acting in knowing evil, going along to get
along. You may think you are simply paying a minor toll to an
ugly troll, but that is a toll that you will end up paying -- in
the form of quick, hot flushes of shame -- in your memories
forever.
Here is another way soul-sucking parasites can trap you in a
miasma of mindlessness: By threatening injuries -- to themselves,
to you or to uninvolved third parties. Alcoholics and drug
addicts pull these kinds of stunts all the time, mesmerizing
anyone who will tolerate them with tales of their infinite pain
-- and promising to inflict still greater injuries upon
themselves should their victims ever come to doubt their
incurable misery. People like this will use any human value to
threaten or to inflict injuries -- sex in the form of adultery or
pelt-collecting, holding children hostage, even preying upon your
aversion to the thought of their suicide. And even though the
person committing these atrocities will move _much_ farther to
the left, on the number line of virtue and vice, than will you as
the victim of his manipulations, the purpose and effect of this
dumb-show will be to hold you hostage to your own unwillingness
to see that person suffer more pain -- even self-inflicted pain.
People who pull these kinds of stunts often play a game I call
Switchboarding: They interpose themselves between you and
everyone else you know -- everyone who might be kind enough, and
sagacious enough, to clue you in to what is really going on in
your life. Your personal, private Switchboard operator will try
to control every conversation you are involved in, ideally by
handling your communications with other people directly and then
telling you only what he wants you to know. If that tactic is not
feasible, the Switchboarder will undermine your relationships,
leading you to doubt what other people are telling you and to
suspect their motives. A true master of Switchboarding can get
you to doubt your own senses! We pass the expression along as a
joke, but people really do get away with saying things like, "Who
are you going to trust, me or your lying eyes?"
That kind of concentrated manipulation is one way that otherwise
decent people manage to get themselves trapped, again and again,
in relationships with precisely the wrong people. Another one --
the counterpart to being held hostage by someone else's
willingness to commit self-destruction in order to induce _you_
to destroy your self -- is a sort of Florence Nightingale
Syndrome: You keep inflicting moral lepers on yourself in the
vain belief that -- someday, somehow -- you will cure one of them
of his leprosy. You won't, but in due course you will cure
yourself -- completely -- of the love of life, of truth and of
your self.
You can be deluded in your own behalf, and that delusion can lead
you to commit the same kinds of errors again and again. The self
is your idea of your life -- of your _whole_ life in all of its
many manifestations throughout your life, including your external
circumstances, your bodily sensations, your hopes and dreams and
memories, your introspective consciousness and your purely
imaginary flights of fancy -- but there is no guarantee that it
is an _accurate_ idea of your life, a true reflection of your
real-life existential behavior, a faithful map of the territory
that is your life. If you should see yourself as being deserving
of contempt or abuse, you will be drawn to people who treat you
atrociously. And if you should meet someone you _does not_ treat
you horribly, you will provoke that person until he _does_ lash
out at you -- validating your twisted view of your self. And if
you meet a very special someone who will not abuse you, no matter
how much you try to incite a negative response, you will dump
that person and move on to someone who _will_ reflect back to you
the self you see in your own mind's eye.
Back in high school, you knew a young lady I call the Swoop Girl.
Someone said that high school is taxpayer-subsidized dating, and
that observation was probably hard to dispute back then, as you
threaded your way through corridors blocked by kissing, cuddling
couples. When a stable couple hit a rough patch -- perhaps he
wanted to dance horizontally, but she wasn't ready -- the Swoop
Girl would swoop in to collect another pelt, seducing the guy,
who was only too mindlessly delighted to be seduced. Her motive
was not love, nor even sexual gratification. What she wanted to
do was inflict pain -- on the other girl. In that way, her sex
act was essentially homosexual, girl-on-girl, an act of perverse
psycho-sexual sadism. Did she move farther left on the number
line than anyone involved, much farther left than the nice girl,
and farther left, even, than the not-so-nice guy? You bet. But
there was nothing of self-adoration in her motives. She hated her
life, clearly, and all she wanted was to spread that hatred to
other people.
Men can do the same kind of pelt-collecting as the Swoop Girl,
with the same sort of homosexual overtones, boasting to each
other about the (mostly imaginary) "notches" they put on their
belts. The so-called Pick-Up Artists are an even more perverse
symptom of this kind of intellectual perversion. They start by
cherry-picking pecking-order ideas from animal ethology. Among
wolves and dogs, cattle and certain species of apes, an Alpha
male will be dominant over all other members of the community --
kind of like a "thought leader," and just as well thought-out!
The Alpha male will either keep all the females to himself, as
with cattle, or he will mate with the highest-status female in
the group -- the Alpha female.
Pick-Up Artists start their sad dance of mindlessness by equating
human behavior with animal behavior -- the Dancing Bear Fallacy.
Human beings are ascended from apes, and you can see vestigial
remnants of this kind of pecking-order behavior among humans
_when they are behaving mindlessly_ -- which we saw back on the
playground. But human beings are _not_ mere animals, and so even
the meekest of us -- the most Omega among us in this crack-pot
theory -- can behave as Socrates did when he is met by exigent
circumstance. But those kinds of inconvenient facts don't fit the
fictional story-line running through the Pick-Up Artist's fevered
imagination, so he invokes the awesome power of mindlessness to
ignore them.
And, as you might expect, these Mittyesque Pick-Up Artists
jettison every aspect of animal status-sorting they don't like --
including those animal species where a female is always the boss.
It is a sufficient Alpha-qualification, for the alleged Alpha
male on the make, to have sex with as many different women as
possible -- "just like" a bull in a pasture full of cow-pies. The
notion of taking charge in difficult situations and providing
mental and moral leadership to the imputed "herd" is much too
much to be bothered with -- which is not to imply that these sad
clowns would be of any value in actual _human_ leadership roles
in any case. Instead, the Pick-Up Artist's definition of an Alpha
male is a guy who is good at tuning in on Mothertongue signals of
sexual interest being broadcast by long-in-the-tooth
repeatedly-recycled evergreen-ingenues -- which is to say, a guy
with slut radar.
In other words, the alleged Alpha male is demonstrating his
ethological "superiority" not by successfully competing for
high-status women -- the specious human analogue to Alpha females
among animals -- women who would not have the first thing to do
with him in any case. Instead, like the Swoop Girl, he is simply
collecting pelts -- not for love and not for sex but simply in
order to compete, and even then only numerically, with other
similarly self-damaged men. To their credit, the objective is not
anyone's destruction -- except for the on-going self-destruction
the Pick-Up Artists and their slutty "conquests" voluntarily
inflict upon themselves -- but there is _nothing_ of
self-adoration -- nor of mindful self-consciousness -- in this
behavior.
What is _really_ happening, as a matter of existential reality?
The Pick-Up Artist sleeps with the slut-of-the-moment, herself an
already-well-used specimen of femininity, because, although her
status is much the same as his, pretty low on the socio-economic
ladder, and well to the left of the zero on the number line of
self-regard, she is nevertheless the best woman who will consent
to sleep with _him_ -- and _neither_ of them has enough desire
for self-adoration to pursue a real relationship with a partner
who is _not_ running some dumb-ass game. Consequently, each one
of them goes home lonely, even if neither one goes home alone.
How sad is that?
There are consolations, though -- for me, at least, and I can
hope for you, as well. First, this prince and princess and their
pantomime of passion illustrate perfectly the self-loathing that
is the sole enduring result of indiscriminate sex. Popular
artists and their puerile prey -- could that be you? -- love to
fantasize about a world with "no-strings-attached," but that
world is not this one. In the real world of real consequences,
the mistake you made last night will never, ever end. It will
recall itself to your memory -- and to your shame -- again and
again, unbidden, forever. And may heaven help you if you try to
"paper over" it with more and more instances of the same dumb
mistake!
And second, by presenting us with such an absurdly distorted
rendition of the Dancing Bear Fallacy, the Pick-Up Artists
demonstrate that all Dancing Bear theories are nothing more than
elaborated arguments of behavioral determinism. The
Alpha-in-his-own-mind "conquers" comely round-heeled gals by
means of trickery and cunning -- he insists. When he is on his
"game," they simply "can't resist" him -- just as female animals
in the wild mate with the best rapist, the male they cannot
successfully deflect, dismiss or defeat.
But the logical fallacy in play is the same one we can identify
in every determinist argument: If I as a human predator can
"trick" my human prey into thoughtlessly yielding to me, it could
only be because human nature is _not_ bound by the iron laws of
animal ethology. Every form of gulling putatively mindless human
beings pre-supposes free will -- rationally-conceptual
volitionality. Without it, the predator would be as much an
unthinking slave to behavioral determinism as -- he insists -- is
his prey. The form of the claim is, _"I_ can think of a plan of
attack, but _you_ cannot think of a plan of defense." Those
propositions cannot both be true, and, of course, we _all_ know,
without any room for doubt in our minds, that human will is free
of all deterministic constraints.
Many theories of marketing turn on the same sort of
contradiction: Why does a product priced at $4.95 procure more
buyers than does the same product priced at $5.00? Because the
buyers are thoughtless, mostly out of habit, but also because
many of them understood long ago that a nickel is not worth a
dime's worth of worry, not because the marketing mavens behind
this nonsense have somehow transformed themselves into magical,
mystical Svengalis, super-human villains of pure
moustache-twisting evil.
There are a great host of these stunts you can pull, if you would
rather try to gull people out of their money, instead of
delivering full value in exchange for the price you are asking
for your product. They all work pretty well -- until you run up
against a competitor who _is_ mindful of intellectual and
economic values and who rewards his customers for being equally
mindful. The Only-Game-In-Town con only works when it is the only
game in town. This is why carnies and hucksters of all sorts
either move up or move on, eventually. And _that_ is how
capitalism cleanses markets of criminality in due course --
unless that process is impeded by criminality of the legislative
kind.
Every specious argument -- every claim that is false to fact,
even if the person making that appeal does not know it is false
-- will turn on a logical fallacy, a pretext or rationale that
sounds good, but is in reality simply a path to error. Logical
fallacies are like catnip to fools, but they are the very bread
of life for demagogues -- for "thought leaders." A fallacy -- as
an artifact of rhetoric, the art of valid discourse -- is simply
an erroneous argument, a rhetorically invalid reason to uphold or
deny a proposition. Thoughtless people deploy them all the time,
convinced in their stolid, triumphant preening that they have
slain dragons with their profound wit.
An easy way to identify a fallacious claim is to stipulate it and
see what happens. So, for example, if you were to say to me,
"Your arguments make me angry, therefore they're wrong!" -- which
is one of the infinite forms of the Fallacy _Ad Hominem_ ("to the
man") -- even if we embrace the premise (and I _do_ make a lot of
people angry), doing so does nothing to support the conclusion.
And heads-up: Even if the things I am saying make you feel
happier or better about your life and your self, that fact does
not make me right. I do believe I am right, and I am taking great
care to persuade you of my truth, but how you feel about that is
quite literally beside the point.
As I have demonstrated at intervals in this treatise,
theologians, philosophers, academics, artists, journalists,
politicians and other so-called "thought leaders" make logically
fallacious arguments very often, usually by spinning
unintentionally comical claims out of their unexamined
prejudices. But by far the most common logical fallacy committed
by "thought leaders" is Credentialism, the Appeal to Authority
expressed in an office wall papered over with waste-paper
graduate degrees. The members of this would-be ruling class
expect for you to yield to their "authoritah," of course, but
frequently they themselves are buried beneath their own bullshit.
Heinlein said that Ph.D. stands for "piled higher and deeper,"
and that claim is easy to credit when you slog through hundreds
of pages of the "scientific" elaboration of facts that are
obvious to any child -- and still easier when the "dissertation"
is devoted to the unintelligible exposition of undiluted error.
Mind you, not all of the members of this anointed class of
redundantly-pedigreed "thought leaders" are true demagogues --
knowingly deceptive manipulators of the pliable emotions of
thoughtless people. Most of them are simply fools as well,
themselves the mindless victims of true demagogues, parroting
vile arguments they never would have been cunning enough -- or
evil enough -- to come up with on their own. But for the few
"thought leaders" who really understand the art of gulling fools,
logical fallacies are the tools of their trade. This is why your
mind will not be safe until you learn to defend it from seemingly
sound but ultimately misleading arguments.
But academia also suffers from an all-but-terminal echo chamber,
and this serves to reinforce the pandemic mindlessness that, by
now, infests virtually all college campuses. The professor has
had twenty or more years to practice the art of sneering at any
hint of a suggestion of a notion that might contradict his pet
dogma -- and he put in six or eight or ten years before that as
an undergraduate and graduate student, studying with past-masters
of sneering. Like the kids on the playground, the students in his
classes know very well what happens to the goat in any mob, and
so each one of them quickly masters the two most vitally
important skills of modern "scholarship" -- and of modern _life_
-- ass-kissing and piling-on.
If you are lucky enough to study with a teacher who actually
knows something worth learning, he will be delighted to take on
your challenges to his presumptive authority. To him, error is
harmlessly comical and an unexpected new truth is a thing of
delight. But you are much more likely to run up against
yet-another bully, this one resplendent in a rumpled tweed jacket
that reeks of tobacco smoke, stale beer and the dirty-clothes
hamper. Ah, but what the man lacks in style he makes up for in
rancor. Marx said, "You can't refute a sneer." This is not so --
but it remains that you cannot refute a sneer _quickly._ You have
to do the job as I am doing it here, unpacking every false
premise in the citadel of lies that is the modern university.
The paths to error are infinite, but two landmarks I have learned
to rely on, in listening to people trying to justify their evil
actions, are the logical fallacies _Tu Quoque_ and Two Wrongs
Make A Right. _Tu Quoque_ is Latin. It means, "You do it, too."
When you catch your teenager swiping a beer, the pre-fabricated
rationale will surely be, "Well, _you_ drink, why can't I?!?" And
you were probably very young when you first heard some little
proto-brute justifying his vengeance by bellowing, "Well, he hit
me first!" -- ergo, two wrongs make a right. You should probably
be on your guard against _any_ statement that starts with a
"well" and ends with an exclamation point. That particular verbal
construction seems to fit very comfortably in the mouths of liars
and thugs. But when you hear those two logical fallacies being
deployed in tandem, what you are hearing, almost certainly, is a
cunningly-crafted rationalization of an abominable injustice.
Just as a passing note -- a word to the wise is sufficient --
those two logical fallacies, _Tu Quoque_ and Two Wrongs Make A
Right, are the "justification" undergirding every atrocity
committed by any government in human history.
Aristotle said we are what we habitually do, and a great many of
us have habituated errors-of-method in our everyday style of
thinking. A habit-of-mind can be an incredibly efficient
time-saver: Think of how little of your conscious thought you
have to invest in driving your car, and how much mental capacity
you have available, in consequence, to devote to the matters of
importance you will take up when you get where you are going. The
problem is that a _bad_ habit-of-mind is just as efficient as a
good one, except that you will be making incredibly efficient
_errors._ The only cure for this is mindfulness. You have to pay
attention to existential reality -- to what is really happening.
If you don't, you can easily drive your life right off the road.
Habituated behaviors of all sorts can set your life on a vector
of motion that will move you farther and farther along that
course, whether this is where you want to go or not. Most people
suffer from the opposite problem, the style of motion
statisticians call The Drunkard's Walk -- they lurch a little to
the left, then a little to the right, and they never manage to
get very far from where they started. But if your behavior is
very consistent -- either very mindful or very mindless -- your
vector of motion over time will carry you across vast distances,
both along the number line we have used to quantify the
consequences of behavior and in your work and your relationships.
If the vector you have set for your self is moving you closer and
closer to a state of Splendor, so much the better for you. But if
you are moving leftward, toward Squalor, you must either check
and change your premises or endure progressively greater losses
of your love for your life.
To say that dissipation is a time-sink is a tautology -- two ways
of saying the exact same thing. Your time is your business, of
course, but it is always worthwhile to ask yourself if you are
getting everything you want in exchange for each irreplaceable
moment of your life you spend. Your values are organized in a
hierarchy, and pursuing less important values over higher ones is
disvaluing behavior. Your net motion, on the number line of
self-regard, may not be leftward, but your rightward motion can
be slower than it otherwise might be. Even worse, dwelling on the
negative, on pain or loss, cannot move you toward Splendor. And
still worse, focusing on other people's values, instead of your
own, will advance your interests in no way at all. And still
worse than that, getting swept up in some "thought leader's"
obsessions -- which is what the "We're all in this together!"
types mean by "Get involved!" -- is a complete waste of time you
can never, ever get back.
I like to play a philosophy game I call Backstory. I will look at
someone -- anyone I happen to see -- and try to project backward
in time to the past causes of that person's present-day
appearance. Toddlers and young children will have sweet faces,
almost always, with no deeper meanings to be discerned. But older
children and adults will have had many experiences in their
lives, and those past events will have written an emotional
history in the lines of their skin. Your mama told you, when you
glared and grimaced at her, that your face would freeze like
that, but neither one of you knew she was right: The facial
expressions we wear most often -- habituated Mothertongue
emotional reactions -- inscribe themselves into our skin. I can
see those habitual expressions in the people I am watching. Their
clothing and their manner will tell their stories, too, and it is
interesting to me to try to suss out their histories, just by
looking at people from a distance.
I stress that this is just a game. Every living organism, human
or not, is in a certain sense a laboratory specimen to me. I am
not cruel or intrusive in any way, but I watch everything I am
blessed with the opportunity to see, and I learn everything I can
from the behavior I observe. In consequence, I can tell you from
having run repeated tests that a toddler at around eleven months
of age is just about as clueless as dog, when it comes to finding
a toy hidden under a shirt, but that same child at thirteen or
fifteen months will be able to identify the toy by the distortion
of the fabric of the shirt, where the dog will not be able to
"see" it, even though the dog actually should "know" by its much
better sense of smell that the toy really is there. That's
subjunctivity in its most basic form -- the toddler "seeing" an
entity that is not immediately obvious to his eyes, identifying
it by its much more abstract geometrical shape -- and this again
is a bright-line distinction between the kind of epistemological
method appropriate to a proto-human mind and the method
"unthinkingly" deployed by a mere mammal.
I wish I could tell you that I see a lot of Splendor when I play
Backstory, but I don't. I see the basic ingredients of Splendor
in the faces of toddlers and young children, but in older
children and adults, mostly what I see are accretions of pain --
not always full-blown Squalor but way too much _of_ the squalid.
But how could this not be the case, given that virtually all of
the people I see are trying with all their will and all their
mental might to live down to moral philosophies that _no one_ can
practice fully without committing suicide -- without slaughtering
the self of the body because they cannot ever manage successfully
to slaughter the self of the mind? This is awful, outrageous,
unbearably tragic. But in the long run, nature is just. If you
damn your mind and your self completely enough, for a long enough
span of time, you go to hell. You just don't die to get there.
This is by far the longest chapter in this book, but it is by no
means exhaustive. I can document many other strategies by which
individual human beings -- the only mindful creatures on Earth --
have managed to achieve a state of mindlessness. Except in the
large, I have not even bothered to criticize specific specious
dogmas, first because it is not my function to crush every
cockroach that crawls out of the sewer pipe, and second because
the methods I have deployed in these examples should prove useful
to you for a wide variety of intellectual extermination efforts.
But what is most important about all of these arguments is this:
If you are gulled by bad ideas, it is almost always because you
_want_ to be. Whether you like the self you see reflected back to
you by some demagogue or because you fancy yourself a great
philanthropist or an irresistible lothario or whatever, if you
are enslaved in a state of mindlessness, it's because _you are a
volunteer._ We forge the chains that bind us.
No one can control your mind but you. If you affect to pretend to
make believe that you have surrendered your self-control to some
"thought leader" -- you haven't. If you insist that you are
irredeemably in the thrall of a professional victim or an
over-cologned Pick-Up Artist or a smelly, smug, supercilious,
sneering professor -- you aren't. If you tell me that you don't
think carefully because it's hard and you don't wanna -- _that_
confession I will believe. But only your own mind can learn the
truth of your nature and only your own mind can control your
purposive behavior. If you abdicate on the awesome responsibility
to think for yourself, you may not die from your enormous,
unconscionable error -- at least not right away. But you will not
_live_ as only a fully-conscious human being can live.
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..._
( http://selfadoration.com/ManAlive.html )
by Greg Swann
Chapter 10. A mindful catalog of mindlessness.
I told you how you came to be a self, but how did you go about
failing so completely, so consistently, to be a defective,
bungled and botched not-self? You _worked_ at it, that's how.
It really is a testament to your fundamental goodness that you
have tried so hard, for all of your life, to conform to ideas of
moral virtue that _no one_ can live down to fully and yet still
manage to remain alive as a human being. You were thoughtless --
mindless -- and so you did not know that the cause of your
repeated failures at attaining those "virtues" was human nature
itself. But you were damned if you didn't try to be what you
sincerely thought was "good," and that much is all to your
credit. You may have behaved mindlessly, but you gave your
mindless pursuit of ethical perversion everything you had.
But how did anyone gull you into behaving so thoughtlessly so
scrupulously and so relentlessly for so long?
Here's one good way: Inclusion and exclusion. It worked great
when you were five years old and it still works great today.
Obviously, no one can indoctrinate you before you master
Fathertongue. Before then, words are semaphores to you, ciphers,
with no more conceptual content than the wagging of a dog's tail.
If someone had read the _Bible_ to you while you were still a
toddler, or the _Koran_ or the _The Federalist Papers_ or _The
Communist Manifesto,_ what you would have heard, absorbed and
acted upon would have been nothing but incomprehensible sounds,
less meaningful to you, and less interesting, than the dog's
barking. But as soon as you came to be able to think in
Fathertongue, the human beings around you could undertake to
reward you, physically or emotionally, for conforming to their
dogmas, and to punish you for failing to.
How might they do this? Recall that much of parenting consists of
invoking the subjunctive -- worlds not in evidence -- to induce a
child to identify and reflect upon the unhappy consequences of
bad behavior: "Would _you_ like it if little Sally broke _your_
toy?" It is but a short step from there to the Straw Man Fallacy
-- putting words into another person's mouth in order to shout
them down: "You don't want for me to think you're selfish, do
you?" "Do you want for the other children to get the idea that
you can't play nicely?" "Why would you want to hold out to get
your own way, when everyone else is willing to go along?"
_"Surely_ you don't think it's right for you not to share your
toys with Bobby when he is offering to share his toys with
_you?"_
These aren't really questions. They're con-games, underhanded
emotional manipulations of a mind too young to have learned how
to defend itself. The weapon is the subjunctive postulation of
the disapproval of other people -- anyone other than you. The
implied punishment -- the threat -- is the prospect of social
exclusion. Your mother or your father or some other adult or
older child was effectively saying to you, "If you don't renounce
your self -- if you don't back down from this position you have
taken all on your own, for your own reasons -- I will exclude you
from the universe of my awareness. Either yield to my will, or I
will make an unperson of you."
There is nothing morally wrong with a child wanting to live his
own life in his own way, and so the purpose of those kinds of
treacly, smarmy appeals is not just a topical injustice --
pushing you around in the immediate moment -- but the inculcation
of a doctrine of moral evil -- selflessness. Take account that
your folks didn't know -- explicitly, mindfully -- that this is
what they were doing. And, never forget, you owe them a boundless
debt of gratitude for the gift of mind in the first place -- for
the mental prowess you can use to identify and mitigate any
thoughtless errors they may have made when you were young. But
this kind of fallacious reasoning was very probably your
introduction to the infinite varieties of anti-ontological
teleology -- shoulding at war with being.
Your folks may have been taking you to a house of worship all
along when you were young, but before you could think in
Fathertongue, church was just another place where you would
squall, squirm and make eye contact with bored strangers. But
once you could reason in concepts, you were swept off to a
separate room, where a wannabe theologian would terrorize you
with elaborate tales of eternal torment. I told you I don't want
to take anything away from you, and my friend Jim Klein has
convinced me that the statement, "God loves me," to a person who
believes it, can be a benign and beautiful claim, unpacking to
something like this: "I behave lovably in the eyes of my god." A
self behaving lovably is the soul and substance of truly ethical
conduct. This is not something I would want to object to -- or
disrupt.
But the soul and substance of a dogma -- which we can define
broadly as the doctrinal representation of an inverted moral
philosophy -- is a profound mistrust of the human mind. If at any
moment, when a "thought leader" is making a claim that is
comically absurd on its face, anyone in the audience can summon
up the courage and the intellectual fortitude to stand up and
shout, "Say WHAT?!?" -- the rest of the sheep in the flock just
might catch on to the idea that the shepherd is a paranoid fraud
making claims that he could never defend in reason.
At that point, it doesn't matter if the undefended dogma is a
religion or a political philosophy, and it is no mere coincidence
that the biblical book of _Proverbs_ says, "Train up a child in
the way he should go and when he is old he will not depart from
it" and Lenin said, "Give me a child for the first five years of
his life and he will be mine forever." Why would we take a brand
new human being who has just come to be fully awake as a mind --
fully aware at last of all the delights and wonders of the world
-- and immediately demand that he shut his mind down forever?
It's because false doctrines cannot bear up to the scrutiny of a
fully-human mind -- and the "thought leaders" who contrive them
know it.
But all of that notwithstanding, the very most beautiful ceremony
you will ever see in any church is not Christmas or Easter or
Chanukah or whatever. It is not a funeral, although it can be
very moving to see how deeply people can be moved to honor the
deceased. It is not a wedding, even though the celebration of
committed romantic love may induce you to renew your own wedding
vows in the best possible way when you get home. But the most
wonderful thing you can ever see inside a church is any
particular religion's analogue of child baptism.
The child is being inducted into the religious community without
his informed consent -- and most probably without his conscious
knowledge, if the ceremony occurs before the mastery of
Fathertongue. But that child's parents -- and, by concatenation,
all of the members of that congregation -- are doing what they
think is the very _best_ thing they can do for that child, and
that kind of conscious commitment to the ideal of moral goodness
is to be applauded regardless of the anti-ontological teleology
of the underlying theological gibberish.
At about that same time in your life, you graduated to the
playground, a riotously colorful campus of delights and wonders
modeled on the idyllic paradise to be found in _Lord of the
Flies._ And there did you have your first one-on-one
confrontation with the first of the many "thought leaders" you
have known in your life -- which is to say an incipient
malignantly narcissistic paranoid schizophrenic dominating
personality backed up by a mindless mob. And that kid sized you
up perfectly in a glance, offering you the chance to prove your
worthiness for inclusion in the mob by picking on the "goat" of
the group. If you accepted those terms, you got to establish
yourself as yet another mindless minion -- probably for the first
of many times in your life, in the first of many mindless mobs.
And if you refused to go-along-to-get-along, you got to be the
new goat, instead, and the rest of the mob -- possibly joined by
the former goat -- ganged up on you in unison.
In Cicero's discourse on the trial of Cataline, he says of one
forum faction, _"Consputare coeperunt"_ -- "they began to spit
together in unison." We are never very far from that playground,
are we? I won't ask you what you did, with that mob or with any
of the mobs you ran up against later, but I will put a different
question to you, something to think about the _next_ time your
choice is either to gang-up or be ganged-upon. Socrates wondered
if it is better, as a matter of morality, to inflict an injury or
to have an injury inflicted upon you. If we accept that the
problem can only be solved by referencing a Calculus of Loss --
if we assume that _both_ options will move your self leftward on
the number line of self-regard, that both will leave you feeling
less worthy of your own adoration -- my question is this: Which
choice will make you despise your self more, now and enduringly,
and which will leave you better equipped to love your self going
forward?
I can think of other dyads of domination in the undiscovered
country of mindlessness. That bully on the playground and his
mindless minions live out their lives in a mad, sad ballet of
inclusion and exclusion, feigned impotence and omnipotence,
submission and dominance and still more submission. Thoughtless
people run in herds, and every group has its own power dynamic:
The boss in this group will be the minion -- or even the goat --
in that one. And each person who submits to this chaos of
collectivized ethics is a slave to it, most especially the
putative "thought leader."
Ayn Rand said, "A leash is only a rope with a noose at both
ends." There is no one who is more the slave of the mob than the
top mobster. He knows with a frantically-unexamined certainty
that "his" mob could turn on him at any instant. And the worst
tragedy for everyone involved, for the boss bully and all the
sub-bullies, is that gang "thinking" can never result in truly
human behavior. The mindless minions, at the least, may think
they gain something by ganging up together, but human
consciousness cannot be collectivized. "Groupthink" can neither
discover the truth nor identify and effect moral goodness. Too
much the contrary! Whether the group "decides" by the dictatorial
fiat of the "thought leader" or by some kind of consensus
communicated among the members of the group in veiled
Mothertongue displays, the "conclusion" the group arrives at can
neither be validated epistemologically nor justified ethically.
You cannot achieve the end-consequence of mindfulness mindlessly,
and two heads are never "better than one" unless each one of
those heads is working independently. Discovery -- of anything --
is particular to an individual person. This is a matter of
inescapable ontology, a fact that cannot be flattered, wheedled,
threatened or beaten into submission by any mob, no matter how
large or how ferocious.
There is only one truth, but as you are discovering here,
unpacking it in all its sublime perfection is not always easy.
But lies are as abundant as weeds or cockroaches. To pull a weed
or to crush a cockroach can be a needful chore, but it is not a
virtue -- or at least not a very important virtue. And to declare
to the world that you have resolved to make a grand virtue of
pulling every intellectual weed you can find is simply an empty
vanity -- a waste of the finite time of your one, precious,
irreplaceable life on redundant, repetitive busy-work. It is
worth mapping the most common paths to error to avoid getting
lost on them -- or to avoid getting lost on them _again._ But no
amount of documenting and deploring and denouncing vice will
result in a single act of virtue in your own life. If you cannot
rid your life of mental and moral cockroaches without wasting too
much of your time, you need to find a way to get away from them
instead.
But when you find yourself among philosophical bullies and their
mindless minions, you need to be on your guard. If you are not
vigilant, they will try to impose their moral standards on you,
and you will find yourself striving -- in vain -- to defend your
arguments, beliefs or behavior according to their putative
standard of value. It does not matter that they can neither
intellectually defend nor successfully live down to their
perverse ethical doctrine. All that will matter to them is
inducing you to damn your self on their terms -- to apologize to
them and to the universe for _being_ a self and for daring to
live _up_ to your self. They crave this as a bogus "evidence" of
the moral righteousness of their creed, an evidence they would
not seek, and would not _need_ to seek, if their dogma were
actually true.
The general process -- evil people seeking "evidence" of the
"truth" of moral philosophies they _already know_ are false -- is
much too common. The ganging-up on the playground -- and in the
forum and in the tap-room and in the office and on the internet
-- is a form of the same madness, social "proof" of claims no one
doubts are factually false and morally reprehensible. True
intellectual confidence is fearless. If you need for someone to
tell you that you are in the right, it's because you already
_know_ you are in the wrong.
To be unwittingly in error is simply a mistake. It can cost you
some of your self-love, temporarily, but it will not cause you to
despise your self enduringly. By that standard, we can define
true evil as taking an action you know in advance is morally
wrong. This is what your tormenters are doing -- when they are
campaigning to get you to spit in your own face -- knowingly
pursuing evil. You do not have to refute every evil argument you
come up against, but if you cave in to the insane demands of
thugs, then _you_ are acting in knowing evil, going along to get
along. You may think you are simply paying a minor toll to an
ugly troll, but that is a toll that you will end up paying -- in
the form of quick, hot flushes of shame -- in your memories
forever.
Here is another way soul-sucking parasites can trap you in a
miasma of mindlessness: By threatening injuries -- to themselves,
to you or to uninvolved third parties. Alcoholics and drug
addicts pull these kinds of stunts all the time, mesmerizing
anyone who will tolerate them with tales of their infinite pain
-- and promising to inflict still greater injuries upon
themselves should their victims ever come to doubt their
incurable misery. People like this will use any human value to
threaten or to inflict injuries -- sex in the form of adultery or
pelt-collecting, holding children hostage, even preying upon your
aversion to the thought of their suicide. And even though the
person committing these atrocities will move _much_ farther to
the left, on the number line of virtue and vice, than will you as
the victim of his manipulations, the purpose and effect of this
dumb-show will be to hold you hostage to your own unwillingness
to see that person suffer more pain -- even self-inflicted pain.
People who pull these kinds of stunts often play a game I call
Switchboarding: They interpose themselves between you and
everyone else you know -- everyone who might be kind enough, and
sagacious enough, to clue you in to what is really going on in
your life. Your personal, private Switchboard operator will try
to control every conversation you are involved in, ideally by
handling your communications with other people directly and then
telling you only what he wants you to know. If that tactic is not
feasible, the Switchboarder will undermine your relationships,
leading you to doubt what other people are telling you and to
suspect their motives. A true master of Switchboarding can get
you to doubt your own senses! We pass the expression along as a
joke, but people really do get away with saying things like, "Who
are you going to trust, me or your lying eyes?"
That kind of concentrated manipulation is one way that otherwise
decent people manage to get themselves trapped, again and again,
in relationships with precisely the wrong people. Another one --
the counterpart to being held hostage by someone else's
willingness to commit self-destruction in order to induce _you_
to destroy your self -- is a sort of Florence Nightingale
Syndrome: You keep inflicting moral lepers on yourself in the
vain belief that -- someday, somehow -- you will cure one of them
of his leprosy. You won't, but in due course you will cure
yourself -- completely -- of the love of life, of truth and of
your self.
You can be deluded in your own behalf, and that delusion can lead
you to commit the same kinds of errors again and again. The self
is your idea of your life -- of your _whole_ life in all of its
many manifestations throughout your life, including your external
circumstances, your bodily sensations, your hopes and dreams and
memories, your introspective consciousness and your purely
imaginary flights of fancy -- but there is no guarantee that it
is an _accurate_ idea of your life, a true reflection of your
real-life existential behavior, a faithful map of the territory
that is your life. If you should see yourself as being deserving
of contempt or abuse, you will be drawn to people who treat you
atrociously. And if you should meet someone you _does not_ treat
you horribly, you will provoke that person until he _does_ lash
out at you -- validating your twisted view of your self. And if
you meet a very special someone who will not abuse you, no matter
how much you try to incite a negative response, you will dump
that person and move on to someone who _will_ reflect back to you
the self you see in your own mind's eye.
Back in high school, you knew a young lady I call the Swoop Girl.
Someone said that high school is taxpayer-subsidized dating, and
that observation was probably hard to dispute back then, as you
threaded your way through corridors blocked by kissing, cuddling
couples. When a stable couple hit a rough patch -- perhaps he
wanted to dance horizontally, but she wasn't ready -- the Swoop
Girl would swoop in to collect another pelt, seducing the guy,
who was only too mindlessly delighted to be seduced. Her motive
was not love, nor even sexual gratification. What she wanted to
do was inflict pain -- on the other girl. In that way, her sex
act was essentially homosexual, girl-on-girl, an act of perverse
psycho-sexual sadism. Did she move farther left on the number
line than anyone involved, much farther left than the nice girl,
and farther left, even, than the not-so-nice guy? You bet. But
there was nothing of self-adoration in her motives. She hated her
life, clearly, and all she wanted was to spread that hatred to
other people.
Men can do the same kind of pelt-collecting as the Swoop Girl,
with the same sort of homosexual overtones, boasting to each
other about the (mostly imaginary) "notches" they put on their
belts. The so-called Pick-Up Artists are an even more perverse
symptom of this kind of intellectual perversion. They start by
cherry-picking pecking-order ideas from animal ethology. Among
wolves and dogs, cattle and certain species of apes, an Alpha
male will be dominant over all other members of the community --
kind of like a "thought leader," and just as well thought-out!
The Alpha male will either keep all the females to himself, as
with cattle, or he will mate with the highest-status female in
the group -- the Alpha female.
Pick-Up Artists start their sad dance of mindlessness by equating
human behavior with animal behavior -- the Dancing Bear Fallacy.
Human beings are ascended from apes, and you can see vestigial
remnants of this kind of pecking-order behavior among humans
_when they are behaving mindlessly_ -- which we saw back on the
playground. But human beings are _not_ mere animals, and so even
the meekest of us -- the most Omega among us in this crack-pot
theory -- can behave as Socrates did when he is met by exigent
circumstance. But those kinds of inconvenient facts don't fit the
fictional story-line running through the Pick-Up Artist's fevered
imagination, so he invokes the awesome power of mindlessness to
ignore them.
And, as you might expect, these Mittyesque Pick-Up Artists
jettison every aspect of animal status-sorting they don't like --
including those animal species where a female is always the boss.
It is a sufficient Alpha-qualification, for the alleged Alpha
male on the make, to have sex with as many different women as
possible -- "just like" a bull in a pasture full of cow-pies. The
notion of taking charge in difficult situations and providing
mental and moral leadership to the imputed "herd" is much too
much to be bothered with -- which is not to imply that these sad
clowns would be of any value in actual _human_ leadership roles
in any case. Instead, the Pick-Up Artist's definition of an Alpha
male is a guy who is good at tuning in on Mothertongue signals of
sexual interest being broadcast by long-in-the-tooth
repeatedly-recycled evergreen-ingenues -- which is to say, a guy
with slut radar.
In other words, the alleged Alpha male is demonstrating his
ethological "superiority" not by successfully competing for
high-status women -- the specious human analogue to Alpha females
among animals -- women who would not have the first thing to do
with him in any case. Instead, like the Swoop Girl, he is simply
collecting pelts -- not for love and not for sex but simply in
order to compete, and even then only numerically, with other
similarly self-damaged men. To their credit, the objective is not
anyone's destruction -- except for the on-going self-destruction
the Pick-Up Artists and their slutty "conquests" voluntarily
inflict upon themselves -- but there is _nothing_ of
self-adoration -- nor of mindful self-consciousness -- in this
behavior.
What is _really_ happening, as a matter of existential reality?
The Pick-Up Artist sleeps with the slut-of-the-moment, herself an
already-well-used specimen of femininity, because, although her
status is much the same as his, pretty low on the socio-economic
ladder, and well to the left of the zero on the number line of
self-regard, she is nevertheless the best woman who will consent
to sleep with _him_ -- and _neither_ of them has enough desire
for self-adoration to pursue a real relationship with a partner
who is _not_ running some dumb-ass game. Consequently, each one
of them goes home lonely, even if neither one goes home alone.
How sad is that?
There are consolations, though -- for me, at least, and I can
hope for you, as well. First, this prince and princess and their
pantomime of passion illustrate perfectly the self-loathing that
is the sole enduring result of indiscriminate sex. Popular
artists and their puerile prey -- could that be you? -- love to
fantasize about a world with "no-strings-attached," but that
world is not this one. In the real world of real consequences,
the mistake you made last night will never, ever end. It will
recall itself to your memory -- and to your shame -- again and
again, unbidden, forever. And may heaven help you if you try to
"paper over" it with more and more instances of the same dumb
mistake!
And second, by presenting us with such an absurdly distorted
rendition of the Dancing Bear Fallacy, the Pick-Up Artists
demonstrate that all Dancing Bear theories are nothing more than
elaborated arguments of behavioral determinism. The
Alpha-in-his-own-mind "conquers" comely round-heeled gals by
means of trickery and cunning -- he insists. When he is on his
"game," they simply "can't resist" him -- just as female animals
in the wild mate with the best rapist, the male they cannot
successfully deflect, dismiss or defeat.
But the logical fallacy in play is the same one we can identify
in every determinist argument: If I as a human predator can
"trick" my human prey into thoughtlessly yielding to me, it could
only be because human nature is _not_ bound by the iron laws of
animal ethology. Every form of gulling putatively mindless human
beings pre-supposes free will -- rationally-conceptual
volitionality. Without it, the predator would be as much an
unthinking slave to behavioral determinism as -- he insists -- is
his prey. The form of the claim is, _"I_ can think of a plan of
attack, but _you_ cannot think of a plan of defense." Those
propositions cannot both be true, and, of course, we _all_ know,
without any room for doubt in our minds, that human will is free
of all deterministic constraints.
Many theories of marketing turn on the same sort of
contradiction: Why does a product priced at $4.95 procure more
buyers than does the same product priced at $5.00? Because the
buyers are thoughtless, mostly out of habit, but also because
many of them understood long ago that a nickel is not worth a
dime's worth of worry, not because the marketing mavens behind
this nonsense have somehow transformed themselves into magical,
mystical Svengalis, super-human villains of pure
moustache-twisting evil.
There are a great host of these stunts you can pull, if you would
rather try to gull people out of their money, instead of
delivering full value in exchange for the price you are asking
for your product. They all work pretty well -- until you run up
against a competitor who _is_ mindful of intellectual and
economic values and who rewards his customers for being equally
mindful. The Only-Game-In-Town con only works when it is the only
game in town. This is why carnies and hucksters of all sorts
either move up or move on, eventually. And _that_ is how
capitalism cleanses markets of criminality in due course --
unless that process is impeded by criminality of the legislative
kind.
Every specious argument -- every claim that is false to fact,
even if the person making that appeal does not know it is false
-- will turn on a logical fallacy, a pretext or rationale that
sounds good, but is in reality simply a path to error. Logical
fallacies are like catnip to fools, but they are the very bread
of life for demagogues -- for "thought leaders." A fallacy -- as
an artifact of rhetoric, the art of valid discourse -- is simply
an erroneous argument, a rhetorically invalid reason to uphold or
deny a proposition. Thoughtless people deploy them all the time,
convinced in their stolid, triumphant preening that they have
slain dragons with their profound wit.
An easy way to identify a fallacious claim is to stipulate it and
see what happens. So, for example, if you were to say to me,
"Your arguments make me angry, therefore they're wrong!" -- which
is one of the infinite forms of the Fallacy _Ad Hominem_ ("to the
man") -- even if we embrace the premise (and I _do_ make a lot of
people angry), doing so does nothing to support the conclusion.
And heads-up: Even if the things I am saying make you feel
happier or better about your life and your self, that fact does
not make me right. I do believe I am right, and I am taking great
care to persuade you of my truth, but how you feel about that is
quite literally beside the point.
As I have demonstrated at intervals in this treatise,
theologians, philosophers, academics, artists, journalists,
politicians and other so-called "thought leaders" make logically
fallacious arguments very often, usually by spinning
unintentionally comical claims out of their unexamined
prejudices. But by far the most common logical fallacy committed
by "thought leaders" is Credentialism, the Appeal to Authority
expressed in an office wall papered over with waste-paper
graduate degrees. The members of this would-be ruling class
expect for you to yield to their "authoritah," of course, but
frequently they themselves are buried beneath their own bullshit.
Heinlein said that Ph.D. stands for "piled higher and deeper,"
and that claim is easy to credit when you slog through hundreds
of pages of the "scientific" elaboration of facts that are
obvious to any child -- and still easier when the "dissertation"
is devoted to the unintelligible exposition of undiluted error.
Mind you, not all of the members of this anointed class of
redundantly-pedigreed "thought leaders" are true demagogues --
knowingly deceptive manipulators of the pliable emotions of
thoughtless people. Most of them are simply fools as well,
themselves the mindless victims of true demagogues, parroting
vile arguments they never would have been cunning enough -- or
evil enough -- to come up with on their own. But for the few
"thought leaders" who really understand the art of gulling fools,
logical fallacies are the tools of their trade. This is why your
mind will not be safe until you learn to defend it from seemingly
sound but ultimately misleading arguments.
But academia also suffers from an all-but-terminal echo chamber,
and this serves to reinforce the pandemic mindlessness that, by
now, infests virtually all college campuses. The professor has
had twenty or more years to practice the art of sneering at any
hint of a suggestion of a notion that might contradict his pet
dogma -- and he put in six or eight or ten years before that as
an undergraduate and graduate student, studying with past-masters
of sneering. Like the kids on the playground, the students in his
classes know very well what happens to the goat in any mob, and
so each one of them quickly masters the two most vitally
important skills of modern "scholarship" -- and of modern _life_
-- ass-kissing and piling-on.
If you are lucky enough to study with a teacher who actually
knows something worth learning, he will be delighted to take on
your challenges to his presumptive authority. To him, error is
harmlessly comical and an unexpected new truth is a thing of
delight. But you are much more likely to run up against
yet-another bully, this one resplendent in a rumpled tweed jacket
that reeks of tobacco smoke, stale beer and the dirty-clothes
hamper. Ah, but what the man lacks in style he makes up for in
rancor. Marx said, "You can't refute a sneer." This is not so --
but it remains that you cannot refute a sneer _quickly._ You have
to do the job as I am doing it here, unpacking every false
premise in the citadel of lies that is the modern university.
The paths to error are infinite, but two landmarks I have learned
to rely on, in listening to people trying to justify their evil
actions, are the logical fallacies _Tu Quoque_ and Two Wrongs
Make A Right. _Tu Quoque_ is Latin. It means, "You do it, too."
When you catch your teenager swiping a beer, the pre-fabricated
rationale will surely be, "Well, _you_ drink, why can't I?!?" And
you were probably very young when you first heard some little
proto-brute justifying his vengeance by bellowing, "Well, he hit
me first!" -- ergo, two wrongs make a right. You should probably
be on your guard against _any_ statement that starts with a
"well" and ends with an exclamation point. That particular verbal
construction seems to fit very comfortably in the mouths of liars
and thugs. But when you hear those two logical fallacies being
deployed in tandem, what you are hearing, almost certainly, is a
cunningly-crafted rationalization of an abominable injustice.
Just as a passing note -- a word to the wise is sufficient --
those two logical fallacies, _Tu Quoque_ and Two Wrongs Make A
Right, are the "justification" undergirding every atrocity
committed by any government in human history.
Aristotle said we are what we habitually do, and a great many of
us have habituated errors-of-method in our everyday style of
thinking. A habit-of-mind can be an incredibly efficient
time-saver: Think of how little of your conscious thought you
have to invest in driving your car, and how much mental capacity
you have available, in consequence, to devote to the matters of
importance you will take up when you get where you are going. The
problem is that a _bad_ habit-of-mind is just as efficient as a
good one, except that you will be making incredibly efficient
_errors._ The only cure for this is mindfulness. You have to pay
attention to existential reality -- to what is really happening.
If you don't, you can easily drive your life right off the road.
Habituated behaviors of all sorts can set your life on a vector
of motion that will move you farther and farther along that
course, whether this is where you want to go or not. Most people
suffer from the opposite problem, the style of motion
statisticians call The Drunkard's Walk -- they lurch a little to
the left, then a little to the right, and they never manage to
get very far from where they started. But if your behavior is
very consistent -- either very mindful or very mindless -- your
vector of motion over time will carry you across vast distances,
both along the number line we have used to quantify the
consequences of behavior and in your work and your relationships.
If the vector you have set for your self is moving you closer and
closer to a state of Splendor, so much the better for you. But if
you are moving leftward, toward Squalor, you must either check
and change your premises or endure progressively greater losses
of your love for your life.
To say that dissipation is a time-sink is a tautology -- two ways
of saying the exact same thing. Your time is your business, of
course, but it is always worthwhile to ask yourself if you are
getting everything you want in exchange for each irreplaceable
moment of your life you spend. Your values are organized in a
hierarchy, and pursuing less important values over higher ones is
disvaluing behavior. Your net motion, on the number line of
self-regard, may not be leftward, but your rightward motion can
be slower than it otherwise might be. Even worse, dwelling on the
negative, on pain or loss, cannot move you toward Splendor. And
still worse, focusing on other people's values, instead of your
own, will advance your interests in no way at all. And still
worse than that, getting swept up in some "thought leader's"
obsessions -- which is what the "We're all in this together!"
types mean by "Get involved!" -- is a complete waste of time you
can never, ever get back.
I like to play a philosophy game I call Backstory. I will look at
someone -- anyone I happen to see -- and try to project backward
in time to the past causes of that person's present-day
appearance. Toddlers and young children will have sweet faces,
almost always, with no deeper meanings to be discerned. But older
children and adults will have had many experiences in their
lives, and those past events will have written an emotional
history in the lines of their skin. Your mama told you, when you
glared and grimaced at her, that your face would freeze like
that, but neither one of you knew she was right: The facial
expressions we wear most often -- habituated Mothertongue
emotional reactions -- inscribe themselves into our skin. I can
see those habitual expressions in the people I am watching. Their
clothing and their manner will tell their stories, too, and it is
interesting to me to try to suss out their histories, just by
looking at people from a distance.
I stress that this is just a game. Every living organism, human
or not, is in a certain sense a laboratory specimen to me. I am
not cruel or intrusive in any way, but I watch everything I am
blessed with the opportunity to see, and I learn everything I can
from the behavior I observe. In consequence, I can tell you from
having run repeated tests that a toddler at around eleven months
of age is just about as clueless as dog, when it comes to finding
a toy hidden under a shirt, but that same child at thirteen or
fifteen months will be able to identify the toy by the distortion
of the fabric of the shirt, where the dog will not be able to
"see" it, even though the dog actually should "know" by its much
better sense of smell that the toy really is there. That's
subjunctivity in its most basic form -- the toddler "seeing" an
entity that is not immediately obvious to his eyes, identifying
it by its much more abstract geometrical shape -- and this again
is a bright-line distinction between the kind of epistemological
method appropriate to a proto-human mind and the method
"unthinkingly" deployed by a mere mammal.
I wish I could tell you that I see a lot of Splendor when I play
Backstory, but I don't. I see the basic ingredients of Splendor
in the faces of toddlers and young children, but in older
children and adults, mostly what I see are accretions of pain --
not always full-blown Squalor but way too much _of_ the squalid.
But how could this not be the case, given that virtually all of
the people I see are trying with all their will and all their
mental might to live down to moral philosophies that _no one_ can
practice fully without committing suicide -- without slaughtering
the self of the body because they cannot ever manage successfully
to slaughter the self of the mind? This is awful, outrageous,
unbearably tragic. But in the long run, nature is just. If you
damn your mind and your self completely enough, for a long enough
span of time, you go to hell. You just don't die to get there.
This is by far the longest chapter in this book, but it is by no
means exhaustive. I can document many other strategies by which
individual human beings -- the only mindful creatures on Earth --
have managed to achieve a state of mindlessness. Except in the
large, I have not even bothered to criticize specific specious
dogmas, first because it is not my function to crush every
cockroach that crawls out of the sewer pipe, and second because
the methods I have deployed in these examples should prove useful
to you for a wide variety of intellectual extermination efforts.
But what is most important about all of these arguments is this:
If you are gulled by bad ideas, it is almost always because you
_want_ to be. Whether you like the self you see reflected back to
you by some demagogue or because you fancy yourself a great
philanthropist or an irresistible lothario or whatever, if you
are enslaved in a state of mindlessness, it's because _you are a
volunteer._ We forge the chains that bind us.
No one can control your mind but you. If you affect to pretend to
make believe that you have surrendered your self-control to some
"thought leader" -- you haven't. If you insist that you are
irredeemably in the thrall of a professional victim or an
over-cologned Pick-Up Artist or a smelly, smug, supercilious,
sneering professor -- you aren't. If you tell me that you don't
think carefully because it's hard and you don't wanna -- _that_
confession I will believe. But only your own mind can learn the
truth of your nature and only your own mind can control your
purposive behavior. If you abdicate on the awesome responsibility
to think for yourself, you may not die from your enormous,
unconscionable error -- at least not right away. But you will not
_live_ as only a fully-conscious human being can live.
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..._
Tom S.
Apr 17, 2012, 6:45:33 PM4/17/12
to
"Self Adoration" <gregswannse...@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:0542013d-2b2c-49e2...@36g2000yqi.googlegroups.com...
>
> by Greg Swann
>
>
> Chapter 10. A mindful catalog of mindlessness.
Operative word - mindlessness.
> by Greg Swann
>
>
> Chapter 10. A mindful catalog of mindlessness.
Rest of psycho babble snipped for intestinal protestion.
Jim Klein
Apr 20, 2012, 11:58:23 PM4/20/12
to
On 4/17/2012 6:45 PM, Tom S. wrote:
> Rest of psycho babble snipped for intestinal protestion.
Thanks, Tom; I always appreciate confirmation of my
> Rest of psycho babble snipped for intestinal protestion.
prescience. I mentioned early on how some people would
get a feeling in their gut when they read Greg's book,
and here you are.
I also mentioned how ironic it would be that they wouldn't
know what it was, even as the book explained it.
Anyway, if you ever find anything wrong in it--like
something false--do be sure and share it. Till then,
your silence on THAT point is noted.
jk
Discover the fundamental premise...
http://SelfAdoration.com/ManAlive.html
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