[This is not for the book, except as context. This is an essay I wrote in the mid-1990s, an attempt to explain to libertarians, especially various flavors of devotees of Ayn Rand, why the idea of a minimal state must always fail -- just as the minimal state as envisioned in 1789 is failing right now. The argument holds up well, I think -- though I am by now less lean-look'd a prophet. It's just that no one wants to hear it... --GSS]

 

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

William Butler Yeats, The Second Coming

The first thing to do is laugh, of course.

We stare tragedy right in the face, so close to it we can smell its stale breath, and it is reaching for us.

Everything we say should not, must not, cannot happen — every bit of it does happen. Teenage gang-bangers with AR-15s car-jack Sally Suburbanite and toss her baby out the window. Middle-aged speed freaks imprison their own mothers and force them to write bad checks. One-hundred-thirty-five years after emancipation, people are owned as slaves and the value of their labor is stolen from them. The falcon cannot hear the falconer and Vicky Weaver and 81 Branch Davidians lay slain.

Should not. Must not. Cannot. Does.

And there’s plenty more, of course, and every bit of it is tragic. Except us, for we are tragic and ridiculous. We wag our fingers and deliver pithy little lectures on morality. Or we wag our fingers and deliver pithy little lectures on utility. And we argue amongst ourselves and hone and polish and perfect our pithy little arguments until they are fit to be inscribed on parchment. And we wag our fingers and deliver them from whatever soap-box we can find.

And until lately no one was listening. And even though we have contrived a nearly perfect roadmap to civilization, it is being incinerated in a conflagration of savagery.

So laugh, damnit. Laughter is what’s left when every other precious thing is gone…

Our tragedy arises not from the precious things that have been taken from us, but from the precious things we have spurned. They have not beaten us yet, but they are winning. And they are winning not because of their strength, but because of our refusal to do battle from our strength. We have crippled ourselves, and in doing it we have given them an advantage they could never have gained on their own.

Without remorse — as a matter of pride even — we have conceded their most basic premise, and they are using our own power to destroy us. To destroy civilization, really, to raze in twenty years what is still unraised after twenty centuries. The worst specimens of humanity are full of passionate intensity, and they stand unopposed.

And who could oppose them, taking account that we are one among them? Indeed, I have seen the enemy and I’ll be damned if it isn’t us!

And I have a lot of nerve, haven’t I? You were gracious enough to invite me into your mind, and I repay your hospitality by blaming you for everything on Earth that’s wrong. There ought to be a law…

Oops!

Which team are we on again…?

Which team do we think we’re on?

Why, we’re the people who fight naked savagery, of course. Right…? Yes, yes, of course. We fight that naked savagery tooth and claw, hammer and tong, sixes and sevens and nines. By god, we hate that naked savagery. Don’t we…?

Yup.

We hate it so much we clothe it in bright-striped tails and call it Uncle Sam. We stick a feather in its cap and call it blood pudding. Or something. But we can’t bear that naked savagery, and we won’t let it bare its head around us.

And when we go up against an AR-15 with a pen knife, it’s just not right that our tail lights vanish in the distance.

Just not right!

There ought to be a law, damnit! Better yet, a bolt of lightning ought to shoot down out of the angry sky to smite the wicked. All of them, all at once. Today, if it can be arranged.

And yes, I am making fun of you. And of me. Of all of us, and all of our forebears. We sought to civilize savagery by inventing an inhibited form of savagery, and we deserve everything we’re getting. It’s right, it’s just, and it’s predictable to nine decimal places.

What did we do wrong?

Instead of renouncing savagery, we sought to rationalize it.

We are no less savages than the gang-bangers or the federal falcons, we’re just not as good at savagery. We don’t revel in our naked bloodlust, we hide it behind a fig leaf and argue to ourselves that we are not bloodthirsty, that our spasms of sadism are right and necessary and justified. We are inhibited, and where they can kill casually on a whim, we can kill only after beating our breasts for months or years. But kill we do, smiting the wicked in the name of the Greater Good.

Those naked savages are capricious, but we clothed savages are deliberate. They brutalize on impulse, but we have sound, detailed, carefully considered reasons for our brutality. Their crimes are random, but, by god, our crimes are justified!

How could they not be? Look at all those philosophy books. Look at that immense pile of law books. Listen to those orators, the finest minds of the West. After twenty centuries of civilization, how can what we do not be justified?

Because it’s not. Because it’s grounded in a savage premise. Because what we have dared to call civilization rejects caprice and replaces it with dementia. And, my gentle and long-suffering libertarian friends, you are not exempted from this charge.

In fact, I think I’m going to run you in. You look peaceful enough, but why should I take chances? I’m going to drive your wrist back up against your shoulder blades and frog-march you down to the station-house. How about a strip search? How about a cavity search?; can’t buy that thrill, now can you? How about some sleep deprivation to give you the opportunity to reflect upon your right to remain silent? And while you’re locked up for months, awaiting your speedy trial, I think I’ll seize and sell your assets. Teach you a lesson. Let you know who’s boss.

Should not. Must not. Cannot. Does.

And the question is: if I can do all that vicious stuff to you, why can’t you do it all right back to me?

The savage answer is: because I have an AR-15 and you have a pen knife.

The allegedly civilized answer is: because I have a sanction and you do not.

Say what…?

Meet the Third Thing, gentle readers. A decidedly behind-the-scenes political operative. The man behind the curtain, so to speak.

When I come to arrest you, there is only you and only me. I am like you and you are like me. We are equal as things, as equal as two rocks or two cans of soup or two kittens. You can jump a little higher than me and I can run a little faster than you, but these are merely differences of degree. There is no power or potential that you have that I lack, nor do I have any special capacities that you do not have. We are equal. If I have the right or power or capacity to do something to you, then you have the right or power or capacity to do it right back to me.

So how is it that I have the right to use pain compliance on you and submit you to a cavity search, but you lack the right to do those same things right back to me?

For this brutality to be justified, there must be some Third Thing present with us. There is you and there is me, and if we are alone, then we are equal. If we are not equal, then there must be a Third Thing in the room that confers upon me super-human powers and consigns you to sub-human responses.

Before, there were two rocks, and they differed in color, weight, dimension, density and mineral content, but they were equally rocks. Neither rock was more rock than the other. They differed in measurement, but they were equal in their rockness. And then the Third Thing appeared on the scene and suddenly one rock was ultra-rock and the other became infra-rock.

And where the gang-banger steals and sells your car and justifies it by pointing his AR-15 at your surrender reflex, the statesman steals and sells your car and justifies it by reference to magic or mysticism or undiluted insanity. The gangster acts like a savage, like a two-legged animal. But the statesman attempts to act like a god, like Dionysus drunk on the nectar of his own imaginary righteousness.

This is important, perhaps the most important thing I have to say. We are not talking about what one can do; the gang-bangers are walking object lessons in what human beings are capable of doing. We are not talking about what one ought to do, not here. What we are talking about is what one can justify doing, the set of actions one can rationally defend taking with respect to other people. We are talking not just about human social interaction but about human social interaction that can be rigorously defended in persuasively valid terms.

In other words, we are talking not merely about politics but about political philosophy. We are ignoring the savages and the gang-bangers; their political philosophy is nothing more than “might makes right”. We concern ourselves here with those political philosophies that presume to reject, to rise above “might makes right”. We concern ourselves with you gentle libertarian, with the charming little bungalow you’ve made into your ideological home.

“Might makes right” is a crude attempt at a philosophical distinction. The argument runs, “I have martial prowess or superior weaponry, therefore I am different from you. My domination of you is justified, just as I am justified in the dominion I claim over my horse. Because I have the ability to inflict pain upon you, you are no more than a beast to me, without liberty, without rights, without autonomy. You are a thing, an extension of me, and I am fundamentally distinct from you.”

We might wish that savages spoke and reasoned that well, but that’s what they’re saying, however incoherently. The distinction itself is idiotic; a human being is not changed into another thing by acquisition of a skill or possession of a chattel. And it’s worth pointing out that the savage himself does not believe it. He wouldn’t offer up his incoherent explanation if he did. We don’t dominate horses in the same way we dominate non-living things, but we do dominate them to a degree, and we don’t bother to rationalize our domination to them. The savage must declare that you are a beast because he knows you aren’t.

And the statesman, although he is marginally more coherent, also makes philosophical distinctions that do not bear up to close scrutiny. For example, he may say, “My domination of you is justified because you have consented to it in every particular.” He will hold up his empty hand and say, “See here? See this Social Contract? You’re committed. You’re obliged. I have your consent.” Meet the Third Thing.

Or he might say, “My domination of you is justified because I have been selected by god himself to guard you from the exponents of evil who falsely claim to have been selected by god himself to protect you from me. It’s the Divine Right of Kings.” Meet the Third Thing.

Or he might say, “My domination of you is the will of the people, the little people, the common people. The weak. The halt. The lame. The children…” Meet the Third Thing.

The zeitgeist, the spirt of the times? Meet the Third Thing.

The practical benefit of uniform law? Meet the Third Thing.

The individual’s natural right not to be injured? Meet the Third Thing.

The consent of the governed? Meet the Third Thing.

The purity of the race? Meet the Third Thing.

The inevitability of one-world Socialism? Meet the Third Thing.

And we can traverse our way down the tree of philosophy until we arrive at a pitiful little proto-statesman with a shaman by his side. He will tell us with a devout solemnity that he is justified in claiming domination over us because he alone possesses the sacred ceremonial amulet. Meet the Third Thing in its undiluted form…

For the Third Thing, ultimately, is insanity defended with devout solemnity. There is no Social Contract imagined by you but binding upon me. There is no Divine Right of Kings. Every person is possessed of free will, but there is no accumulation of that will, and the voluntary support of many or even most people does not justify anything. There is no zeitgeist. Neither your convenience nor mine justifies our domination of our neighbors, or each other. You have the capacity to act in self-defense, but it absurd to argue that this somehow prevents future injuries. “The consent of the governed” could only have meaning if the consent were explicit and unanimous. The “race” has no rights. Neither Socialism nor any other creation of the mind of man is inevitable. And, finally, the sacred ceremonial amulet is just a rock suspended from a rope.

These are all products of the imagination. They are wholly products of the imagination. They are all extremely elaborate, often very confusing, pantomimes of philosophy. They all concede that “might makes right” is not a philosophical argument; it is brutal, unsavory, and, as above, idiotic. And the question that each one of these creeds — and many others — is an answer to is this:

How can we dominate people without claiming that “might makes right”?

It’s a good question. A noble question. And the people who have striven to answer it have been, for the most part, proud and noble people. The answers they’ve come up with have been demented, of course, but that’s unavoidable: the question is demented.

When the gang-banger invites you to stand on the curb while he drives away in your car, “might makes right” is his only justification. And when the cop invites you to grab your ankles so he can search your rectum for contraband, “might makes right” is his only justification. No one volunteers to be pushed around against his will. “Volunteers against his will” is a meaningless construct. And “dominate without ‘might makes right’” is also a meaningless construct.

The question the political philosophers don’t ask is: how can we elicit the cooperation of people? They don’t ask it because the answer is obvious; we all know how to elicit cooperation. The problem, they say, is: what about people who will not cooperate?

Well, what about them? We’re not asking whether or not one has the right to retaliate — respond “like for like” — to injury. We’re asking whether or not you have the right or power or capacity to dominate me, to break me like you’d break your horse to saddle. If you don’t, then we must either find a way to cooperate or part company. But if you do, then we are not the same kind of thing, we are as unlike as you and your horse, and “might makes right” is the only philosophical justification for your actions.

This is vital: one person cannot dominate another without deploying superior martial prowess, superior weaponry, or both. To dominate means to rule by force. There is no other way to rule, and there is no justification for ruling by force except force, “might makes right”. The Third Thing is the means by which philosophical proto-savages attempt to convince themselves that brutality-for-a-cause is in some meaningful way distinct from ordinary random brutality.

The Third Thing is the thing that stands between the political philosopher and his own recognition that he has not renounced savagery, he has merely rationalized it.

The Third Thing is the things that, you say, joins the two of us when you claim that you are right to do to me what you would insist would be wrong for me to do right back to you. If you can arrest me but I can’t arrest you, there must be some distinction between us, something that makes us not equal, and that distinction is the Third Thing. If you can imprison me but I can’t imprison you, there must be some distinction between us, something that makes us not equal, and that distinction is the Third Thing. If you can punish me — for my own good, to teach me a lesson — but I can’t punish you, there must be some distinction between us, something that makes us not equal, and that distinction is the Third Thing.

In order for you to claim any justification for your domination of me, you must insist that there is some distinction between us, some right or power or capacity that makes you super-human and renders me sub-human. This distinguishing property, whatever it is, is the Third Thing.

And, whatever it is, it is imaginary. It does not exist. We are equal. You are what I am and I am what you are. We are equally human, the same kind of thing, and there is no basis in evidence for claiming that we are in some way distinct.

And where the savage says, “I am distinct from you because I have a weapon in my hand,” the political philosopher insists, “I am distinct from you because I have nothing in my hand, nothing but an unreadable book and a sacred amulet.”

The Third Thing does not exist. And because it does not exist, there is no defensible creed of the domination of one person by another. You can try to dominate me, but you cannot argue that you are justified in trying to dominate me. There can be no such thing as the just domination of one person by another.

And our charming little bungalow turns out to be a house of cards.

And our pithy little lectures turn out to be carefully crafted nonsense.

And we have taken on that naked savagery and fought it by wrapping it in the raiments of our impenetrable verbiage. And the emperor is not merely naked, the emperor is just another naked savage.

And I have seen the enemy and I’ll be damned if it isn’t us…

Ayn Rand said that libertarianism leads to anarchism, and this is correct. If we adopt her own admonition that one must never initiate violence, we must conclude that every form of government is invalid, since every form of government is a coercive monopoly on the dispute resolution business. If instead we argue that each person owns his own life, then we must conclude that every form of government is invalid, since every sort of domination of one person by another is an attempt to express ownership — rightful use or disposal — of the person being dominated. And if we wander into my corner of the universe, Planet Third Thing, we discover that every form of government is invalid, because every form of government is validated in imagination alone, in dementia.

Kind of a problem if, like Rand, like Nozick, you want a state at any price.

But Aristotle said we must follow the argument wherever it leads. Well, what if we do? We arrive at anarchism, of course. Not for any affirmative reason, but simply by the process of elimination. There are good, sound, well-reasoned arguments for affirming anarchism as a political philosophy, but they’re beyond the scope of this essay. But we have kicked the stilts out from under two millennia of political philosophers, and their living exponents are probably not very happy about it. We have shown that their basic question — how can we dominate people without claiming that “might makes right”? — is nonsense. What can we say to them when they demand to know, as they will, “Well then, what does make sense?”

What does make sense…?

Rationality makes sense, of course. Claiming to have a different identity as a thing because you carry a weapon makes no sense, obviously, and there is no end of snickering to be had at the expense of those stupid, stupid savages. But claiming to have a different identity as a thing because you uphold a peculiar idea or carry a ceremonial totem also makes no sense, and we refrain from snickering only because the advocates of these sorts of positions are barely visible behind the fog of their rationalizations. But what makes sense, obviously, is acting upon things according to their own true, unchangeable identity.

Anything else is insanity, and it is a testament to the foggy facility of the political philosophers that it is necessary to say that it is insane to attempt to act toward human beings as if they were something else.

I am discrete, separate, detached. I am not a part of you and you are not a part of me and we are not together parts of something else. I am free. My actions are initiated and controlled solely from within my body, operating on the direction of my mind. There is no circumstance by which you or anyone else can assert control over my mind or my body. I am sovereign. My body is a dominion over which I alone am master — not as a matter of right, but as a matter of physiology. I have the capacity to defend my life from any peril that presents itself, and there is nothing you can do, short of killing me, to deny me the power of self-defense. To dominate me, you must use force, and your use of force is your admission that I am not your property to do with as you choose.

And you are just like me. We are alike as things, equal in our separateness, our freedom, our sovereignty. We are alike in our equal possession of the power to act in self-defense, and we are alike in our ability to comprehend that we have this power. Considered as things, we are the same thing, and there can be no rational basis for concluding otherwise. We can conclude differently, or pretend that we have, but we cannot justify such a conclusion in reason.

We cannot dominate people without claiming that “might makes right”. And we cannot rationally claim that “might makes right”. Ergo, we cannot in justice attempt to dominate each other. We can do it, if we want, but cannot justify it in reason.

Trying to justify domination, trying to rationalize it with the Third Thing, has unhappy consequences, as we can see all around us. Again it is absurd that we need to say this, but we do: operating from insane premises results in insane conclusions. It’s not the gang-banger with the AR-15 who is crazy, it’s the political philosopher who stands on the curb sputtering, “Should not! Must not! Cannot!”

Does.

What doesn’t make sense is striving to contrive ever more absurd Rube Goldberg machines, senseless contraptions that enable you to drive away in my car but forbid the gang-banger to drive away in yours, all without anybody getting hurt. You can do this if you want, but it should surprise no one that the trousered, inhibited savages will lose every battle to the uninhibited, naked savages.

And what does make sense is to renounce savagery. This is what the political philosophers has been aiming at for 2,000 years, and it’s no stain on them that they missed a target they couldn’t see and could barely imagine. Civilization is the slow march to the recognition that each of us is separate from all the others, that each of us is free from all the others, and that each of us is sovereign to rule over our own lives. We have risen from the animals, and the animals have never tired of demanding that we rejoin them. But we are human — unique among creatures — as we leave the savagery of the animals behind us.

What makes sense is to acknowledge that we cannot actually dominate one another, that we stare tragedy right in the face whenever we try to dominate one another. What makes sense is to devote our incomparable minds to discovering ways to live together without attempts at domination. We can do this, of course. We already do it almost all of the time. And I can name dozens of simple and effective non-coercive ways of dealing with people who insist on attempting domination. That is also beyond the scope of this essay, but it is sufficient to say that it is possible for human beings to find ways to get along without pushing each other around at gunpoint. And again this is an absurdity that is necessary to state: we can live without killing each other. In peace, in harmony, in prosperity, in splendor…

The bay-trees in our country are all wither’d
And meteors fright the fixed stars of heaven;
The pale-faced moon looks bloody on the earth
And lean-look’d prophets whisper fearful change;
Rich men look sad and ruffians dance and leap,
The one in fear to lose what they enjoy,
The other to enjoy by rage and war:
These signs forerun the death or fall of kings.

William Shakespeare, Richard II

We rub our eyes at the dawn of a new millennium, and for this reason if for no other, people are awake to the possibility of new and better ideas. We have them — a nearly perfect roadmap to civilization — and we are skilled at conveying our philosophy.

Our appeal as libertarians to the rest of the political spectrum is our immense consistency. They see us from a distance, and we appear to them to be monolithic in our advocacy of human liberty. Well we are, almost. But that little bit of corruption, that tiny little claim that force can sometimes be justified, will in due course destroy the rest. Just like the last time.

Savagery does not make sense. The proto-savagery called statesmanship does not make sense. What makes sense is the renunciation of savagery, the renunciation of “might makes right”.

We can convince them of what is right. Probably we can’t convert them by the busload, but they are listening to us, and they never were before. We can tell them about the Third Thing all day and all night, describe it in perfect and loving detail, and in short order they will stop listening; they’ve heard it all before, after all, and the competing brands of imaginary amulets are kinder, gentler and more forgiving. Or we can strive to convince them of what is really right. But first we have to discover it.

I’ve known for more than a year that I want to write a book about what we’re getting wrong.

As a species, that is.

Through all of human history.

Surely that’s a man-sized ambition — and perhaps also a new high-water mark for the abstract concept denoted by the word “hubris.”

That’s as may be. In truth, this is an undertaking I would rather not undertake. For one thing, I’m busy and, in consequence, I’m physically tired much of the time. For another, this is less a thankless job than it is a task for which I can reasonably expect to be punished. Not officially punished, one may hope, but it seems likely that I will be derided, hectored or hounded as I proceed with this project. I don’t shun that sort of thing, not ever, but it’s not something I actively court.

But none of that matters. The ideas I want to talk about drive me wild — in the best of all possible senses. I abhor every form of the claim of unchosen duty, and yet I feel that I must go through all this, that I cannot live in peace, much less die in peace, until I have transcribed every bit of everything that races through my brain.

But I can laugh at myself, too, so much am I alike, in my incipient dotage, to Dostoevsky’s Underground Man: “I am a sick man. I am a spiteful man.” Saving the world is a madman’s obsession, after all, a belfry awaiting its loyal complement of bats.

So that’s one caveat, one of plenty more to come: I might be completely mad. Or I might simply be madly wrong. Or I might be so cloyingly clever as a demagogue that I can make you think that wrong is right and right is wrong. I believe with everything I have within me that I am telling the full truth about everything I understand, but I understand, too well, that your mind is your own to maintain. I will do my best to speak the truth as best as I can, but I will also point out what I consider to be weaknesses in my arguments, as I go along, so that you can be that much better prepared to maintain your own mind.

There’s more: I have no education to speak of, and I bear my ignorance like a curse, like a bloody caul over my eyes, obscuring everything I see. I’m a clumsy oaf in Latin, and I have no Greek at all. I am a mongrel dog without pedigree, so much a child of the gutter as to make making distinctions a vanity. I argue well, I think, and I hope validly, but I want to give you every excuse I can think of to dismiss me, to turn your back and insist — at full voice — that there is nothing here of interest to you or to anyone. I don’t reject your disagreement, but I don’t intend to waste my time on people seeking to undermine my case. If you want to spurn this offering of my mind, you could not possibly want that outcome more than I do.

Even so, I want to do my best to be nice about this. I’m not a nice person, and I suffer fools very badly, but I am not doing this to whip anyone into line. Too much the contrary! It happens that much of what I have to talk about will cause just about everyone some pain, but neither pain nor pain-compliance are among my objectives.

Again: Too much the contrary! The essence of everything I have to say, the thing humanity has gotten most wrong through all of human history, is an idea I call Splendor. We’ll define that concept again and again, as we go along, but this is the shortest definition I have come up with so far:

Splendor is the interior experience of being so enthralled by the act of creating the values that contribute to and ultimately comprise your idealized perfect self that, while you are experiencing it, you are your idealized perfect self.

What is the meaning of life? What is the purpose of man’s existence on Earth? The objective of questions like those two and many others is to absolve the questioner’s furtively pre-planned failures in advance. But the purpose of a properly functioning human consciousness is Splendor. Whether or not there is anything like a designer of the human mind, Splendor is what the human mind is designed to do.

And that’s what this book is about, this instead-of-a-book for now. I have a lot to talk about, and for a solid year I’ve been thinking about how to commence. But I had no idea how to begin this project until I understood that — no matter how much Squalor we might have to slog through to understand the mess we have made of the world — the proper subject and object of all truly human thought is Splendor — attaining it, sustaining it, transmitting it to and cultivating it within other human minds, spreading it to every last corner of this too-often-benighted orb.

Do you want to talk about ambition? I know how to heal the global economy. I know how to win the War on Terror. I know how best to safeguard the environment, and how, even, to rid the world of virtually all conflict. I wrote the headline above — “Save the world from home in your spare time!” — a long time ago as a parody of matchbook advertisements. But it’s really no joke: I can show you and your neighbors and everyone on the planet how to save the world — how to make this world the paradise we have so far only dared to imagine in other realms.

How much more ambition must I claim for myself? This much, at least: I am writing this now in the hope that humanity can avoid yet another Dark Age, yet another descent into centuries of tyranny and unreason. But it seems plausible to me that I might well be writing to the other side of that awful crevasse. It is hubris indeed to plant myself in the path of Socrates as he saves the human race for the third time, but the world needs saving for a third time because of the vital work the Greeks and their children of the mind have never yet been fully able to accomplish.

To the Greeks, to the Romans, to the British and to the Americans, each at the finest moments in their histories, individual human beings were suffered to be free in their bodies. But never in human history have we acknowledged the simple ontological fact that the human mind, by its nature, is free of every bond that might be imposed upon it by other people.

When we “suffer” human liberty, we imply that the natural and ongoing state of human existence is slavery, an existence confined by cages and chains, constrained by whips and guns and contained, ultimately, by a silent language of shame and fear. But every bit of this is false. The would be masters of human minds require chains and whips and fear to effect their tyranny precisely because the human mind cannot be compelled by any force whatever. You cannot be caused to believe some external doctrine, and you cannot be prevented from upholding whatever ideas you might choose. You can be pushed around like a barrel or locked up like an animal. But you cannot be controlled by anyone, ever, from the outside.

The purpose of human consciousness is Splendor, but Splendor is itself a secondary consequence of a properly-functioning human mind. And the nature of that mind, thriving in delight, aglow with wonder for itself? The inescapable ontological nature of the human mind is independence. That’s not an “ought,” not a moral ideal invented by the Greeks, cherished and improved upon by their students. This is simply the way we are made, the way all of us are made, no matter how oppressive our upbringing might have been.

I would free the Americans because I am one — and I crave freedom with an American’s outsized hunger. But there are people on this Earth who are much more terribly constrained than the Americans, and I would deliver the gifts of Splendor to them, as well. I know what I want to say, and I believe that if I can say it in the way it should be said, I can correct this awful error, this awful omission of the Greeks, for every one of us, forevermore.

That’s right. You, too, can save the world — forevermore — from home in your spare time! It’s not even hard — and that just by itself is funny to me. The errors we make, the errors we have always made, are pitiful and small. Here’s what I want for you, here’s what I want for me, here’s what I want for all of us: I want for the human race to be admirable and immense. Consciously. Conscientiously. Constantly.

I can’t say that people will do as I advise them to — although you can rest assured that my advice will never extend beyond rational persuasion. But I know that what I have to say is important, and I know that if some people elect to pursue and perfect the ideas discussed here, they will live better, happier lives. And if enough people act upon these ideas, the world around them will change for the better, too.

Can I promise you a better world? No, alas. All I can do is show you the world as I can envision it. If I am mad, to do as I do will result in disaster. And if I am wrong, willfully or not, so much the worse. But in the end I am doing this because I must, because I desperately want for my fellow human beings to do better — to be better — and so I am taking the time to explain what I know about the science of being a better human being.

What you do about it — now or later or never — is your business.

…prepare yourself for the asshole cops…

Just think: If you just keep voting for more and more government, eventually the nanny-state might find a way to stuff you back up into your mammy’s womb. Or, failing that, they’ll exterminate you and everyone you know and love. Either way, the world will finally be rid of the pestilence of pesky humanity.

Black humor? No shit. But at least you don’t have to wonder who’s the asswipe now…

[This is me in February of 2004. It's fun for me to read now, because we were selling a lot then, and -- like a lot of folks -- the next year, 2005, was my best year so far. I didn't plan to follow that up with three years of drought, but some days the bear eats you. This year started out with five more months of drought, and yet we're going to finish 2009 somewhere between $8 and $10 million in gross volume. We're surfing a 90-day pipeline of around $100K in GCI, and I'm working very hard to pump that up to $250K. If we can get there, we'll actually have a business.

But: I'm not selling success as a matter of dollars and cents. That matters to me, but not as much as Splendor does, not as much as integrity and follow-through and a comprehensive commitment not just to the good but to getting better -- all the time. I have an essay aborning in me about everything I have learned about sales in the last ten years, but even that's not as much as I want to do -- as much as I want to have done. I want better money, yes, for us and for everyone who listens to us. And I want for Realtors to be better. I want for us to have an earned and deserved reputation as honest brokers who put our clients' interest first. But before all that, I want for people to do better, to be better, to experience life more as a rapturous treasure and less as an unwanted burden. I want for the world to be better, remarkably better in every conceivable way.

This essay is me, the real deal, entirely unedited. I know I'm not alone in being like this, but no one dares to talk this way. We are children of Abel in every way that matters, and we are too much ashamed of being alive to celebrate the simple fact of our vitality. And yet this is the change that matters. To be free of other people means to be free of them in the silence and solitude of your own mind. If they can't get at you there, then chains and walls are nothing but expressions of their inevitable failure. But if you forebear to be who you really are at the command of some internal editor, you are imprisoned everywhere -- even when you are completely alone.

If you want to buy or sell some real estate in Metro Phoenix, I'm your guy. But the best gift I have to bring to the marketplace is this one: The practical expression of Splendor as a philosophy of being. --GSS]

 
The world I live in, the world I love to live in, is a place of the most intense concentration. To a degree, it doesn’t even matter to me what I’m concentrating on, provided it commands my fullest attention. What I like best is to think about one thing and to think all about that one thing and to think about it exhaustively, until I understand it as if I were inside that thing, as if I were that thing.

The world I die in, the world in which I hate to find myself enmired, is the place where there is nothing to be thought about, nothing to be understood, nothing to be accomplished but the rote, the obvious, the useless and trivial. I am twice lucky, though, because I can live in my world even when I’m stuck in that place of dusty death, and because I cannot for the life of me remember pain in the instant after it goes away.

I live on this page, this temporary parchment of agitated phosphors, but I live at the same time in so many otherwheres. I wrote Macintosh software for years, the years when I couldn’t make the phosphors dance. My essay on Ibsen is the pride of Norway and a day off from work for lazy American literature professors, who assign it year after year. My study aids for the Oxford Latin Course and my partial rescue of the Interlineal Horace win me the acclaim of bleary-eyed young Latinists all over the globe. The absolute best work I have ever done, I think, is Anastasia in the light and shadow. But the most popular opus in my corpus — in terms of raw bandwidth — is not my weblog, not a political or philosophical essay, not a short story, not a book or a novel. It is a very crude animation explicating Catullus LVIII — and Lesbia just struts, she doesn’t even strip!

But this is my world, a world where all that exists is what I am concentrating on right now. I love it better than absolutely anything, and when I find it, that vast, pulsing orb of effortless energy, I can work forever, I can work until there is nothing left in me or of me or to me. I can work until I collapse, then sleep the sleep of the blessed, then wake to do it all over again — again and again, forever.

I love, love, love to write, and when it comes for me, when it’s right, I can write a thousand words an hour for six or seven hours a day. I stink like the dead when I stop, and I babble on senselessly, but when I sleep it’s as if the next day’s work is done for me in the night — by elves! — and the words just pour out of me when I sit down to work again. The things that I’ve written that are heartbreakingly beautiful — to me, at least — were all written that way — this way — as fast as I can type the words, constantly racing to catch up with my uninterruptible concentration.

But as much as I love to write, I love, love, love almost everything that I do. When I was writing that software, I wrote it to infinite perfection. I solved the mission critical problem. I solved all of the ancillary problems. I error-trapped for things that could never happen. I wrote jokes and poetry in the source code for my own amusement, and I built in Easter eggs for the end users, with other treats kept secret just for the people who helped me design and test my programs. I wrote my own manuals, and the manuals are fun reading — useful, practical, whimsical, cautionary, sometimes even wise. I made my own icons and designed my own packaging and did everything the best way I could, and I got better consistently through time. And all through all of that — all through everything, everywhen — there was within me the quiet and perfect and unquestionable conviction that working any other way would be hellish. That doing anything less the best I could do in functionality, in elegance and in pure enjoyment would serve only to enmire me in that world of dusty death. I would betray everything I had done by failing to do what I could have done — what I might have and should have done.

And I do everything that way. And I hate doing anything any other way. I hate having anything to do with anything that doesn’t need to be done, and I hate for things to be done half-way, half-measure, half-assed. I don’t even want for tasks merely to have been accomplished competently and proficiently. If there is nothing of delight in the doing, then the chore is not done. If there is nothing of me in the doing, then I might as well have been dead.

I would see myself reflected in everything I touch — not as a vanity, not as a self-indulgence in appreciation for the accomplishment of nothing, not as an accident of nature. I want to see the evidence of my hand — my own hand — in the things I have done as a measure of the value I bring to and seek in my life. I want to look upon my work and say, “This is well done. This is properly done. This is superbly done.” I want for the things I do to be distinct in every way from the natural, the accidental, the random, the dusty and the dead. My work is my life and my life is my work and the full evidence of my effortless energy must be present in each of them — or both are dead.

I think about all of this now — a point on a line of time named ‘always’ — because of the people I am working with right now. I so much love nearly everything I do that I have never cared very much about remuneration. Enough to live on was more than enough, and the rest was mere score-keeping, a vanity at best. But my son has developed a taste for expensive education, and my wife and I will need to retire in due course, and the simple fact of life is that I can reap just as much delight working at peak intensity for money as I can working at that same intensity for free — or some small sum in the immediate neighborhood. To that end, I have consciously directed my attention to learning how to be a truly fearsome sales monster. I approached this like everything else, with a ferocious concentration, and it looks like it’s about to begin to pay off.

But what I’ve been thinking about is how much I enjoy it. It’s like everything else for me — everything is like everything else for me — thoughtful effort is thrice repaid. I think about everything associated with this one little thing, and I think all about what I think is wrong in everyone else’s thinking. It’s the same approach I used with Latin demonstrative pronouns, master the base and overlay the exceptions, a very programmatic style of ratiocination. I plan someday to know more about this than anyone. Not for the sake of knowing. For the sake of doing. I want to be able to do this job so well that I end up turning away more people than ever I can help.

And I love, love, love the people I get to work with. I spent the first third of my working life in salaried jobs, and half the people I worked with were half-assed at least half the time. The others were exceptional, and I loved working with them and learning from them — or simply admiring their delightful competence. But now everyone I work with is a sales monster in some respect — a person who is paid only upon the successful completion of an intricate and volatile task.

Mostly these folks are not what I would call contemplative. Like my lovely Gwendolyn, I go to some pains to edit the full glare of me in their sight. But to a man, to a woman — they are focused. Each one of them, every day, is presented with this challenge: Do each and every task your job requires, perfectly and as soon as it must be done, without failure, all on your own motivation — or starve to death! This is reality, the reality that is never absent in random, accidental nature. That most people, most employees, most time-servers — half-assed at least half the time — are insulated from this reality is a gift from exceptional people like the ones I get to work with every day. If I might wish to make a deeper sort of conversation with them, I could never ask to experience a deeper admiration for them.

They are of my world. I don’t know what they think about epistemology or ethics or economics or esthetics. I don’t know if they agree with me about anything away from the world of our business. What I know is that when we are in that world of our business, they are in my world and I am in their world and none of us is in that world of dusty death.

I believe in Splendor, and what I mean by that word is the state of being — the state of mind and the intensely physical, palpable oscillation of the body — that comes from doing whatever it is you’re doing so fully, so completely, so consciously that you are not doing anything else — not anything else. The mind is focused by an act of will, but true concentration is not a focused mind. True concentration is a focused everything.

That sounds harsh, but of course Splendor is delight — undiluted, undiverted, undivided — undiminished and inextinguishable. I love it when I live it, and I live in my world because I love it so much. I have my wife with me and my son and my dogs. I have the wonderful people I am privileged to work with. I write psalms for those who shun my world, or who seem to, but in truth I don’t miss them. I can’t. I am enthralled by a vast, pulsing orb of effortless energy — the object, the subject, the essence of my devout concentration. I can’t bear to look away. And I never, ever look down…

[This is me, from 09/10/2006. --GSS]

 
Cathy and I watched The Path to 9/11 on television tonight. I had forgotten that we were in Metro New York for the Turn of the Millennium. My father lives in Connecticut, and we went there that year for New Year’s Day. The photo you see is my son crawling all over a bronze statue of a stock broker in Liberty Park, directly across from what was then the Merrill Lynch Building — on December 30, 1999. I lived in Manhattan for ten years, from 1976 to 1986. For quite a few of those years, I worked just across from Liberty Park, in the Equitable Building at 120 Broadway. At the other end of that little brick park was the southeast entrance to the World Trade Center complex. I worked insane hours in those days, and, very often, when I got out of work, I would go sit at this tiny circular plaza plopped down between the Twin Towers. Not quite pre-dawn, still full dark, but completely deserted — and to be completely alone in New York City is an accomplishment. I would throw my head back and look up at the towers, the fourth movement of the Ninth Symphony running note-perfect through my head.

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

I don’t believe in any heaven except for this earth, this life — the heaven we make every day by pursuing the highest and best within us. The World Trade Center had its faults. I can detail every one. But it was a piece of the sublime, a proud testament to how high, how good our highest and best can be. I don’t believe in heaven, but when I think of what was done that day, I pray there is an everlasting torment for the men who did it…

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

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

The time of your life is your sole capital. If you trade that time in such a way that you get in exchange less than you really want, less than you might actually have achieved, you have deliberately cheated yourself. You have acted to your own destruction by failing to use your time to construct of your life what you want most and need most and deserve most. You have let your obsession or anger — over what amounts to a trivial evil in a world where people are shredded alive — deprive you of all of the rest of your values. This is anegoic, acting contrary to the true needs of the self.

One of my favorite memories is of a Labor Day years ago. My son and I were out riding our bikes and we rode to a CompUSA to see all the latest software. The store was packed. Middle managers poring over the PERT packages, programmers pawing through hefty manuals, yuppie couples testing eduware with their little yuppiekinder. Labor Day is a holiday established by people who hate human productivity, who hate the human mind. It is a day set aside on the calendar to celebrate and sanctify indolence — and violence. And there in the CompUSA were the men and women of values. The people who know that to be more and have more, you must learn more and do more.

Those are my people. I love them better than any other people I meet. I work with them, laugh with them on the phone, transact business with them. I love to write about them. There are no villains, none more significant than bugs. But there are heroes. For the most part, they can’t defend their beliefs the way I can. But they live those beliefs, every day.

I think it is hypocrisy to say, “I will cooperate with the state when I shower, when I drive, when I don’t want a landfill behind my house, but I will pretend to rebel with respect to this one of the hundreds of taxes, all the rest of which I will pay without batting any eye.” But that notwithstanding, to deliberately frustrate your own self-adoration, to deliberately circumscribe your own self-actualization, to deliberately forbid yourself to live to the fullest of your capacity — that is a tax that could only be self-inflicted. No tyrant could be that diabolical. Behaving this way is anegoic, acting contrary to the true needs of the self.

The time from the birth of human awareness, age four or so, to its death, closely correspondent to your corporeal demise, is all the life you have as a human being. To deny yourself all you can have, because it is not all you otherwise might have had, is anegoic, acting contrary to the true needs of the self. The people in the West who are most free of the bonds of other people are not the tax scofflaws or the libertarians or the imaginary prudent predators. They’re the people crowding every cultural equivalent of CompUSA, working assiduously to figure out how to achieve the most and the best of all of their values, from first to last.

I think this is where true human freedom starts.