[The following was duplicated from the original at indarchy.com.]
With “we” here, I mean the so-called “freedom lovers.” I mean those of us who understood what’s been going on for a very long time, and who didn’t like it one little bit. I mean those who’ve been citing the Founding Documents, with a focus on the ideas involved. I mean those who knew all along that reality admits of no contradictions…not in the physical realm and not in the human realm.
We saw all this and we saw even worse. We knew all along that production wasn’t a series of numbers to be tracked. We knew–from principle as well as experience–that statism simply can’t last. We know the nature of the entities involved, and we know that something can’t come from nothing…no matter how deep your wish nor how long your whip. We understood the whole time, the last few decades and the next few years, what simply must happen if collectivism and statism rule the day.
And that’s the part we got wrong. Thank goodness. We see things how they are and we conclude to where they must lead. Hence, the picture in our minds is usually one of collapse. We see fools thinking they may sit at home and somehow live a long, happy life. We see fools thinking that if they tweak the whip just right, then they may be happy too. We see thugs all around us, honestly believing that they are doing the moral good, because they’ve been taught nothing else, not ever. We understand the errors, and we know that logic simply commands–that is, reality simply commands–that somehow all of this must collapse and somehow a new world must be built on the ashes and bodies so wastefully piled.
That was our error, for a human life is not a structure. There are no bricks to tear down, nor foundations to be dismantled. Human life is built on time, and the time is always what it is…now. There is no time in which action can be done, nor is there any time for which we may willfully choose, except the present.
It’s not that the foundation mustn’t be properly built; of course it must. Luckily that’s a piece of cake, so easy that it doesn’t even take any physical building. The foundation is what’s already there, and in fact was the only thing there all along. The foundation is what decent people choose, and decent people are chomping at the bit to choose what’s right. They just never heard it, that’s all. And from what I can tell, they’re about to hear it, in spades.
I guess the message here is simple. We’ve known this all along too, but these are the times when it must become clear as a bell, and not a single mistake can be made when imparting it. Human life is about creation and building, and we must remain ever-conscious in remembering that the only thing a human life can directly create and build, is the single life itself.
The correct message is not, “Tear it down.” The correct message is, “Build it up.”
It suits my ends to poke around in the trash can inside your brain, but I’m not doing it to be mean — nor to induce you to feel bad about yourself. I know a whole lot about the interior mental processes that motivate the pursuit of values and disvalues — and about the subsequent and secondary consequences of those mental processes — but it’s not as if I can actually read your mind.
So how do I know so much about how your mind works? I don’t, not by any means except inference. What I know about is how my mind works. We are alike as things — we are ontological equals — so I know that your mind works the same way mine does — no less than and for the same reasons that your heart works the same way mine does. Moreover, I can look you in the eye and tell you the truth of your life in excruciating detail, working from nothing other than past experience with myself and other people. Our differences make us unique and beautiful, but our similarities make us comprehensible to each other.
So without intending to scold you, I need to say something to you in the gentlest way I can:
You’re getting everything wrong!!
Wrong, wrong, wrong. All the time, for all your life. Everyone, everywhere, for all of human history. Wrong, wrong, wrong — always and everywhere wrong — with wrong heaped upon wrong in twisted, corrupt dogmas of wrongness.
Do you want proof?
It could be you’re all hunched up in resentment at being called wrong. Or maybe you’re folded in on yourself in guilt, revisiting all of your past perceived sins. But here’s how I know that you’re wrong, and that you’ve been wrong about nearly everything, for almost all of your life:
Because being wrong doesn’t matter. Being right is the only thing that matters.
We all tell lies, the worst of them to ourselves. We all shirk our responsibilities, crafting sullen silent soliloquies to justify our laziness. We all hurt other people, and we are all hurt by them. We all do things we know are wrong when we’re doing them, and we all live with the pain of those errors forever — silently, in a stolid solitude, but forever.
The things you have done that are wrong are not to be dismissed, shrugged off. They can’t be, no matter how much you might wish they could. But redemption is egoism in action. There are limits to how much of the past damage you have done to your self you can undo, but we redeem our errors not by penance and not by renunciation but by acts of splendor.
All you need is an idle moment to catch your self doing something wrong — in the past. What you need instead is to catch your self doing something right — right now.
In due course, I’m going to talk about the world and about everything that can go wrong with it — wars and diseases and tyrannies and cataclysms and catastrophes unending — but what I am really talking about, what I am always talking about is self-love, the all-but-unendurable worship by the self of the self, this as a matter of simple justice, in appreciation for past and present physical and purely introspective expressions of mental and moral greatness.
You are too much aware of your past sins and failures because you have too little greatness in your life — too little splendor — to be conscious of instead.
Do you see? Your self is your life, and your awareness of your self is the source and the sink of every other awareness you have ever had. Your relationship with your self is primary and paramount in any other relationship you might have with other people or with things outside your mind. Every purposive action you take is taken first by your self upon your self, and there is nothing you can think, say, do or experience that is not felt first, most and always by your self.
Your self is the star of every scene of every act in the drama of your life. So here’s an interesting question: When your self takes the stage, what do you see?
The same thing I see, for what that’s worth. Your body is the physical expression of your self, and your every triumph, your every disaster and your every delight and terror is written on your face, on your skin, in your posture, in your movements and in your speech for any observant person to see. But the self of the mind, your true self, is visible only to you. I can see how your past has inscribed itself into the cells of your body, but only you can see the self you would have and could have and should have become.
This is the dirty little secret I know about you, the one I refuse to keep quiet about: I know you’ve betrayed the self of your imagination in just about every way possible. I know there are things you are burning, burning, burning to do — and yet you talked yourself out of doing them, again and again. I know there are things you want desperately to have achieved — but not desperately enough to dig in and do them. I know you have been pressured, again and again, into doing things you knew were wrong when you did them, and I know you have done other things you knew were wrong purely out of spite, frustrating yourself more than anyone else.
I know that when you were four or five years old, you imagined for yourself a glorious self, a thing of illimitable goodness. And I know you have smudged and smeared and soiled and sullied and chipped and chopped away at that image of your self ever since. I know that you’ve never stopped mourning what is in fact a gradual and persistent and ultimately fatal self-annihilation, and I know that you hate your own self-abnegation so much that you would do almost anything to make it stop — except stop doing it.
How do I know all this? Duh.
I’ve understood everything I’m talking about at progressively higher levels of abstraction since I was very young, but that doesn’t mean that I have been spared the horrifying and mentally-permanent spectacle of self-induced error. Too much the contrary, alas, and with less of the self-serving self-righteous self-justification other people might lay claim to.
But guess what? None of this matters at all. I am lucky, in my own error-ridden past, in this way: I try to pay attention to everything, so I’ve learned a lot from my own past self-destructive actions. But still more importantly, self-destruction does not matter, except to the extent that one must learn to stop doing it. What truly matters, all that truly matters is self-construction, realizing — making real — that image of your self you crafted for yourself when you were four or five years old.
The world outside your mind is just so much weather — sunny one day, rainy the next, meaningless almost all the time. Other people matter to your self only to the extent that you yourself matter to your self. All that really matters is your self and what you are doing with it.
Do you see your self as being ugly, small, of no consequence? That’s because that is how you behave. You see your self all the time. Every thought you have is hugely about your self, and every purposive physical action you take is your self manifesting itself in the world outside your mind. What you see of your self in your mind’s eye is the accumulated reflection of what you have seen of your self — today and on every day before this one.
Do you want to see your self as being beautiful? As a thing of uncontainable enormity? Do you want to see your self for what it really is, as the most important thing that could ever exist within the universe of your consciousness? If this is what you want, then you have to behave that way. In the world outside your mind, you have to manifest the self you have imagined for yourself inside your mind.
What is it that you want to do? What is it that you want to have accomplished? You have to do those things. You have to see yourself doing those things. When you feel pressure to betray your self, from other people or from some doctrine of self-annihilation, you have to stand up to that pressure — you have to be the hero you loved to imagine for your self when you were young.
Making mistakes does not matter. Acting deliberately in error does not matter. Being evil does not matter. Failing your self — refusing out of spite and laziness to be the self you would have and could have and should have become — does not matter. What’s one more zero on the scoreboard of time, after all?
All that matters, all that matters, all that ever matters is being right — for an instant, for an hour, for a day, for a year, for a lifetime. As a matter of ontology, being right is the only way to achieve anything, but, even before that, being right is the only way you can live with your self. You have the power to choose who you will be, but you do not have the power to escape who you have become — not and remain conscious as a living human being. You cannot wish your way to greatness, you cannot erase your memories of your past evils, and you cannot worship your self in appreciation for the accomplishment of nothing. You can choose always to build upon and burnish your self, or you can choose instead to soil and dismantle it. But you cannot love who you are without behaving lovably in the actions of your existence.
Just that much is the most amazingly, wonderfully inspiring thing you could ever think about, if you make it your business to think about it all the way through. But there is a level of inspiration beyond this one, if you stop to consider that you are just like me and we two are just like everyone else.
If you have habituated self-destructive behavior, you have to stop. But merely not being wrong is not sufficient. All that matters is being right. So you self-identify an error and set about to correct it, making up for past injuries to yourself and other people, as much as you can, and doing better going forward. And you do that again and again, one bad habit after another, each one as you discover it. And after a while, the habit of self-improvement becomes the defining metaphor of your life — improving not your mind or your body directly, but improving your self in ways that result in improvements in your mind and in your body — and in your behavior. That much is remarkable: The more greatness you see in your own real-time and remembered behavior, the more greatness you will see in your self, in the silence and solitude of your mind.
Now think of this: Your next-door neighbor is just like you. So is your brother-in-law and the nice lady who cleans your office on Tuesdays and Thursdays. We are each one of us identical, ontologically, to all the others, and there is nothing that you can do to improve your self that your neighbor cannot do as well. Imagine what could happen if your neighbor and your brother-in-law and your cleaning lady and everyone you know were to commit themselves to a lifetime of continuous self-improvement. Imagine if every human being on the face of the planet, living now and yet to be born, were committed to the idea of being his or her best possible self, committed to being good, to being great, to being better every day.
Imagine a world where each living human being has chosen to live for nothing other than self-adoration — to being everything he desires, everything he admires, everything he aspires to — all day, every day, with not one second lost to self-betrayal, self-abnegation, self-destruction.
Do you think that might be a world worth living in?
Do you think that might be a world worth working toward?
You live in squalor, and there is an extent to which you worship that squalor. As long as everything is wrong, wrong, wrong, as long as everything is bad and ever and always worse, you can absolve yourself of any responsibility for your circumstances — it’s all out there, all of it beyond your control. But you hate your life, to the extent that you do, because you hate what you see yourself doing with your life. And you love your life, when you do, when you see your self living up to itself. The world you want to live in is not one where everything out there is perfect, but where the world of your self is perfectible and steadily more perfect.
On other days, in other essays, I can talk about how the world conspires against your self. But that doesn’t really matter, nor does anything else you might name. All that matters, all that ever matters in the context of your own life, is what you yourself are getting right. If you want to change the world, this is within your power — but you can only change it from the inside out. Do that, and nothing that happens outside your mind will matter very much. And if we can persuade enough other people to pursue self-adoration along with us, the world outside our minds will change for the better for all of us.
I have many more reasons to be cheerful still to discuss, but this is all the reason you need to be filled to bursting with optimism. You don’t need to change the world. What you need to change is your thinking, your habits of mind and your behavior. Make those changes and, regardless of any squalor still to be found in the world, your own life will be a paradise of illimitable splendor.
How do I know all this? Duh…
Reasons to be cheerful: Defying the specter of ugly fates.
Manifest your own destiny: You say you want a revolution? Yeah, well anyone can piss and moan about how bad everything is. If you want things to change, I’m making a stout effort to show you how to achieve revolutionary change — from the inside out. But your own efforts at self-improvement will bear sweeter fruit sooner if you share what you’re learning with other people who love to live. You’ve never heard anything like this before. Why would you hoard it to yourself?
Art is demanding, and that’s good. But art is petulant and importunate and presumptuous to a fault. Art is that damned nuisance of a snoopy neighbor who keeps knocking, knocking, knocking on your cellar door. Art goes straight for the places you forbid yourself to think about and rummages through your most terrifying secrets like a burglar tearing through your underwear drawer. Good art makes you hate it as you devour it, shun it as you immerse yourself in it. Good art makes you restless and jagged and ragged and inspired. Good art makes you shiver. Great art makes you cringe.
Art is a vanity in precisely this way: I presume to recreate reality in my own image and likeness, and I have the effrontery to demand that you not only acknowledge that reality but prefer it. I presume to seize the universe and squeeze out of it a tiny seed of truth. And I presume to plant that seed within you — without your consent, perhaps without even your knowledge. And I presume to nurture this new universe I have caused to grow within you until you scream — if I am good enough — scream from agony and delight. And I presume to do all of this for no purpose of yours, but only for reasons of my own devising. And at the end of it you may thank me or damn me, but you will never have been more than the means to my end: I sought not you but only to spawn myself anew within you — immaculate conceptualization. Art is a vanity because it is the means by which the artist postures as a god — and not a very merciful god.
I see all of this and yet I embrace it. I am as much art’s victim as you, although on my best days I am lucky enough to have a bit of my own back. But as a species and as individuals we are unwilling to forswear the worst of our vices without that resounding blow to the head that art alone provides. Our artists are vain and petulant god-impostors, but they do for us the job we demand of gods: They fill us with awe and wonder and terror and they give us the excuse we seem to need to repent of vice.
As a species, as individuals, we are born enormous and we waste the span of our days and our years shrinking, shrinking, shrinking until we vanish away to nothingness. And while it would be vain and petulant and importunate and presumptuous to a fault for me to call any work of mine art, nonetheless I am come to you to give you a most resounding blow to the head in the hope that it will give you the excuse you seem to need to repent of this awful vice of shrinking.
I love humanity in principle but I loathe much of it in practice. And that is the sort of statement I normally rebel against. The implication is that there are two universes, one perfect but unreal, one real but inherently imperfect. I don’t believe in unreality and I don’t believe perfection is beyond our reach. I love what humanity can become, but for the most part has not. One of the reasons we revere great artists is because they have nurtured the seed of greatness that each of us carries within us. One of the reasons we despise great artists, sneering at their human imperfections, is because we despise ourselves for having failed to nurture the seed of greatness that each of us carries within us. I love to envision a humanity that rejoices in its potential for greatness and therefore never has cause to despise itself.
Is that not a godlike vision? Do not dare call it a merciful vision. I seek for you not ease, not comfort, not quiet, but their polar opposites. I would wish that you work ceaselessly, obsessively, beyond every standard of human endurance, to writhe and seethe and bleed giving birth to your greatness. And I would wish for you to undertake all of this at once, without delay. I have seen enough of this shrinking, and I want it to stop.
Is that not sufficiently demanding? I presume to dictate to you the terms of your existence, and I do it with the utmost effrontery. I demand not just that you repent of vice, I expect you to punch out some hefty virtues, and no half measures. I am importunate by any interpretation and I am petulant beyond dispute.
Is that not presumptuous enough for you? Surely it is, for you and I both know the nature of those most terrifying secrets, but I alone am presumptuous enough to reveal them. I am no mere snoopy neighbor, no mere rummaging burglar. I am you, you in your most furtive and delicious and concealed and coveted moments. I am you in principle, never in practice. Perfect but unreal, burnished to a glow in the utter secrecy of the imagination, hidden from every eye in the universe, even from your own. I am the seed of that greatness within you, fully grown in another garden.
Is that not vanity personified? Indeed. But exactly. I am vanity personified, the word made flesh, the world made fresh. Infuriatingly fresh. I am a resounding blow to your head with a cold, wet fish. I don’t want to knock some sense into you; that’s not possible. I want you to unlock that horrid dungeon of the mind in which all the sense is imprisoned. You know what I am because you know what you are — in principle. I want you to be what you are in principle in practice.
I want you to stop shrinking, shrinking, shrinking and instead nurture the seed of your own enormity. I am not another empty-headed little door-to-door salesman peddling self-esteem or self-improvement or self-advancement or self-delusion. I am a thundering god-impostor and I demand from you self-love, the total worship of the ego by the ego. Self-love cannot be bought or sold, it can only be earned at the price of enormous effort. And I demand that you make that effort to deserve your own adoration.
The words that are running through your mind right now are the words by which you have made war on your life since your childhood. Those words are the means by which you endlessly shrink away to nothingness. You will not grow merely by ceasing to despise your potential for greatness, but you cannot grow as long as you persist in this hideous self-annihilation. You are born to live, no less than any tree or bird, and you have the potential to live in a way impossible to the plants and the animals, to live a life of beauty and meaning and achievement. But you cannot live that life while you are pursuing its destruction.
I am a student of the base and the squalid. But I am a poet of the glorious, the immense. I imagine for myself a radiant universe and I people it with giants. In my work I write about this failure of humanity or that error, this vice or that sin, and it would be easy enough to suppose that it is humanity itself, the stuff we’re made of, that is imperfect. But I know this is untrue. Humanity’s failure is not a failure of materials, not a failure of design. It is a failure of nerve. At least until now, we have lacked the courage to become what we truly are, reasoning animals.
I gaze into the squalor and I would wish that people stop indulging their stupidities, stop gathering into herds, stop pandering to their craven appetites — stop behaving as animals. But there is no end to the vices we could forswear and it would never be enough. We require not an end of vice, but a commencement of virtue. We need not to stop behaving as animals, we need to start behaving fully as human beings. All the time.
Good art makes you shiver, gentle reader, and great art makes you cringe. The very best art makes you change, and I am vain enough to hope that this day and these words will mark a change in your life that will last forever. If you will dare to be as enormous in practice as you furtively imagine yourself in principle, you will have a treasure that no one — no artist and no god — can ever provide for you: A life that you will not have to affect to despise by shrinking, shrinking, shrinking away to nothingness, a life that you can revere — openly, joyously, gloriously. And if you come one day to the perfect complement of this day, the day when you birth for yourself a universe as radiant as the one I would plant within you, I hope that you will share your self-reverence as I have shared mine with you.
Living is what you’re doing when you’re too enthralled to notice. Dying is what you’re doing when all you can do is notice. Our destiny is not to die without ever having dared to live. Our destiny is to thrive. Without shame. Without apologies. And without one instant of shrinking. I worship what you can become. I beseech you to become it and rejoice boundlessly in your enormity.
Greg Swann, 5/20/96
Reasons to be cheerful: Defying the specter of ugly fates.
Manifest your own destiny: You say you want a revolution? Yeah, well anyone can piss and moan about how bad everything is. If you want things to change, I’m making a stout effort to show you how to achieve revolutionary change — from the inside out. But your own efforts at self-improvement will bear sweeter fruit sooner if you share what you’re learning with other people who love to live. You’ve never heard anything like this before. Why would you hoard it to yourself?
And, yes, I’m talking about adult subject matter. If you’re still a giggling pre-teen, you might giggle off elsewhere. I intend to approach this as philosophy, but, if anything, that will just bring out more self-induced juvenility. The actual reason that normal adult Americans have bad sex is because they refuse — very probably in every realm of their lives — to take joy seriously. But we can’t even get that far without a commitment on your part to stop blushing and start thinking. If you won’t do this, what I plan to do here will be a waste of your time.
And must I also defend this as real estate? If you want to learn every new vendorslut trick for not making money while you betray your own soul, get thee to Agent Shortbus or any one of a hundred other sites. If you want to learn how to be a whole soul, to be the highest and best person you can be — at work, at home and in the privacy of the bedroom — let’s talk. But the only subject that matters to me is being alive as a self-conscious human being — and being good at it — and this post is 100% on-topic for that theme.
Are we down to nothing but adults who are prepared to be serious about human joy? Let’s start with a very basic premise: Normal, healthy adult human beings who love each other romantically should have great sex together virtually all of the time. Disabled? That could be a problem. Disabled in the mission-critical hardware? A bigger problem, but not an insuperable one. Stressed? Distracted? Drunk? Your timing is bad. Not in love? You’re screwed — but not in the good way.
My take in reading all of these alarming articles about pandemic sexual dysfunction is that the most likely problem is that, no matter how desperately people might be trying to have sex, only a precious few of them are fully committed to making love. We told ourselves, during the sexual revolution, that we were breaking the chains of biology. In fact, we were simply rationalizing a mindless, empty promiscuity. Getting laid is easy — and despite the lies we tell ourselves about the past, it has always been easy. It’s loving and being loved that’s hard to achieve, and it seems plausible to me that the more easy sex you chase, the harder it will be for you to forge a lasting, trusting commitment with another person.
How stupid is that?
We’re talking about self-love, self-adoration, now and always. This is all I am talking about, all I am ever talking about. Philosophy is all-encompassing, but philosophy begins with ethics, with teleology, with the unique self you have self-abstracted for yourself and what you choose to do with it. Is casual sex liberating? When you wake up next to someone you hardly know, and whose appearance and habits and character disgust you in the light of day — have you burnished and exalted your self, or have you soiled and diminished it? Will last night and this morning be moments of your life you will revisit with pride, or, when these events recall themselves to your memory, unbidden, again and again, will you feel shame, regret, revulsion, disgust?
Just as a general principle, anything you do that leaves you feeling ashamed or regretful or revolted or disgusted with your self is a disvalue, a thing not to be pursued but to be shunned and avoided. This is painfully obvious — and there is nothing I have to say that is not completely obvious to any normal five-year-old — but equally obvious are all the evidences of shame, regret, revulsion and disgust one can see on any Saturday or Sunday morning, just about 10 am. That’s when the boys and girls slink home in their night-club clothes, soiled just a little bit more, diminished to just a little bit less, encumbered forever with one more memory they can’t bear to look at and yet can’t ever manage to forget.
Again: How stupid is that?
Good grief! If all you need to do is to purge yourself of unwanted fluids, stay home and masturbate. Truly, there is no action you can take that is more fundamentally self-loving than self-loving itself, and, as side benefits, it’s fast, cheap and easy to clean up. It doesn’t leave you feeling disgust or hatred for yourself — despite what you were told at church. To the contrary, the endorphin kick will lend you a mild euphoria. And I’m pretty sure you won’t feel any need to fake anything.
I write as a man, and men don’t need to be told to masturbate. Any woman who really has a problem achieving orgasms with the man she loves should probably learn to love herself quite a bit more than she has. Love-making is a skill, and it’s not something that one is born knowing how to do. It doesn’t “just come naturally.” Women manage to cloud their minds with all kinds of barriers to their own enjoyment — worries about their looks, their weight, their clothes, jewelry and cosmetics, along with worries about everything else on the face of the earth. But even if she’s fully-committed to her own orgiastic joy, a woman still has to learn how to manage the hardware. Here again, men have it easier. Through the miracle of ultrasound, we know that little boys cuddle their puds while they’re still in the womb. All they learn later is how to deny it.
Here are two cool facts about a woman’s sexual hardware:
First, there’s almost nothing to master. We all know about the clitoris. If you can’t find it, you need to spend twenty or thirty seconds watching hi-def internet porn. And we’ve all heard about the G-spot, the allegedly elusive key to unlocking the treasure chest of every woman’s delight. Here’s the cool part: They’re all one organ. The clitoris is aligned on the exterior wall, the G-spot on the interior wall, and the whole thing is hugely sensitive. It’s exactly like the glans on a man’s penis — and don’t forget that men and women are just a variation on the same basic design — and, with just your thumb and two fingers, you can make the woman you love melt in your hand. It’s a very simply massage, and all you have to do is give it your time and pay attention to what she likes better and what she likes best.
Second, everything on a woman is sexual hardware. Men like to focus on a few choice targets, but a woman in love is in love over every inch of her skin, in every tiny hair of that skin, in every spot on her body that can be touched or stroked or caressed or kissed. For both men and women, the most important — and most enthralling — sex organ is the mind, but women often are not as adept as man can be at lying to themselves about the value of mere lust — which we have already identified as a disvalue. I don’t claim to understand what the sex act might be like for a woman who is not in love, but I’m inclined to think that it might not end in an orgasm — even if she fakes one.
But here’s the coolest fact of all about women’s sexual hardware: Once she starts coming, she doesn’t have to stop. A man’s orgasm is co-terminus with and is in many ways identical to ejaculation. What that means is that, no matter how aroused a man might be, and no matter how much he might want to achieve orgasm, if he has nothing to deliver, he will not climax. This is not true of women. A woman who loves her lover and understands how best to achieve orgasm can come again and again, effectively continuously — for five minutes, ten minutes, twenty minutes, an hour — to the limit of her physical endurance.
Think about that. Potential score: Infinity. Actual score: Zero. Precisely how screwed up are we, that something that should be infinitely pleasurable turns out to be, for as many as four out of five women, a nasty burden, an unwelcome chore, a task on a checklist to be dispensed with as quickly as possible and gotten out of the way?
Yet again: How stupid is that?
But don’t think I’m absolving the men. If women don’t achieve orgasm, it’s their own damn fault, but if men don’t experience orgasm as the fullest and finest expression of everything that is to be cherished and celebrated in human life, then they’re screwed, too. Coming is easy for a man. It’s commitment that’s hard. But without that commitment — without the full and fully-loving commitment to a partner you can’t bear to live without — sex is just a short spasm of pleasure followed by a lifetime of regret — lied about, white-washed, papered-over, renounced again and again in a short wince of otherwise introspective pain — but fundamentally self-destructive.
How stupid, how stupid, how stupid is that?
None of this is necessary. Women have to learn how their bodies work — and they have to learn to get out of their own way. Men have to learn how women’s bodies work, and how to control their own enthusiasm — which, incidentally, is a lot of fun just by itself. But both sexes have to learn the most important thing there is to know about sex: It’s not good for you if you’re not in love with your partner, but it is glorious — enthralling — soul-enriching — if you are. Very simple, very obvious. Your parents told you, but you knew it without having to be told. Making love is the most nakedly, openly vulnerable thing you can do with another person. How could it be any good with someone you don’t know, don’t like, don’t trust, don’t respect, don’t love? Why would anyone ever expect sex without love to be anything but a disappointment, in the long run?
So let’s get beyond that. You’ll either do better, going forward, or you won’t. What’s interesting to me about Paglia’s article and about the fake orgasm article is that love-making is the one activity of modern net.wise yuppies that seems to be immune, somehow, from the normal yuppie obsessions. Buying a new computer? You’ll read everything you can find on-line. Shopping for a new TV? You’ll be able to name the key features and short-comings of half-a-dozens models. Making love with your spouse, whom you truly do adore? No thought, no preparation, no tools, no toys, no accessories.
How stupid is that?
No one would clean a kitchen without cleaning supplies. No one would rebuild a transmission without tools. Yet we all show up in the bedroom armed with nothing but ignorance and unlimited needs — which soon enough turn into unlimited resentments. Very, very dumb.
Witness:
That’s an affiliate link to Fascinations, a very female-friendly sexual-aids emporium. It’s a true affiliate link; I’m undertaking a chore that no one else you know has been willing to do, and I’m going to get paid for it. Not everything they sell is worth buying, and, in general, you get what you pay for. But if you are looking for one relatively-inexpensive item that will make a world of difference in your love-making right away, buy a big bottle of Maximus lubricant and use it liberally. If both of you get rid of all or most of your pubic hair, you’ll like it even better. The front face of both of your pubic regions is very sensitive, when aroused, and if a guy manages to hang out right there, moving hardly at all, he can risk almost nothing while delivering almost everything. That’s very cool, but it’s not something you can do “naturally,” without theory, without practice and without after-market support.
Are the men wincing and cringing by now? Are you unmanned by the thought that you might need help in the bedroom? Are you equally emasculated by your hammers and your screwdrivers? The fact is that sex toys — the right sex toys — are just plain fun — as much fun for him as they are for her. Just shopping for them can be fun, if the two of you are open enough to talk about what you might enjoy. Marriage is a conversation you never want to end, and love-making is the most completely eloquent form that conversation can take. Sex toys will make your love-making better, but being honest with each other about love-making — thinking about it, planning for it, talking about it before, during and after — this is what it means to be serious about joy.
I am not anyone’s Casanova, nor am I any sort of expert on the physics or mechanics of lust. But I am as serious as I can be about my marriage, and I want for our love-making to be the best it can be, the best the two of us can make it. I talk about getting better at everything all the time, and this is one more part of my life where I want to devote my time and attention to getting better. We say that Americans are obsessed with sex, but obviously this cannot be so. We might be obsessed with titillation, but when it comes down to delivering the goods — actually making love — our minds are elsewhere.
How stupid is that?
But if you make love mindfully, then sex becomes everything you ever hoped it could be, everything you expected it to be when you were young. If love is a marriage of like minds, then your love-making can be your wedding day all over, over and over again, as often and as enthrallingly as you want to relive it. Your bodies will come together, and that just by itself is a delight, if you are alone and naked with your life’s delight. But your souls will come together, too, and this is a level of exultation that no mere animal — nor mere strangers — can achieve. True love-making occurs when like minds meet, marry, melt and merge, when there is nothing left to your conversation but mothertongue, the language of bodies, and yet the room is filled to bursting with the ringing tones of fathertongue: “I love you more than anything! I love who I am when I’m making love with you, and I love it that you respond to me the same way.”
This is doable. This is attainable. Speaking not of statistics but of the ontology of the human body, mind and spirit: This is normal. Everything the body does is an expression of the self. I know I love my wife, and I know she loves me, because we love each other all time, as often as we can, for as long as we can, as enthrallingly as we can. But we love each other all the time, in everything we do, and there is a degree to which we are always making love, no matter where we might be or how we are dressed. It’s all one thing. Everything is all one thing. And mastery, in whatever you might be doing, may not be easy, but the effort you put into your marriage will be repaid in vast abundance.
And how smart is that?
Reasons to be cheerful: Defying the specter of ugly fates.
Manifest your own destiny: You say you want a revolution? Yeah, well anyone can piss and moan about how bad everything is. If you want things to change, I’m making a stout effort to show you how to achieve revolutionary change — from the inside out. But your own efforts at self-improvement will bear sweeter fruit sooner if you share what you’re learning with other people who love to live. You’ve never heard anything like this before. Why would you hoard it to yourself?
Arizona State Senate Bill 1070 — the “Welcome to the Hotel California” legislation that has drawn so much attention nation-wide — will take effect on July 29th, 2010. Two other bills that will become law that day are more interesting to me, if not to TV-camera-mugging know-nothings in other states.
First, it will be lawful in Arizona for citizens to carry a concealed weapon without applying for a state permit. Arizona has always been an open-carry state, and, until now, a concealed carry permit required nothing more than a small fee plus 16 hours of instruction. With or without the legal requirement, the instruction is not a bad idea. But what will change on July 29th is the attitude of bad guys. Unlike thugs in, say, Chicago, criminals in Phoenix know there is a high degree of likelihood that ordinary people will be armed. As Robert A. Heinlein said, “An armed society is a polite society.”
Second, firearms manufactured and sold within the state of Arizona will not be subject to the Federal Brady Law’s national firearms database. It’s not a big deal right now, but it is plausible that there will come a time that the Feds — or their surlier successors — might try to confiscate every gun they know about. Having weapons Johnny G-Man knows nothing about might turn out to be an important advantage, if the shit hits the fan.
Look at this:
Isn’t that a sweet little pistol? It’s a Ruger LCP, specifically designed for concealed carry. It’s a .380, six rounds in the grip, one in the chamber, so it’s strictly a self-defense weapon. But it’s just a little bit larger in all dimensions than a pack of index cards, so it is very easy to conceal on your person. You can get a belt-mounted holster for it that looks like a camera case.
That’s a Realtor’s gun, a salesperson’s gun, a weapon for people who go to a lot of places they’ve never been before and don’t know what to expect. Less than ten ounces, and no one knows you have it until it turns out to be your other lock box key. And now that both the U.S. Border Patrol and the Toronto Police Department have made it plain that you are on your own, should you need to defend your own life or property, it seems like a gun like that might be a good investment.
Take note: This is not a SHTF weapon. I intend to talk about what might happen if some or all of western civilization hits the skids — taking account, always, that I do not expect this to happen — but a gun this size is not adequate for self-defense if self-defense becomes an everyday chore. Per Steve Earle, “It can get you into trouble, but it can’t get you out.” But this is a very nice form factor for a concealed weapon, just enough firepower to contain casual idiocy.
And here is where I live right now: I’m going to buy two of these in August, one for each of us to carry every day. I truly do not believe the shit is going to hit the fan, but I am less resolved in that belief than I have been at any time in my life so far. I want for my mother back home to buy and learn to use a Colt 1911, also, but I know she won’t. I sent her pepper spray and rosary beads, instead.
What’s even sweeter for me about that Ruger LCP is that Sturm Ruger’s factories are in Prescott. Janet Napolitano, the very-publicly-inept head of the department of Homeland Security, was the gun-hating governor of Arizona in her last disaster of a job. Next month she and the entire BATF can go pound sand. That much makes me proud to call myself an Arizonan.
But what about you? Should you arm yourself now, just in case? I think like a Realtor, and I think every female Realtor should be armed at all times. I think every post-pubescent female should be armed to the teeth, though, so maybe that doesn’t count. But, male or female, if it’s plausible to you that being able to brandish or even fire a weapon could prevent a worse harm, to you or to another party, I think you have a responsibility to yourself, to your family and to your estate to be able adequately to defend yourself, your property and your companions. The adverb matters: Simply owning and carrying a firearm is not enough. It’s much more important to learn to use and maintain the weapon safely and effectively. Usus est magister optimus. Practice is the best teacher.
So: Do I carry a weapon now? No. But I want Cathleen to do this. And I do recognize that events can take us by surprise, our haughty hubris notwithstanding. And I like it that Arizona is doing this, and I agree wholeheartedly with the underlying sentiment: Not only is it our right as Americans to provide for our own defense, it is also our responsibility to do this. The perfect symbol of the American citizen is not an eagle but a Saguaro cactus: Not solitary, but proudly independent, armed mightily, but never in offense, yet utterly ruthless, inconquerable and unforgettable in defense.
Reasons to be cheerful: Defying the specter of ugly fates.
Manifest your own destiny: You say you want a revolution? Yeah, well anyone can piss and moan about how bad everything is. If you want things to change, I’m making a stout effort to show you how to achieve revolutionary change — from the inside out. But your own efforts at self-improvement will bear sweeter fruit sooner if you share what you’re learning with other people who love to live. You’ve never heard anything like this before. Why would you hoard it to yourself?
Filed Under (Splendor) by Greg Swann on 07-01-2010
This is a dumb thing to say, but at the same time, I think it’s the essence of everything, the one thing that most needs to be said:
I love life. I love living. I love being alive as a human being — a genetic homo sapiens within whom has been cultivated a self — and I love, love, love being that self with a deep and abiding adoration. I don’t want to be anyone but me, but I want to be me to the utmost, to the evermost — without shame, without hiding or disguising myself in any way and without one word of apology to anyone, ever.
This is fact, obvious and dumb to say but utterly necessary to understand: We are each of us all alone inside the mind, and the self of atoms, actions and events that others see is the physical expression of the self of the imagination that each one of us sees only of his own self and only alone, within that perfect solitude of the mind.
Just that much is breathtakingly beautiful, if you take the time to think about it: A reflexively recollecting mental process, by iteratively expressing itself — in the observable world, of course, but first and most and almost continuously in purely introspective activity — essentially becomes itself and then, over time, progressively recreates itself — learning, changing, growing — over and over again. The self is its own self-abstracted abstraction, and your relationship with your own unique self is by far the most important relationship in your life.
The self is the song of itself, and each one of us is his own song, his own soul, unique and incomparable and fundamentally inexpressible to others. Without human upbringing, we are bad imitations of animals, at best. But with it, by age five each one of us is his own song, his own soul, his own ego, his own “I am.” Are we but ghosts, lost and horrified in a lurching, chaotic machine? Are we mindless fleshy worms squirming without purpose across the fertile fields of time? Or is each one of us an artifact of his own devising — each one of us unavoidably a work of art — a poem, a sonnet, a song, a symphony? The life that is the true life of a human being is the self, the self-sculpted mental image of itself.
But even beyond that, to live the fully-human life is to express with your mind, your body, your time and your efforts how desperately you want to live the human life. The world you see inside your mind is a map of the world you’re looking for in the physical world, the place where your own unique self will fit perfectly, the world that matches your expectations, the world that makes sense to you. If you maintain your self as a thing of beauty, the world you find outside your mind will be a thing of beauty and wonder and ever-abundant delight. If your mind is functioning, and if you’ve trained yourself to use it properly, then the world is yours to remake as you will. You can perfect what’s working and reinvent what isn’t. Every animal must suffer, every one but you, for you alone among animals have the power to identify and then to correct or eradicate the causes of your miseries.
Does that sound like you? If it does, I like you sight unseen. That’s the world that I see when I’m alone, staring at the horizon or visiting and revisiting my own words on my computer’s display, and that’s the world that I love best to live in, the place I love most to be on my best days.
But let me tell you about another world, a darker place where nothing works, where everything is wrong, where every motive is ugly and yet nothing is so ugly as the guilt-drenched, pain-wrenched faces of the people, each one of whom is either doing something vicious or stoically dreading someone else doing something even worse. In such a place — and don’t think I haven’t lived there, too, on the days when I’ve been bad and on the days when I’ve been worse — in such a place it might make sense to ask, “Who am I to throw stones?” But, pathetic though it may be, what everyone does, when they see a world like that, when they see a human race that despicable, is to relay to humanity — patiently, repeatedly, frequently, at length and in excruciating detail — everything it is getting wrong.
In that world, when I am there, when you are there, virtue means nothing. All that is necessary is to lack — and to deplore with appropriate venom — the other guy’s vices. This might seem to be a comfortable place to live. After all, no shirt is too dirty, no stance too disreputable, provided the next person is dirtier still. Whatever vestigial need you might feel to look up to the things you value in life, it is more than sufficient — satiating, at least, if not satisfying — always to look down.
Each one of us felt enormous once, back before we learned how to lie to the self, as unique in the mind’s eye as each us truly is unique in reality. But any one of us can feel himself free to become as small as he might like, so long as there is someone to be pointed at who is smaller still. We begin the human life as everything, as the utmost and the evermost, and yet most of us spend most of our lives chipping away at the self-sculpted image of the self until there is nothing much left of it — nothing to be saluted or even acknowledged, much less worshipped, exalted, burnished to a golden glow.
In that dark and ugly world, we spend every ounce of energy we have striving to become everything we’re not, anything we’re not — anything we can never, ever be, so long as it’s not anything at all like what we must be, to be human. You have a self, the uniquely human consciousness, as an ontological fact, as the unavoidable consequence of a past series of choices, with the first and most significant of those choices having originated with your parents. But to be a self, to be your own self, this is a matter of choice — teleology — your own continuous, on-going, internally-originated choices. But even then, you can only avoid being that gorgeous and irreplaceable self you have created for yourself by progressively soiling and scourging and dismantling the self-sculpted image of the uniquely-human life you worked so hard to make — from the instant of your conception to that strange awakening of the self-conscious mind at the age of four or five. To be human is to be a self, yet and it is the self that each one of us — myself included — often seem to want most desperately not to be.
This is an error. This is the source of all human errors, the wellspring of every crime, every atrocity — and of every sneaky, smarmy little lie. Every purposive human action is taken first by the self upon the self. To strive — in vain — to soil and scourge and dismantle reality, you must first soil and scourge and dismantle your own self-abstracted self. The world is what it is, but your soul is what you make it — gorgeous or hideous, omnipotent or impotent, a thing of glorious, radiant beauty or the object of your own unforgiving, unrelenting spite. You cannot ever destroy reality. But you can destroy your self, if you work at it long enough, and in destroying your self you will succeed in destroying everything you love and admire and look up to, everything you wanted to be when you were four or five years old.
You are a self unavoidably, through no choice of your own. By the time you were capable of making conscious choices, the job of becoming a self was already fully done. But the self you are is entirely your choice, and no one else can even see, much less cause or prevent your choosing. You can choose to live in that dark and ugly world of fear and doubt and misery. Or you can choose to live in the world as you saw it on the day you first woke up as a self-sculpted soul, the world of beauty and wonder and ever-abundant delight. But you will choose. Being is ontology, and it is unavoidable. Choosing is teleology — but it is inescapable. You can choose the light or the darkness, or you can run from one to the other, wasting your life in a lather of dithering. But you cannot be alive as a human being and yet, somehow, choose not to choose. You cannot choose what you are. Your only choice is who you’ll be.
Is that a curse, a crushing burden no one can carry? Or is it the most heartbreakingly beautiful thing that could ever be? You are the god of your own existence, the alpha, the omega, the without-which-nothing. To be a self is such an amazing thing, such an unprecedented thing, the fountainhead of meaning that gushes riotous meaning upon everything else. The universe is everything there is, and yet it is nothing without you — without your seeing it for what it really is, without you taking it and making of it the world you choose for yourself — the place where your own unique self will fit perfectly, the world that matches your expectations, the world that makes sense to you. This is the power you have within you — if you choose to exercise it.
That’s what I’m doing. I’ve wasted too much of my life avoiding this chore — putting it off out of fear of the consequences, but putting it off, too, out of shear laziness. But I want more than this from my own life, from my own self. I want to live to the fullest extent I can. As a reverberating consequence of my own expressions of my own unique self, I want to hear my ideas echoed back to me in your expressions of your self. I don’t want to see my own reflection. I don’t want to hear my own voice, echoing in the uninterruptible silence of my mind. I want to see my soul’s sister, my soul’s brother reflected back to me, voicing not my own thoughts but thoughts like mine, thoughts about the fully-human life, the life that is worth not just living but loving, rejoicing, the life that reveres nothing above itself and that reveres itself to the utmost, to the evermost — without shame, without any disguise and without even the hint of an apology.
This is what we can be, and this is what we should be. We can make less of our selves, each one of us alone in the perfect solitude of the mind. But we cannot ever be other than what we are. It is foolish and tragic and completely unnecessary not to make the most of the unrepeatable, irreplaceable gift of human consciousness. But if we choose to honor and cherish and exult in that incredible gift instead, there is nothing that is beyond our reach.
Reasons to be cheerful: Defying the specter of ugly fates.
Manifest your own destiny: You say you want a revolution? Yeah, well anyone can piss and moan about how bad everything is. If you want things to change, I’m making a stout effort to show you how to achieve revolutionary change — from the inside out. But your own efforts at self-improvement will bear sweeter fruit sooner if you share what you’re learning with other people who love to live. You’ve never heard anything like this before. Why would you hoard it to yourself?
Manifest your own destiny: You say you want a revolution? Yeah, well anyone can piss and moan about how bad everything is. If you want things to change, I’m making a stout effort to show you how to achieve revolutionary change — from the inside out. But your own efforts at self-improvement will bear sweeter fruit sooner if you share what you’re learning with other people who love to live. You’ve never heard anything like this before. Why would you hoard it to yourself?
Take note: If you slaved away for 152 hours at an ordinary job in 1964, you could have bought yourself this classy stereo from Radio Shack:
Put in the same 152 hours in 2010, at the same kind of job, and you can buy this much stuff instead:
This is the power of (relatively) free markets. Not only can you buy more stuff, better stuff, stuff that was completely unobtainable in 1964, at the same time very smart people have figured out how to make you much more productive than you would have been in 1964.
Chances are you had almost nothing to do with this incredible productive miracle. If you are like most Americans, your major exports are half-digested junk food and bitter lamentations about the unseemly unfairness of everything for everyone, everywhen and everywhere. But this simple example, provided by The Enterprise Blog at the American Enterprise Institute, illustrates what has really been going on in your life, while you have been so busy complaining about how horrible everything is.
We are puerile as a race, about which I will have much more to say later. But even if you are thoroughly grown up in your own thinking, it’s good odds that you have spent your entire life looking at the world upside down, concentrating with a dour dread on everything that does not matter while blithely ignoring everything that does.
Do you want a very good reason to be cheerful? The world outside your mind is all but entirely wonderful, a thing of beauty and infinite splendor. It’s only that world inside your mind that is a mess. I’m thinking it’s time you cleaned house. How about you?
Reasons to be cheerful: Defying the specter of ugly fates.
Manifest your own destiny: You say you want a revolution? Yeah, well anyone can piss and moan about how bad everything is. If you want things to change, I’m making a stout effort to show you how to achieve revolutionary change — from the inside out. But your own efforts at self-improvement will bear sweeter fruit sooner if you share what you’re learning with other people who love to live. You’ve never heard anything like this before. Why would you hoard it to yourself?
Yes, everyone knows Saturday Night Live is not funny, but that sketch is interesting, even so.
Why? What is that bit actually saying?
Actors are puppets for writers, never forget that. What are the writers of that unfunny little skit trying to say?
Imagine this: Your parents spent a ton of money to send you to Brown or Yale or Dartmouth, and now you have the thoroughly unsexy job of writing unfunny comedy bits for an unwatched variety show that can’t even sell its own advertising time.
Do you want to believe that some mouth-breather in Dubuque can get an education just as useless as yours at, say, one percent of the cost your parents paid out?
Worse, what if that guy’s education is better than yours? What if he can get a job that amounts to something, in an industry that is growing, not dying? What if people make or lose money — or even live or die — based on his academic performance?
He doesn’t have your class ring, and he doesn’t belong to your network of drunken dissipates — each one of whom is stuck in a going-nowhere job just like yours. But, but, but: He doesn’t feel himself endowed with the centuries of effete sneerpower to which you lay claim but have done nothing to deserve.
The truth you don’t dare admit is that your education distinguishes you in no way at all. You studied nothing serious, and you learned nothing of what you studied. You put in time and you made connections, but you don’t actually know anything, you can’t actually do anything, and if you are ever required to be anything more than an expert at supercilious self-pity, you will be dismissed at once. You are nothing but your vaunted pedigree, and that pedigree is based entirely on the accomplishments of other people — the vast majority of them long since deceased.
This is the naked essence of that fake advertisement, the snarling envy and resentment of an entire social class composed of nothing but empty suits.
Welcome to the disestablishment, y’all…
The question is, what if we’ve really screwed the pooch this time. What if this is not a V-shaped recession, not a U-shaped recession, not even a W-shaped recession? What if this is an L-shaped recession, like Japan’s “lost decade”, a sudden drop followed by a long span of no growth? What if this is the Second Great Depression? What then?
The answer is right in front of your face.
The answer to everything, and we don’t even know it yet, is the internet, the wired life, especially the iPad(ish) experience.
I have a client who is a content creator for The University of Phoenix. She tells me that their product is about 80% on-line by now, and they are within a year or three of being, essentially, 100% remote-delivery. I’m not interested in hearing caviling about quality. You either know how to reconcile account books or write a brief or launch a product or you don’t. If the quality of on-line education is not ideal for now, it will be, as a simple response to market pressure.
But meanwhile, we have arrived at the scalable university. That scruffy, sneering, tweedy degenerate — call him Professor Elbowpads — who held court in the classroom while courting all the co-eds, is about to be well and truly disintermediated. One inarguably excellent professor is all that will be needed to educate thousands and ultimately millions of students — and his lectures will be perfectible and therefore steadily more perfect, in exactly the same way that every other type of software becomes steadily more perfect over time.
That much is very cool: Study what you want, when you want, as much as you want, in pursuit of whatever goals may drive you. This is the university unchained, and your parents and their money, your own social skills, your delectably post-modern ass-kissing talent — none of this will make a damn bit of difference. The highest of education is suddenly available to anyone who wants it and can pay for it.
Even better: The cost of wired education is very low already, and competitive pressure will drive the price down even further, even as it drives quality ever higher.
Do you want to go one better? There are a billion Indians and many more than a billion Chinese who are at least as qualified as you are to take advantage of this revolution in higher education — in education at all levels.
So not only does the sneering, simpering Professor Elbowpads get the sack, so does the entire National (un)Education Association. We’ll save all kinds of money, and yet billions of very bright minds will flame ever brighter — a blinding renaissance of human brilliance such as the world has never seen. We are here, now, already, and you can’t even see the vast riches piled before you.
Think of this: If a genius like Shakespeare is a one-in-a-million mind, there are more than six thousand Shakespeares walking the earth right now — along with at least six million lesser minds who are nevertheless smarter than — and much harder-working than — stuffy old Professor Elbowpads. All of human wealth is consequent upon human capital, and we are on the verge of cultivating human capital as we have never done before.
There’s more than this, even. As much as I love Socrates and all of the giants of the agora of the mind, still, from the Greeks to the Romans to the English to the Americans, we have enslaved the human mind under a vicious caste system. Throughout the entire history of the West, cultivation of the mind has almost always been a monopoly of what we might call the equestrian class, the quality folks who live up in the big houses on the hill. This is the source of the enmity evident in that SNL sketch, the petulant resentment of a putative aristocracy that feels its historical privileges are being eroded away.
The unique character of American democracy was established not by philosophers like Thomas Jefferson, but, rather, by practical politicians like Andrew Jackson. In America, for a short while, ordinary people were able to tell their would-be overlords exactly where to stuff it. That kind of Jacksonian equality is long since gone, and the American university played a huge role in reestablishing the establishment in modern America.
But the days of the aristocracy are over for good — if we want them to be. The net culture itself is a near-perfect meritocracy: You either know your shit or you don’t, and, if you don’t, no one gives a ruby red rat’s ass where you got your diploma. The Web 2.0 world has introduced us all to the idea of the adhocracy — organizations composed solely of self-selected volunteers, each one of whom wields only as much authority as he has earned, this in the estimation of all the others. The next step is the agora that Socrates himself trod, only scaled up to the size of the entire globe — scaled up to the size of six billion hungry minds and more.
Who gets to be Socrates? Whoever can earn the attention of people who want to know the truth. Family connections or family money will mean nothing. Social status will mean nothing. Academic pedigree will mean nothing. You either know what you’re talking about or you don’t, and no amount of sheepskin will enable you to pull the wool over anyone else’s eyes.
Meet the new boss, same as the old boss? Not if we don’t want to, not if we resolve to get democracy right this time. Bosses and equestrian classes and aristocracies and caste systems — these are all artifacts of poverty, of enforced ignorance, of libraries crammed with dusty, neglected books jealously hoarded behind university walls. Look at the rich feast of information that has already been set before you by the incipient internet and reflect upon how little of that vast abundance you are able to consume. Now consider this: This is but the beginning of the true Golden Age of human knowledge and human technology and, we can hope, human wisdom.
Are we headed into a “lost decade” — or worse? Possibly. But we are also aimed straight for the brightest burst of brilliance the human mind has ever yet known — and this is only the beginning of the greatest Age of Reason in the history of human life on earth.
Whatever the next few years may bring in the way of economic growth, they seem sure to bring us the first true flowering of the human mind — when all of us can at last be in league with the Greeks. And, if we are very lucky and very wise, we will emerge from this latest cluster-frolic by our so-called betters having rid ourselves forevermore of the pestilential idea of aristocracy.
Reasons to be cheerful: Defying the specter of ugly fates.
Manifest your own destiny: You say you want a revolution? Yeah, well anyone can piss and moan about how bad everything is. If you want things to change, I’m making a stout effort to show you how to achieve revolutionary change — from the inside out. But your own efforts at self-improvement will bear sweeter fruit sooner if you share what you’re learning with other people who love to live. You’ve never heard anything like this before. Why would you hoard it to yourself?
The little boy came gamboling up to me when I was just over the ridge. He was big for three, small for four, and cute by any measure. Brown hair, blue eyes and a smile as quiet as firecrackers.
I was cutting across the park on my way to the library, and I’d come a little closer to the playground than I had wanted to. Unaccompanied adults have no business being at the playground. It spooks the parents, and it ought to. For myself, while I like kids well enough, I don’t much like what comes with them these days…
“I’m Shotterman!” said the little boy. He struck a menacing pose. He was wearing little blue shorts and a black Mickey Mouse tee shirt. He had Spiderman sneakers on his tiny feet.
“Hi, Shotterman,” I said. “What are you?”
“Huh?”
“What are your powers, Shotterman?”
“Oh,” he said. “I can shoot.” He cocked his finger. “Pshew! Pshew pshew! Pshew!”
“Shotterman!” I announced. “Strange visitor from another planet with an uncanny aim and accuracy. Shotterman! Able to compete for marksmanship prizes on five continents.”
Shotterman laughed with delight, as I knew he would. This was entertainment he thoroughly understood.
And here’s a little something I understood: He doesn’t have a dad, not at home. Little boys don’t crave male attention when they’re getting enough of it. The nation is crawling with little boys looking for big boys to play little boy games, and I knew without being told that Shotterman was one of them.
“Who are you?” he asked.
I knew what he meant. “Nothingman,” I said.
“Nothingman?”
“Nothingman! A vanishingly small amount of substance, barely here at all. Nothingman! A homeopathic quantity of humanity.”
He looked at me as if he wasn’t quite sure if I was serious in my nonsense.
“Hunter!” called a voice from the benches over by the swings. Shotterman blanched a little.
“Hunter!”
“Is that your name? Hunter?”
“No, I’m Shotterman.”
“Hunter Ryan Daniels! You get your butt over here and I mean this instant!”
I winced. I can get enough of that stuff. “C’mon,” I said. “Let’s motivate.”
We walked back over toward the playground equipment and Hunter went “Pshew!” at anything that moved and a lot of stuff that didn’t. He broke away and leapt, landing knees first in the dirt. He was surrounded by three or four plastic trucks, and he said, “C’mon, Nothingman. Let’s go get the bad guys!”
There were two thick little women sitting on the park bench. I looked over at them, to see if one or the other wanted me to clear out. They ignored me and they ignored Hunter and they ignored everything except their animated conversation. He was on his own, and I rather expected he would be.
“Okay,” I said, plopping down on the ground. Women sometimes play little boy games, but they don’t do it well. I don’t know if it’s ineptitude or condescension on the part of the women or some subtle pheromone that adults can’t sense, but little boys play little boy games with men and not with women. “Let’s go get the bad guys, Hunter.”
“You mean Shotterman,” he said solemnly.
“Right. Shotterman.”
“But I’m not Shotterman anymore.”
“No?”
“No.”
“Well, then, who are you?” I scrunched my shoulders and turned my palms up and Hunter laughed.
“I’m Mouseman!” he said.
“Mouseman!” I intoned. “A mysterious creature from a distant galaxy, he craves meat and vegetable scraps. Mouseman! Able to chew through walls in only several hours.”
He went “Gnaw, gnaw, gnaw, gnaw!” to show me his impressive gnawing powers. His teeth were straight and white and perfect.
“Did I tell you my sister’s moving in with us?” one of the women said to the other. I knew by her voice that she was Hunter’s mom, the woman who had bellowed before.
“Isn’t your sister an alcoholic?” her friend asked.
“Yeah.”
“And didn’t you say she’s a drug addict?”
“Only sometimes.”
The friend chuckled at that.
“But the thing is,” said Hunter’s mom, “I’ve got to do something to get more money in the house.”
“What about Hunter’s daddy?” the friend asked.
“You mean Mouseman,” said Hunter, although they weren’t listening to him. He was pushing his trucks around in the dirt. This activity must have required 100% of his concentration, since he would not look up.
“Oh, sure!” spat Hunter’s mother. “He’ll help, but only if I give him joint custody!”
The friend took her time answering, a cloud of doubt on her face. “…But you sister’s a drug addict…”
“I don’t care! I’m not giving that son of a bitch joint custody!”
“Wow…,” said the friend. “You must really hate him…”
There was a ball on the ground and I picked it up and threw it hard. “Mouseman!” I said. “Go get it before the bad guys do!”
Hunter sped off and I turned to look at his mother. I said: “You hate your ex-husband. Do you hate your son?”
“What!?!”
“That’s who you’re hurting…”
“Yeah?” she sneered. “And who are you to tell me how to raise my kid?”
I shrugged. “Me? I’m Nothingman, a vanishingly small quantity of civilization in a world turned to savagery.”
She simply looked confused, which was just as well.
Hunter came dashing back and I stood up. “I gotta go, sport.”
The sadness in his eyes was immense. When you never get enough male attention, it seems like the men in your life are always saying goodbye.
I fixed his mother with a glare and she squirmed uncomfortably. I said, “Little boys need their daddies.” She wanted to protest but I held up my hand. “Little boys need their daddies. You don’t have to like it, but that’s the way it is. Give it some thought…”
“I like my daddy,” said Hunter. “I think he’s Superman!”
