SplendorQuest.com

One beautiful fall morning when my son was 11, he turned on the TV. That in and of itself was unusual because we were not in the habit of watching morning TV. He was being home schooled that year, so we had plenty of opportunities to watch the morning news, but we just didn’t do it. However on that particular morning, as I was helping my daughter prepare for school, for whatever reason, my son turned on the news and said, “Hey Mom! A plane crashed into one of the Twin Towers.”

Recently at dinner, he was talking about his generation, “We are not going to be a pretty generation as we age,” he told us, quite out of the blue. “What do you mean?” Tattoos. He was talking about a generation of tattoo’d old folks, and we all had a good giggle at the thought of old wrinkled grannies and grandpas walking around with “sleeves”, tramp stamps, and ear plugs. He picked up a tortilla chip and held it vertically, “You’ll be able to slide this through someone’s ear hole when they are 75.”

He’s almost 21. Our 18 year old daughter left for college a few weeks ago- the first to (more…)

A friend said this on the phone: “I’m sorry this is taking me so long. I’m really bad at computers.”

My reply: “Why would you say it that way?”

“Huh?”

“I understand that you’re reporting on what you see as being a matter of fact. But why not say it this way: ‘Computers have been a challenge for me, but I find I’m getting better with experience.’ You’re telling the exact same truth, not misrepresenting anything. But by focusing on what you’re doing right, you’ll improve your future performance just by changing your attitude.”

I’m not talking about canned affirmations. I’m talking about the words you choose when you’re telling the unshaded truth about your life, your mind, your talents, your work, your relationships.

You can say: “I’m a lousy writer.” But you can be just as truthful by saying this instead: “It hasn’t been easy for me to improve my writing skills, but I’m finding that hard work is paying off for me.”

You can say: “I always get lost when I go someplace for the first time.” But it would be equally factual to say, “I find it beneficial to prepare carefully before I travel to an unfamiliar neighborhood.”

You can say: “I’ll probably lose.” But (more…)

Imagine this: You are the High Priest of a nomadic tribe following a herd of foraging sheep. When the tribe needs food, a beast is slain and the meat is shared equally. The political structure is hierarchical, but even the Chieftain is governed by the unchanging traditions of the tribe.

One year the herd wanders toward the seacoast. You encamp a short walk away from a trading post built by a sea-faring civilization.

For the first time in their lives, your tribesmen discover a way of life different from their own. The traders live indoors, sleeping on beds! Their diet consists of more than meat and foraged nuts. They eat grain, fruit and fish, flavoring their water with delectable nectars.

Wealth is not shared. Villagers trade with each other to get what they need — and each family owns its own land! Disputes are resolved by reasoned conciliation, not by fiat. Even so, each family seems to own more weapons than your whole tribe combined.

Anyone can introduce a new tool, technique or idea at any time — upending the whole civilization if it comes to that — and not only is this not forbidden, it is avidly sought!

This is horrifying to you as High (more…)

That’s a lot to take in, so indulge me as we summarize what we’ve talked about so far:

• You are a sovereign soul. Your purposive behavior is exclusively controlled by your self.
• You cannot be governed. Other people cannot control your behavior, nor you theirs.
• To the extent that other people — your religion, the government, your family or friends — might seem to control you, this is a consequence of your own freely-tendered consent, your own explicit, freely-chosen, on-going cooperation.
• Because other people’s seeming control over you originates in your own sovereignty, you can recover your freedom at any time you want, simply by withdrawing your consent.
• If you have surrendered any of your sovereignty in the past, your life will be better — for you — once you have regained full control over yourself.

If you have made the mental effort to recover your sovereignty in full, your life will already be better. This is a profoundly important reason to be cheerful, wouldn’t you say?

In other essays, I take up the mental, physical and moral benefits of a full commitment to self-adoration, but this is simple enough to see in summary: If you devote your life to doing everything you can think of to make (more…)

You’ve been told your whole life that all the troubles of the world owe to selfishness, and that the only true path to happiness is to renounce the self and to damn the only life you have ever known. Who told you this? Amazingly enough, it was thugs, priests and politicians — and their many, many minions. If you’ve read this far, you must know by now that every bit of this is a lie, the Big Lie that has been used in infinite variations over the course of all of human history to con decent, honest, innocent people like you into giving up everything you have for the benefit of the worst sorts of people.

This is a premise I believe can be defended in reason to infinite precision: Everything squalid on the face of the earth, for all of human history, is the consequence of selflessness, of the deliberate, conscious, completely voluntary renunciation of the self by a person who has self-induced the belief that some objective he seeks can only be attained by an act of self-destruction.

But that argument is just the corollary of this one: Everything we know of splendor, within our own minds and in the world (more…)

Let’s start with this idea: You are a sovereign soul. I have a lot more to say about the nature of the self, within this series of posts and throughout my writing, but, in a political context, this is the most important fact of your life: You cannot be governed.

All of human history, ultimately, is an attempt to contravene and negate and obviate this simple fact, and it is for this reason that every human civilization — so far — must be rated a failure. Some have been better than others, of course, and I sing the praises of the Greeks not just for what they did in the Hellas of old, but for what they are still doing all over the world. The Greek idea — each man has the right and power to own and control his own life and property — undergirds the best approaches we have seen — so far — to truly human civilizations.

And the United States — for a while — was the best-ever expression of that Greek ideal, the freest civilization ever yet seen on the earth. But like the polities of the Greeks before us, American society carried within it the seeds of (more…)

So: Let’s drop the shit-hammer, shall we?

Greece is broke. So is England, and so is most of the rest of Europe.

California is broke, Illinois is broke, and, if you count unfunded pension liabilities, not only are all the rest of the states, counties and cities broke, so are all of the surlier labor unions.

Social Security is broke, as is the metamorphosing medical scam to be known, soon enough, as no-healthcare-for-you!

The United States government is broke, of course, limping along, for now, on funds borrowed against the promise of future confiscatory currency inflation, future crippling taxation — or both.

Socialism is a Ponzi scheme, and, before you know it, you run out of suckers to milk. Sooner or later, welfare-state socialism has to collapse. As I’ve argued, I don’t think that time is now. Despite our talent, as a species, for forecasting apocalyptic, pandemic doom, in reality the sky hardly ever falls more than once or twice a day.

Moreover, even though we are enmired in a deep recession — and even though our puerile president is making that recession much worse with every boneheaded error at his command — even so, it is very likely that we are out-producing welfare-state socialism in the (more…)

You can’t remember being born but I watched, awestruck and amazed with your determination, yes, and your beauty of course, but also of the things you did naturally. Things like learning, absorbing, growing, striving to enter the world on your own terms- as a baby you did that. You did it in part because of your own individual stubborn need to assert yourself into the world but more because we are born with a healthy and completely natural need to assert our selves into the world. These are survival skills that we cannot deny and to try to deny them is wholly unhealthy.

There are things we need in this life: Food, clothing, shelter in the physical, but there are also things we need that are baked into the cake of our DNA. Things like being productive, that is, productive problem solving. We need to produce, create, find solutions. That is us as healthy human beings and we cannot ignore this fact. Healthy humans are driven to be productive for themselves, to create their own lives and solve their own problems. We love doing this because it is what drives us. Perhaps it drives many animals on some level or another, but (more…)

A Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Willie story

The very first thing she said to me was, “I’m Anastasia.”

She had pronounced the name ‘Anna-stay-juh’ but I took care to be more formal. I nodded gravely and said, “‘Ah-nah-STAH-ziuh’. I’m honored.”

She giggled delightedly. “Why’d you say it that way?”

“To lilt, to laugh, to dance, to dream. To fly, to sigh, to sing, to speak. To embroider the air, to perfect it with the perfect sound: ‘Ah-nah-STAH-ziuh’.”

She giggled again and that was answer enough.

She was four-and-a-half on the day we met. Not awfully, terribly short, but at no risk of scraping her head on anything. She had a round little face that had borrowed too much mischief to be cherubic but was angelic nevertheless. Her hair was brown and it was almost always almost everywhere; it was obviously brushed and tied and obviously instantly disarrayed by her mischievous wanderings. She was a beautiful child, beautiful inside and out, but her eyes were the crowning glory of her nobility. They were bluer than blue, deep and dark and purple, as purple as the crest of a dynasty. They were clearer than any gemstone, and they seemed not to reap the light but to sow it. For all the (more…)

[This was written for genuine Bloodhounds. Please check your chip!]

I always start simple. Then I try to stay there. This post is no exception. I even cut it in half, to keep it as simple as possible. The main question I seek to answer here is, “What is owing?”

You see, I owe Greg Swann. No, not for anything he sold me, nor because of anything he expects, let alone demands. He did do some software work back in the ’90s, but I paid for that. BTW his code is used to this day, making one part of our company’s website much better than any of our competitors’. And since that part is about the price, and since I offer (what once was!) a commoditized item, it means the whole website is better, from the customer’s POV. And in business, as is no secret here, there’s no other relevant POV.

Greg Swann has inspired me, as he’s inspired so many people, but lots of people inspire lots of other people. We don’t go around keeping track of who inspired us how much, and how much we ought to pay for each. (more…)