Learning to love your self is the greatest love of all.
Beyond comparison, Whitney Houston:
Month: April 2012 (page 2 of 2)
Todd Carpenter, the National Association of Realtors’ official In-House Social Media Judas Goat, has announced that he is leaving that charnel house of corruption for the slightly-less-corrupt Trulia.com. Carpenter, who almost immediately proved himself to be much too goaty for the refined nostrils of Michigan Avenue, managed to last three years with the NAR.
His new position at Trulia is entitled — I kid you not — Senior Manager of Industry Engagement (SMIE). In an earlier, more circumspect age, a job title like this would have implied carefully-honed skills in affable-cocktail-drinking, check-grabbing and barely-losing-at-golf. In the Realty.bot era of the dot.com epoch, Todd’s function will be to be well-known to thoughtless TwitBook time-wasters in the real estate business, thus to provide “social proof” that advertising on Trulia is an unbeatable waste of money.
Carpenter’s announcement is the fourth in a recent series of similar “news” stories. Todd will be following Bob Bemis, Jay Thompson and Duane Fouts into exciting, challenging leadership roles in the burgeoning Realty.bot Judas Goat industry. In light of Carpenter’s utterly implausible new job title, I have denominated all of these sellouts great guys “The Knights Who Say SMIE!” They may not actually say “SMIE!,” mind you, but you can bet they’ll say what they’re told to say. To do less would be cheating the shareholders, when the job description clearly calls for gulling the yokels.
As always, if you don’t know who is the yokel — it’s you. If you don’t believe me, check for blood in your underpants.
I have warned you about all this for many years. You didn’t listen then, and you won’t listen now. But if all the mad monkeys of the TwitBook mob “decide” to tee me up for a Two Minutes’ Hate, could y’all please go the extra mile and hate my new book and web site, too? Chapters 10 and 11 explore the mob mentality thoroughly, so there’s plenty to rant about.
But: Still: My heart goes out to Todd Carpenter, easily the most easy–going of The Knights Who Say SMIE! I always thought he was redeemable, and I still do. And look at the Read more
From: Man Alive! A survival manual for the human mind.
Extract from Chapter 5. The greatest love of all.
What’s the purpose of life? Scruffy, bearded teenagers of all ages have been asking that question for thousands of years, and each one of them has come up with an answer even more ludicrous than the absurd prescription put forth by the previous nitwit. But here is the full answer to that age-old question:
The purpose of human life is self-expression.
The purpose of every organism’s life is to be lived, and since your own life, most fundamentally, is the life of your self, the purpose of your life is to make your self manifest in every way you can. This is a matter of ontology – of being. It sounds like shoulding – teleology – but in fact this is what you are regardless of what you or anyone else might say about human nature. Every purposive action you take is taken first by the self upon the self, and this is the unavoidable consequence of your having come to be a self. You didn’t cause this to happen – your parents did – and you could not have stopped the process even if you had known it was happening. Only a mind already possessed of Fathertongue could even conceive of the possibility of preventing the cultivation of Fathertongue in any human mind.
You are a self as a matter of inescapable ontology. The effect was caused by volition, by choice, by an iterative shoulding process initiated by your parents. And of course it can be terminated – by your death or by a serious head injury. But the fact that you are a self is a fact of being, not a behavior to be caused or prevented by shoulding. While you are a self, you cannot not be a self. You can pretend you are not a self, albeit not as deceptively as you can pretend your house-cat is a vegan by feeding it nothing but spinach. But you are a self by no choice of your own, and you cannot stop being a self Read more
From: Man Alive! A survival manual for the human mind.
Extract from Chapter 4. The greatest invention in the history of humanity.
In the last chapter, I raised the idea of your being stranded on a desert island. That’s a hugely unlikely scenario, but it’s interesting to think about because everything that is true of you, as a type of entity, is true of you in isolation. You’re in this all alone, recall, and there is no factual statement that we can make about your nature as a human being that is not true of you even – especially! – when you are isolated from all other people.
In later chapters, we will take up the implications of your fundamental ontological solitude. For now I want to focus on the existential solitude of being stranded. Is there anyone for you to talk to? To cuddle up to? To fight against or to make love with? No. You possess everything you were able to recover from your plane crash or your shipwreck, but there is no one else with you, and anything else you might want you will have to provide for yourself – if you can – or else do without.
But cheer up, Bunkie! You don’t have a knife, but you know that knives exist, and you can apply yourself to making one. It may turn out to be a crude thing compared to the knives you can buy in a store, but close enough is good enough. You don’t have a calendar to keep track of time, but you can easily make one with stones or sticks. With but a few exceptions, you don’t have any of the artifacts we take for granted in Western Civilization, but you have owned a great many of those tools and toys in your time, and you can recreate some of them as you wait to be rescued. You are poor in practical technology, but you are infinitely rich in technological knowledge.
Why is that so? Because of Fathertongue. We stand on the shoulders of giants. To say the truth, mostly we lounge on the shoulders of giants, Read more
Today is Mothertongue day for Man Alive!, so it seems like a fine time to celebrate the best Mothertongue song ever written, When you say nothing at all, written by Paul Overstreet and Don Schlitz and performed here by the incomparable Keith Whitley:
Here it is again, covered by Allison Krauss and Union Station:
Makes me cry every time I hear it. That’s what art is for.
From: Man Alive! A survival manual for the human mind.
Extract from Chapter 3. Speaking in tongues.
One of the things that protects humanity from all of the philosophers and academics who insist that we are nothing special is the power of speech. Not speech deployed to argue against them; for the most part we are intimidated by their pedigrees and their supercilious posturing. But the power of speech itself defends us, because each one of us can easily see that this is a power that human beings alone possess. Lab-coated academics never stop trying to convince us that chimpanzees or dolphins share the power of speech with us, but regardless of what we say – or don’t dare say – in rebuttal, most of us recognize that these claims are absurd.
That’s just more of the Dancing Bear Fallacy, of course, but it is worth listening to the people who make these arguments – and to the people who chortle their support for them. A laboratory dolphin possessed of rationally-conceptual volitionality would immediately file a lawsuit seeking manumission from the clipboard-wielding sadists holding it captive. Ten thousand chimpanzees sitting at computer keyboards cannot produce the works of Shakespeare, nor even one line of intelligible verse. Not ten thousand, not ten million, not ten billion. The purpose of making these nonsensical claims about the specious verbal abilities of trained animals is not to confer an unearned status on those animals, but to rob you of the status you earned by mastering your mind. Animals cannot make informed choices by reasoning about concepts – nor do they need to. They are perfect the way they are – and so are you.
The goal of modern philosophy – in all probability unknown to you and to the scientific researchers who make these breathless claims about the imaginary conceptual abilities of animals – is to undermine the mind. Slavishly following those knowing philosophers of mindlessness, there are vast cadres of very well paid professional butterfly collectors whose job it is to make tautologically obvious observations about animal behavior in the most exaggerated ways they can. And slavishly following Read more
Trustworthy people do not expect you to take them at their word.
The word transparency has a useful cachet in business, a condition where nothing of material importance in the transaction is concealed from the consumer. When I was a kid, I worked with a print broker who led his clients to believe that he owned his own composition house, his own pre-press facility and his own printing plant. In fact, he worked out of his car and, for all I know, he rented his shoes. Why would his clients really want to know that he was a broker, not an owner? Because it affected his ability to deliver on his promises — certainly a material concern.
In real estate, we hear about that kind of transparency, and we’re one foot on the boat and one foot on the dock. We absolutely hate it, for example, when the other agent in a cross sale fails to disclose a material fact — no doubt hoping against hope that the problem will go away if no one mentions it. But we rebel against the idea of what we might see as an intrusive transparency. As an example, where one agent might disclose to the penny how a listing commission is to be spent, another might feel that this is none of the seller’s damn business. The discussion then would turn on whether such a disclosure is a material fact.
The issue is clouded because the word transparency means something very different in the Web 2.0 world — and in the world of persuasive communication in general. The fear in any advertising or marketing presentation — your own fear, too — is that you are being tricked, sold a bill of goods. That by dishonest or technically-honest-but-non-obvious means, you think you are buying a rabbit when all you’re really getting is an empty hat. The purpose of transparency in this context is to take away that fear.
So in reply to my post last night about video testimonials, John Kalinowski notes that they could be Read more
From: Man Alive! A survival manual for the human mind.
Extract from Chapter 2. The nature of your nature.
The general form of the specious appeal – this seems to have certain traits in common with that, therefore this is that – is a comically obvious error when you state it plainly. The people who make these sorts of arguments can’t state anything plainly, of course, so you need to train your mind to unpack their claims. If there are significant differences in kind between the “this” and the “that” – regardless of their seemingly “uncanny” similarities – the argument is most probably deploying the Specious Analogy Fallacy.
As a sort of pocket-reference to the kinds of bogus arguments made about your mind – claims you will see everywhere if you look for them – take note of these three general categories:
1. “We now know we know nothing!” Either your mind is inherently unreliable or the world outside your mind is fundamentally incomprehensible.
2. “Your good behavior is not to your credit, but at least your bad behavior is not your fault!” The actions you think of as being morally good or evil are either causally unavoidable or are caused by something other than your free will – hormones, brain chemistry, genes, brain defects, drugs, diseases, your upbringing, your environment, your wealth or poverty, memes, etc.
3. “Dancing bears are just like us!” Either animals such as apes or dolphins (or even “artificially intelligent” computer programs) are just as smart as you, or you are just as flailingly ignorant as an animal.
Note that all three of these categories are self-consuming: To uphold them, necessarily, is to deny them. If we know we know nothing, then we must know at least that one something – begging the question of how we can know even that little bit of nonsense. If the human will is not free, I cannot will myself to persuade you of this claim – nor even simply to make it – and you cannot will yourself either to accept or reject it. And if your mind works “just like” an animal’s brain, then you Read more
From: Man Alive! A survival manual for the human mind.
Extract from Chapter 1. You’re in this all alone.
Each individual human being is his own first and best philosopher, like it or don’t, for this simple reason: You are not born knowing how to stay alive, and, absent some sort of cosmic-injustice machine like the Big Mother welfare state, if you don’t figure out what to do – and then do it – you will die. If you do nothing in your own behalf, you will die. If you pursue errors, your own errors or the kind that come with a tony religious or academic pedigree, you will die. If you attempt to exist as an animal does, trying to steal the values you need to survive, you will live in Squalor until one of your would-be victims catches up to you, and then you will die.
What is more, you cannot live the uniquely-human life – the fully-human life – unless you think in your own behalf, in pursuit of your own values. The philosophical or theological doctrine you have followed until now has been aimed, most likely, in the opposite direction: It sought to get you to supplant your own reason with someone else’s dogma, and to pursue that person’s values rather than your own.
Why is Western Civilization collapsing? Because you defaulted on your responsibility to defend it – by defending the values that make your life possible.
But, but, but… We’re all in this together, aren’t we? Wrong. That’s just another hustle, devised to get you to give up everything you have earned so that the person making the claim does not have to earn anything at all. This is the truth of your life, which perhaps no one has ever told you before today:
You’re in this all alone.
I just traded two weeks of my life for the rest of human history. That’s what it feels like. It’s funny even to me to live at that level of hubris!
I’ve always been able to work very hard when I need to, and I’ve always loved the way I feel when I finish: It’s the ultimate best kind of soaring I get to do, a tremendous sense of enormous accomplishment that leaves me feeling everything but small. I don’t know where you might sip at your best taste of Splendor, but for me it comes from working hard, working wisely, working well, working beautifully — and getting done. I am the high-D who ate up all the d’s in the alphabet. I like to finish big jobs masterfully.
But today I swim in Splendor. Today my world is all the way won — and won my way. Today I published a book of philosophy that will change the course of human history: Man Alive! A survival manual for the human mind. The subject: Your mind and how you can save Western Civilization and make your own life more perfect by rethinking your moral philosophy.
Just that topic itself is a thing of the most perfect hubris, and yet I swear I have the outlandish effrontery to insist that this one little book will — ultimately, when enough people embrace the ideas I uphold — reverse the tide of tyranny that has overrun the Earth. It’s 78 pages, total, just 32,000 words — a third of the length of a typical novel — and yet it bears within it the seeds of a brand new kind of life for billions of human beings.
Which kind of life would that be? My kind, of course.
I have taken it upon myself to lecture everyone alive — and everyone who will ever be alive in the future — on how to manage their minds. At length. In significant detail. And without much in the way of comfort or consolation.
People who already think as I do, in the large, will love it. Not only do I confirm to them Read more
We had mail server issues today, and I had to update some stuff on Cathleen’s Macintosh.
She uses Stickies, and this was the note at the top of her screen:
There ain’t nothin’ like sweet romance…
One of my favorite jokes about the art of advertising copywriting is a matchbook cover reading, “Save the world from home in your spare time!” I don’t know if anyone still advertises on matchbook covers. I don’t even know if anyone still makes matchbooks. Presumably, by now, smokers can light their cigarettes with the fire of indignation in other peoples’ eyes.
Even so, I’ve always believed that ordinary people should be able to save the world from going to hell on a hand-truck. Our real problem is not a Hitler or a Mao or the Eric-Cartman-of-the-moment. The only real problem humanity has ever had is thoughtlessness — the mindless accession to the absurd demands of greater and lesser demagogues.
So: I’ve written a book about that one issue: The high cost of thoughtlessness — and how to stop paying it. The title is Man alive! A survival manual for the human mind, and it weighs in at a slim 30,000 words. I’m nobody’s matchbook copywriter, and I would have made it even shorter if I could have. But the book covers everything I know about the nature of human life on Earth — what we’ve gotten wrong, until now, and how we can do better going forward.
If you have paid attention to my writing over the years, you will have seen me cover some of these ideas on Usenet or at PresenceOfMind, BloodhoundBlog or SplendorQuest. I actually can summarize my thinking very briefly. Take your pick: “Ontologically-consonant teleology” or “Love your self.” That’s the same ethical creed expressed two different ways, and everything I have ever written develops and defends that philosophy. The proud fact of my life is that it took me thirty-three years to write a short book in eight days. You can get a taste of it, if you like, in this short extract: Stop cursing the darkness by turning on your mind!
Here’s what I need: Readers. The book itself will be free. I wrote it to save the world — no kidding. But I need for people to read it in “galleys” to let me know if I have Read more
Are you the ‘go to’ guy/gal? Do you list a lotta property and do it well? Are you a leader? Though I’m sure many will say charisma is required, I beg to disagree. It never hurts, but in the end, the Lord created the ultimate equalizer to charisma:
Results.
Today, let’s have a serious discussion about what combination of approaches would slaughter what’s currently goin’ on in the national brokerage community. First, here’s my perception of the major ‘schools’ I see in operation.
Variations on the Agent-Centric brokerage model
Between us we can come up with a myriad variations. Let’s limit them to very high commission splits, and the desk fee approach.
As I’ve written before, not long ago, that the agent-centric (A-C) model is failing everywhere it’s been tried. It’s ability to fail at pretty much every level is becoming legendary, regardless of the Titantic-like practicianers now lookin’ to technology to save them. Listen guys, if buying ownership positions in title companies, lenders, and starting your own escrows isn’t prima facie evidence of the desperate reach for lifejackets, I don’t know what is.
Let’s directly compare the currently popular A-C model with what I’d open in today’s — or any — housing market.
But first, a word from the Disclosures Department.
My biz model, though it pains me to admit, would indeed work exceptionally well if completely buyer oriented, listing few if any homes. However, when compared to my model — Broker-Centric — the firm primarily based upon listing homes will annihilate the buyer based company. This isn’t theory, or even bias on my part. As anyone should readily be able to discern, it’s a matter of sixth grade arithmetic.
Also, I’m loosely basing my ‘virtual’ A-C company on a brokerage I know of in a northwestern state. The size, and commission split are the perfect example of the results one can expect when using this model.
End disclosures.
Let’s first construct a virtual company built upon the A-C model.
Let’s give ’em a lotta agents, but not make it a big box setup. We’ll hire 35 full time agents. None of ’em Read more