Category: Egoism in Action (page 4 of 30)

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Will Republicans repeal Obamacare next January — or ever? Don’t hold your breath. Mainstream politicians of both parties are addicted to corporate campaign contributions — and who knows what other kinds of bribes? — so what we will get will be a pathetic, cosmetic “reform” of Rotarian Socialist medicine. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

If you want to restore the liberty of the American people, you will need to change the United States Constitution. And you will have to do that by constitutional convention and state-by-state ratification, because there is no way that Congress will vote for the necessary changes.

In a very short summary, here is what needs to be done, if the head of steam built up by libertarians, by free-market conservatives and by the Tea Party movement is not to be wasted. The text within the quotation marks is proposed amendatory language, followed by a discussion of the objective to be achieved.

1. “The words ‘general welfare’ appearing in the United States Constitution or its Amendments do not create any powers of the legislative, executive or judicial branches of the government of the United States. Any legislation authorized by the words ‘general welfare’ is repealed.” This gets rid of one of the most pernicious pieces of federal elasticity.

2. “Article 1, Section 8, Clause 3 of the United States Constitution is stricken in its entirety. Any legislation authorized by that clause is repealed.” This does away with the power of the federal government to regulate commerce. The interstate commerce clause is second only to the general welfare clause as a means of enlarging the power of the national government.

3. “Amendment 16 to the United States Constitution is stricken in its entirety. Any legislation authorized by that Amendment is repealed.” Goodbye federal income tax. The federal government will have to return to taxation by capitation — the head tax.

4. “Amendment 17 to the United States Constitution is stricken in its entirety. Any legislation authorized by that Amendment is repealed.” This language puts the Senate back under the control of the states. This was a vital check on federal power. Read more

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Sorry if I seem to be ignoring y’all. I am all but completely unable to make an honest living in real estate right now, and that leaves me with next to nothing to say about making an honest living in real estate.

I am not without things to say, of course. Never that. But I am doing most of my talking at SelfAdoration.com just now.

Here’s proof: A post about changing your life for the better featuring the incomparable Sam Cooke singing A change is gonna come.

Art first:

Then rhetoric:

You have a unique, inviolable nature as a type of entity. You have many characteristics in common with other entities, and with other organisms, and for the most part you cannot change those characteristics. But every purposive action you can take is guided by your conceptually-conscious mind — by your free choices — and you can always resolve to choose differently going forward. When you do, your life will change — for the better, if you choose wisely. You know this is so, and, in consequence, if you simultaneously insist to yourself that it is somehow not so, the cognitive dissonance will make you miserable — and progressively less efficacious over time.

But if instead you accept your true nature as a human being for what it is, and then act accordingly, your life will get better and better in every way. No one can absolve you of your sins, since you answer to your self alone. But for the same reason, no one can rob you of your triumphs.

There is much more on that theme in this week’s “movie of the week” — a video podcast I am doing every week.

If you have not yet read Man Alive!, I entreat you to do so — and to share it with everyone you love. We all say we want to see the world change, but the book offers an actual strategy for making the change you’re looking for — in your own life and in the lives of everyone on Earth eventually.

Looking for the Cliff’s Notes? Here is one very potent idea: The world won’t change Read more

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

From: Man Alive! A survival manual for the human mind.

Extract from Chapter 12. The love of Splendor is the life divine.

There is one more idea I want to take up with you, and I think it is the most demanding one I know. You had to wrap your mind around the self, after being told all your life to despise it, and then I sprung the notion of self-adoration on you. I undermined just about every dogma you have ever heard about, and then I made you eat anarchy-pie and like it – or at least not spit it out. And now I plan to make you stretch even farther, to go with me where no philosophy of reason has ever gone before.

Where might that be?

To heaven.

“Say WHAT?!?”

But, but, but… Heaven is for theologians. Heaven is for priests. Heaven, every smug academic will sneer, is for wishful thinkers who can’t handle the infinite hell that is human life on Earth.

I think you might be able to guess what I think about a claim like that. If theological pronouncements about ontology and teleology are intellectually useless, invalidities defended with insipidities, so, too, are the metaphysical opinions of modern philosophers, academics, artists, journalists and politicians. If you hate the self, in time you cannot fail to hate life as well – your own life and all of human life. You will not be able to stop yourself from sneering at joy, at hope, at ambition, at every value the fully-human life requires. You will look for nothing but evidences of failure and despair in the world around you, and your one, unique, irreplaceable human life will become the infinite hell you insist you see everywhere.

But what if you were to point your mind in the opposite direction?

…continue reading here…

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

From: Man Alive! A survival manual for the human mind.

Extract from Chapter 11. Indomitable you.

We all know that slavery is abominable, a vile and vicious practice, indefensible on any grounds. And yet we may not know – or may know but do not want to admit we know – that many, many slaves, throughout human history, have clung to their captivity and vehemently resisted manumission – freedom. And while you may want to insist that you would never prostate yourself like that – begging to be chained, begging to be abused, begging to be despoiled – precisely what is it you are doing when you sign your tax return? When you mail in your property tax check, paying, over and over again, so that the brute of the state will not confiscate the land you allegedly own? What are you doing when you show up, hat in hand, in one government office after the next, begging for permission to stay alive for one more day – so that today’s earnings can be expropriated just like those of the day before and the day before that, on and on for every day of your life?

There are a lot of different things I can say, when I meet people, to find out if they are still capable of thinking with the clarity of mind of any normal five-year-old, or if they have walled up their minds in some dank dungeon of mindlessness. This is one of my favorites, a truism that sorts the sheep from the shepherds from the living minds just like that:

Every time you lick a stamp, you’re kissing the master’s ass.

“Say WHAT?!?”

There is obviously no reason for mail delivery to be a state monopoly, no reason but mindless tradition and the inertia of thoughtless habits-of-mind. And there are obviously many good reasons for every sort of communications business to be handled by free-market enterprises. And yet you kiss the master’s ass with every piece of mail you send or receive, and the master rewards your obedience by piling vast hordes of unkempt, slowly-meandering union men on your shoulders, paying them Read more

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I made a catalog of the means by which people gull you into betraying your own interests and values. Paul Kelly sings the soundtrack:

If this don’t make you dance, you need some Gin and Juice.

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

From: Man Alive! A survival manual for the human mind.

Extract from Chapter 10. A mindful catalog of mindlessness.

I like to play a philosophy game I call Backstory. I will look at someone – anyone I happen to see – and try to project backward in time to the past causes of that person’s present-day appearance. Toddlers and young children will have sweet faces, almost always, with no deeper meanings to be discerned. But older children and adults will have had many experiences in their lives, and those past events will have written an emotional history in the lines of their skin. Your mama told you, when you glared and grimaced at her, that your face would freeze like that, but neither one of you knew she was right: The facial expressions we wear most often – habituated Mothertongue emotional reactions – inscribe themselves into our skin. I can see those habitual expressions in the people I am watching. Their clothing and their manner will tell their stories, too, and it is interesting to me to try to suss out their histories, just by looking at people from a distance.

I stress that this is just a game. Every living organism, human or not, is in a certain sense a laboratory specimen to me. I am not cruel or intrusive in any way, but I watch everything I am blessed with the opportunity to see, and I learn everything I can from the behavior I observe. In consequence, I can tell you from having run repeated tests that a toddler at around eleven months of age is just about as clueless as dog, when it comes to finding a toy hidden under a shirt, but that same child at thirteen or fifteen months will be able to identify the toy by the distortion of the fabric of the shirt, where the dog will not be able to “see” it, even though the dog actually should “know” by its much better sense of smell that the toy really is there. That’s subjunctivity in its most basic form – the toddler “seeing” an entity that Read more

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

From: Man Alive! A survival manual for the human mind.

Extract from Chapter 9. The high cost of mindlessness.

Because you never trained your mind to think about the ontology of human nature – don’t fault yourself for that; no one else did, either – you thought they were just talking about you. You’ve known your whole life that you yourself have never been able to live down to the perverse ideas of “virtue” that evil philosophers and their mindless minions have never tired of preaching at you, but you thought the fault was yours alone. You thought that, since everyone incessantly repeats these inverted moral prescriptions, everyone other than you must be conforming to them, as well, and it must be you alone who is defective. You could not succeed in condemning – damning – your life and still living it, so you called yourself a “sinner” for committing the awful crime of continuing to live as a human being after insisting to yourself not just once but a thousand times that the self – the cardinal value in the uniquely-human life – is evil. How could you possibly claim to be good if you could not ever seem to do the things you insisted to yourself are good?

You didn’t know that nearly every other human being swims in that same steaming sewer of longing and shame, each one of them perpetually and persistently failing to uphold “virtues” that are – by diabolical plan and intention – impossible to practice. You didn’t know that no one can practice those perverse ideas of virtue – because no entity can both be and not-be itself. That is the essential statement of ontology, the law of identity, and we can characterize virtually all of moral philosophy, until now, as anti-ontological teleology: You should be only what you cannot be. But that proposition is inverted, too. What virtually all theologians and philosophers have insisted, for all of human history, is that you should not be the only thing you can be – a self, a being of rationally-conceptual volitionality, a free moral agent.

Why would they make Read more

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

From: Man Alive! A survival manual for the human mind.

Extract from Chapter 8. The integrity of art.

When I talk about Mothertongue and Fathertongue, I know that many people are straining to divide them up in their minds, to separate them and to regard them somehow as being opposites. This is understandable – it’s the way our minds like to work, in distinct categories – but it is incorrect. A genetic Homo sapiens becomes a human being when he masters Fathertongue, but none of us ever stops communicating in Mothertongue.

For one thing, since Mothertongue consists of bodily expressions of internal emotional states, we are “communicating” in Mothertongue all the time – even when we are all alone. For another, Mothertongue is necessary to many types of human social concourse – when we want to communicate love or hate, affection or indifference, trust or suspicion, admiration or contempt, reverence or ridicule, pride or shame, satisfaction, boredom, fascination, derision, impatience, joy, anger and countless other emotions. For still another, Mothertongue is essential to demagoguery and other forms of deception: I can say one thing – or a noisome nothing – in words and simultaneously communicate a different idea in facial expressions, verbal intonations or bodily posturing. And for still one more thing, Mothertongue is the essence of art.

…continue reading here…

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

From: Man Alive! A survival manual for the human mind.

Extract from Chapter 7. A calculus of morality on a first-grade number line.

You live an easy life, and that has made it easy for you to be thoughtless and glib about your values. You say things like “Whatcha gonna do?” and “Life’s a bitch and then you die,” and you don’t realize that you are making outrageously misleading statements about ontology and teleology – about your own unchangeable nature as a human being. If you are casting about in your mind for a slang expression that would have meant something to the father of Fathertongue, the man who gave you the first treasure in that huge cache of incomparable wealth that you could never have produced on your own, try this on for size: “Some days you eat the bear, some days the bear eats you.” But even that doesn’t fit, because once the bear eats you, it’s lights out. Game over. Forever.

When you are starving, there is no room in your mind for cynicism or boredom or superciliousness or ennui. You don’t waste your time crafting ridiculous arguments conflating unlike things, and you don’t deface, deride, damage and denigrate the very values you need to sustain your tenuous survival. A starving human being can think of many different things, but it seems hugely unlikely to me that any of those notions would win the approval of the smug jackasses down at the Student Union. They – and you – have the luxury of living off of a legacy of inherited wealth, in the form of the accumulated intellectual and economic power of thousands of years worth of carefully-curated Fathertongue. And like most heirs of unearned wealth, they have lived their lives – at least the life of the mind – as unrepentant wastrels.

And the truth of the matter – and I’m willing to acknowledge it, even if you are not – is that the only reason you are willing to attend to what I have to say now is that the people you trusted to manage your inherited wealth of Fathertongue Read more

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

From: Man Alive! A survival manual for the human mind.

Extract from Chapter 6. Evaluating values.

We like to think of human history as a clash of great men, their hair flowing in the breeze, their muscles rippling, their eyes fixed firmly on the horizon. In reality, virtually all of the so-called great leaders of history were just like our fearless leaders in the present day: Chiseling, conniving, endlessly grasping grafters, each one striving with all his crafty cunning to go one-up in the sleaziest possible way on all the others. We celebrate and revere the most successful career criminals of each human epoch, and we forget entirely the brilliant minds who actually produced all the riches we take for granted.

Still worse, we fail to note that each one of those renowned thugs was backed up by a scheming little shaman, a full-time professional rationalizer of evil, whose job it was to tell the same transparent lies to the boss thug and his henchmen over and over again, to assure them, again and again, that their actions were righteous because they so obviously were not, to keep them from drowning in the liquor they had to swill to quiet the cognitive dissonance within their own minds. That shaman – first a high-priest, later a theologian, still later a philosopher – was also tasked with the vitally important job of gulling fools into believing that a brute like Alexander the “Great” was a greater benefactor to humanity than a genius like Socrates. Just about everything you know of human history is a testament to the success of that shaman and his intellectual heirs.

Your values are inverted, and I can demonstrate this with an example very close to home. For your whole life you have been told – and you have probably believed – that the United States Constitution is a grand and noble document that exists to safeguard your liberty. In reality, it is a sort of peace-treaty drafted by three corrupt political factions in early America. The owners of the newly-erected factories in the New England and Mid-Atlantic states wanted to impose high Read more