Four years ago I wrote an essay called First Feedback.
It was a lovely piece of writing and smackdab in the middle of a time where I was highly embattled. My health was in the gutter, the J6 committee was locking up people around me, and there was a chorus of people around me influencing me in the wrong direction.
In scanning the piece, I feel a sense of pride toward it and see a few things here and there I would update now.
In some way, that piece was one of my means of tethering myself to sanity. There was too much chaos in my life and I needed to return to first principles. A number of the susceptibilities I’d worked on in the past, those that remained unfinished, cropped up in the face of my pursuit of a will to power. Seek to dominate others, no matter who, and watch your conscience do its thing. I was wrong to do what I did and I knew better at some level. I have worked so hard, even through continuing crud health, to make things right.
The first feedback continues to help me. Stefan Molyneux calls it “RTRing”, a term I accept and use, but his only book on it has a lot to do with confronting family members with your honest experience. And he hardly ever mentions the book anymore. So I do like this term “first feedback”, especially since I’m more concerned in my content with the self-knowledge and art side of things than economics, axiomatic formulations, and current events.
Basically put: you note the first thought that comes up in response to a stimulus and then observe the emotion that is provoked by this thought.
Then can come a bunch of bullshit.
That secondary response to things is propaganda programming – usually from your parents, schooling, culture, or peers.
In “owning your reactions” to events, you are practicing first feedback – this process of observation. When you report to someone else faithfully and honestly the thought you had, you are “RTRing”. People are not necessarily owed this and there’s no point in putting yourself out there to people you know have shot you down in the past. I like calling this process “first feedback” because it is a private process of honesty. You can choose whether you share or not.
People MANAGE themselves when they act on the secondary response, propaganda, in response to troubling thoughts and emotions.
I highly recommend against this.
One of the most common secondary responses is, “What would so-and-so say?” This is an insecure part that thinks it knows how to run your life. It will get you to conform to expectations. This was part of learning and growing (or submitting and waiting) under our parents’ rule. There’s nothing wrong with considering what someone else would want. But that can’t be the sole driver for a decision. And for many, it is.
For soooooo many people, they internalize whatever voice in their media environment and, if that voice isn’t making arguments and to whatever extent they aren’t, the voice will become an inner censor and animator. When you open yourself up to influence (see my essays on salesmen), you allow a projection of a person into your inner life based on your level of understanding of them – which is based on your level of empathy.
I see that sometimes people will internalize me, which I don’t ask for, and then they confuse something about my point of view and withdraw from me. This is their own historical programming clashing with something I’ve said. The stakes get too high because the soup is too rich and it’s easier to just back off. People who were treated as being caught in a lie by their parents will try to catch their Inner Steve in a lie. Again, I didn’t ask for any of this. It’s just how some people deal with social media. It’s not personal! I have always advocated that if my content was too provocative in a negative direction to just back off and relax. In fact, back in 2021, I had to say stuff like this – for my own self-preservation!
Another common one is people who were pitted against their siblings in competition. They will internalize “Steve” and then try to outfox him. I try to always equalize on social media to take the edge off of this one. That’s a bit of why I make dad jokes and longboarding/ganja jokes sometimes. They’re funny to me but also, I am not seeking to dominate. Life is so much more pleasurable and real when you live this way. I had to learn the hard way but somedays I’m glad I did. I really earned it.
Back to the bullshit.
A secondary response people have is, “What does this do for my image?” They have a false self, a posture in life they have to maintain. Public relations is about manipulating that posture to gain as much broad social approval as possible while maintaining employability in your field. Celebrities will do this for the clothes they were, the events they show up to, and even their hairstyles. They purse the “iconic”, which is memorability for superficialities.
The smarter ones are subversive and weave in universals.
Another bullshit, secondary response is, “What does this mean for my worldview?” People caught in ideology cannot be honest. To be honest means to break their worldview open. This has all sorts of negative connotations, within their worldview. Your honest, first feedback to the mounds of Communist gobbledygook out there will liberate you but not if you judge the first feedback as this or that. Your first feedback is what it is. You can’t change it. All you can do is drown it out.
There’s plenty more of propaganda themes I could touch upon but I feel my time for this writing running short. There’s lunch and family and clients to get to.
