The majority of spousal conflict goes something along the lines of:
-Bob has Preference A.
-Jane has Preference B.
-Both take it personally to some degree and squabble.
Let’s do an example:
-Bob wants to watch King Of Queens (an old-time Franssen favorite).
-Jane wants to watch Gay’s Anatomy (objectively shitty show).
-Both find one another’s choices repulsive (we don’t accept anti-Kevin James slander in this house!)
What to do?
First of all, if you’ve made it so far into marriage that your wife still thinks Gay’s Anatomy or Sabrina Carpenter or whatever the heck is entertaining and useful to her, you’ve made a major mistake. You have failed to educate your wife in good taste. You have failed to show her the meanness inherent in some programming and less abundant in other programming.
The thing about this is that enlightening your wife requires some measure of artistic and emotional sensitivity and vulnerability on your part. If you are not a person going through meaningful suffering or a climb to the top (in terms of self-actualization), how can you expect her to invest in any art or entertainment that has even a few vestigial elements of these themes?
If you are not real, how can you expect your spouse to want to even attempt to become real.
By the way, I’m not here defending King of Queens as high art, just comparing it relative to Gay’s Anatomy.
If you genuinely don’t enjoy “adult contemporary” or anything particularly contemplative or nuanced and provocative, don’t be surprised when your spouse tries to drag you into the gutter – and perhaps enlists her “support network” in the effort.
There’s a kind of mean bigotry that most people are engaged in these days. And if you are with someone who is mean-spirited, moved by the salacious, or prone to ghetto sentiments, why aren’t you taking responsibility for this?
One of the cardinal sins of a man in dating is that he “takes it easy” in the early going, so as to not “scare off” the woman, and then her subsidized retardation blows up in the man’s face and suddenly he’s in a prison cell of in-laws, inanity TV bull-pucky, and her “community”. She takes you for a lummox!
If you can’t respect the dignity of your #1 person enough to take a firm stand when they go unconscious and disassociate, you are signaling to your unconscious that you don’t take philosophy seriously. Watch your apathy grow. Watch yourself turn to mysticism, hideous and self-effacing, to cover up the crime – the crime of apathy.
There’s more I want to say but I’m knee-deep in writing and recording music over here plus it’s someone’s special day.
Did you enjoy this? Donate to get me cough up more.
Sending you love and relaxation from my A Man Without A Face artist’s retreat on the Maine coastline 😉
Mysticism is the inability to articulate an argument through reason and evidence alone.
I have been doing philosophy since 2007. One of my early undertakings was to undo all of the mystical programming I had been put through by my upbringing. The clarity this provided me was astounding. Only until the past few years, maybe since 2022, have I realized just how much that essential early work saved me from insanity.
The thing with mysticism is that anyone who practices it inevitably leans on it more and more as they get older.
When you’re a young, wide-eyed pup, you take for granted your ability to grasp The Argument. You haven’t eroded your reasoning abilities, by choice, yet. As you get older, you have lived through more and more forks in the road where you either chose reason-and-evidence or mysticism.
The more you lean into mysticism, the more you rely on it and it devours you. Then you live in this permanent kind of cope where you’re forever looking to some person out there that is proof of concept for your mysticism. A strange veneration of mystics of the past sets in, too. There’s a guilty tone to it. You lose your creativity.
As I approach my fifth decade on the planet, I have come to appreciate how little people actually register on the plane of philosophy. Meaning, people don’t exist philosophically. By my reckoning, it amounts to maybe 2% of the people I have ever interacted with – and that’s coming from me, who has been highly specialized and fairly vocal and gregarious and active in the field of philosophy.
Philosophy or mysticism – that’s the fundamental choice for any thinker. There is no mixing of the two. It’s impossible. Anyone telling you otherwise is lying.
Across the West there has been a tremendous re-uptake with mysticism. You see it from just about every two-bit influencer concerned with “saving the West”. It’s mysticism up and down the line with them. Mysticism unlocks earthly power. If you want influence and influence is power, you go to mysticism. But then you live in insanity. Articulating the veracity if your insanity to you becomes more and more impossible as you age and double down.
Few will walk the Lonesome Valley.
There is a tremendous pride and hubris that has followed the West’s re-uptake of mysticism. And more subtly, a murderous rage that threatens to wipe everything out – from within. The incredible spite of people who turned away from reason and evidence is only contained by reason and evidence.
I have watched so many people now in my years who have turned to mysticism and had their personalities completely enshrouded in greyness and misery. It’s a perfect 1-to-1 input. Adopt mysticism → become enshrouded.
I cannot abide!
I will remain free.
I am not afraid to lose “The West”.
If the price of keeping it is to be a slave to conformity, forget the West.
Reason and evidence will bloom something better, anyway. It’s only a matter of time. Why fight math itself? The math is firmly with The Argument.
You cannot claim to love me and then pepper me with non-arguments. I would like to be treated with curiosity!
Parents will tell these pleasant stories about your childhood when so-and-so did this and it was just so funny.
That’s the common view of what is happening here.
Let’s break it down: –Pleasant stories – where is the empathy for whether the story was pleasant for you or not? Do your parents actually gauge your response to the story or just blab it out like NPC’s? Be honest. -Your childhood – the story is from a parental point of view and since parents aren’t philosophical and on principle, engaging with curiosity first, the story is often told to manage a difficult internal feeling on their part. -It’s just so funny – the funny haha stories are usually the ones where there was some sibling to sibling predation that resulted in someone’s embarrassment – yours.
Haha Jimmy, you little butthole!
Consider the basic attitude of parents to their children: I own my child, children are less intelligent therefore inferior, and my house, my rules.
Let’s break it down again: -I own my child – parents err here. Yes, in a strict, legal sense, you own your child. We have to have it this way or the State will claim ownership, which leads to all manner of insanity. But the truth is that parents are stewards of their children. Says as much in the Bible. Susses out from a libertarian perspective, as well. Your work as a parent is to relinquish unto an 18 year-old a fully functioning body and brain, absent of damage due to your parenting style. Check out my book Peaceful Parenting for more on this.
-Children are less intelligent and therefore inferior – this is where parents’ programming comes through. People come from a domination-submission background (aka the entirety of human history): where performative disadvantage on the part of another kicks online programming in us meant to seek an advantage. The tenderness of peaceful parenting can be seen when you take that disparity as all the more reason to equalize with the child. How else can they best learn?
-My house, my rules – this is just impatient tyranny on the part of a parent, usually the father but more and more so the woman these days. This is communicating to the child that power is the adjudicating factor in human conflict, not reason, evidence, or truth. If you’re too lazy to try and universalize the rules in your home, to make them make sense for everyone – just admit it!
What is really going on with these nostalgic stories?
The older parent, now with adult children, is typically trying to put their adult children back into state dependence – to harken back to a time when the adult-child was dependent on them. This induces in the adult-child a sense that their parent still has the wisdom and authority now that they had then.
Consider it – are you, as the adult-child, asking for stories from the childhood so you can get an honest perspective, some relevant feedback that you can use today? Or are these stories just kind of randomly offered up by nervous people with guilty consciences?
There is a dominance that creeps into these stories, particularly when they’re at the expense of the adult-child present for the retelling. They’re little humiliation rituals meant to prop up the waning authority of the aged parents. Sometimes they’re told in exquisite detail but suddenly the aged parents practice selective memory if the adult-child asks for a painful memory – such as the time he was spanked or yelled at or degraded with some punishment in response to a transgression.
One of the most common stories is the, “Remember your first day of school?”
This story is told quite unconsciously by aged parents, oblivious in their certainty that the adult-child will simply buy into the bit and nod and smile.
Remember your first day at school? You were so nervous! You cried but then, after a bit, you found it wasn’t so bad.
There are people out there who will also quite unconsciously proclaim, “I was excited to be at school! See, I’m a winner. I ate school up and you can find no fault in what I’m saying. School was a great experience for me and you’re weird for taking issue with my enjoyment of what turned out to be something really great for me.
This is a way of propping up their parents’ systematic breaking down of them before school happened so that they would be inured to its effects by the time its presence in their life became fact. People like this speak as puppets of their parents’ denial. The reason for this is because school is philosophically evil and retarded, done with stolen money and modeled after sociopathic “pedagogy” from the late 19th century.
School is emasculating, people-breaking.
But good luck arguing with people’s programming.
The next time you hear a hardy-har-har Boomer story about the time you fell on your face or your sibling shit their pants on a beach trip or you were awkward with a girl or, “Remember the nickname we used to tease you with?” – consider the power dynamics at play.
Consider empathizing with your younger self.
Consider the philosophy of the scenario being presented, as opposed to the nostalgia programming welling up inside of you.
Consider the limits in empathy of the adults in the memory.
Consider saying what actually needed to be said then but couldn’t be said because you were a powerless, dependent child.
Consider if that sovereign voice inside of you was sought out by your parents.
Then sit with the answers you hear and feel your wisdom increase.
Me at the Studio Ghibli Peaceful Parenting Denmark Conference 2025 – sorry to have missed you!
The truth is that people don’t move on from their wrongs. They simply plow them under and move forward. But whatever you plow under will eventually spring up.
In this way, people’s personalities become ugly, hardened, and embittered.
This is why they have no problem asking you, rhetorically, why you can’t move on.
That’s why they can stomach playing such a shitty trick on a person they’ve wronged.
There’s a massive uptick in “nostalgia posting” on the timeline.
As everything goes to utter hell and back, the worst demons among us unleashed, there is a growing contingent of people who long for when times were better.
This phenomena is captured by this meme:
These guys, at the time, had it so bad. Life was rough!
But in hindsight, there’s an innocence they had that has since been spoiled.
This is not unlike bad parenting’s effects on a person.
Once upon a time, you were an untroubled, un-cudgeled, un-browbeaten individual who had a plucky enthusiasm and a zest for life. You have some go-off energy.
This was ground out of you by unhappy, mean parents.
Little by little, the light went out. The twinkle was snuffed out.
And you’re not allowed to remember.
The world is set up to grind you down. The world will remove from you your ability to empathize with previous mood and hormonal states where you were much brighter, more innocent, and alive.
And if you spend any amount of time trying to remember or recapture these previous states, you will be treated as a kook.
Abusive parents will edge away from you like you’ve done something wrong.
An ax-murderer, establishmentarian society will call you sentimental, “conservative”, feckless, weak, cowardly, feminine, etc.
All manner of abuse must be heaped on you to keep you from questioning why things went so wrong – or how they could be improved.
Instead you’re supposed live in a highly reactive state of yowling at the latest outrage.
Forever on a hamster wheel of escalation.
Society heaps its greatest accolades on those who best help us forget.
The later someone arrives to philosophy in life, the more difficult it is for them to integrate the concepts and the harder they tend to “fall apart”.
This is a difficult process.
This is why I say that young people who find my work are at a great advantage. This is also why I say that no matter your age, if you work hard, it tends to go easier.
Work hardest at the beginning – this way you accumulate fewer cruddy habits.
If philosophy is highly likely to tear you down, then if you are lackadaisical, the “falling apart” is going to hit much harder. The less you scooch boot, the more likely you are to be hit by a hammer.
MAGA disillusionment dumping fatties into philosophy where tripping and falling is guaranteed.
Philosophy is extremely difficult.
The later into life a person is, the more entrenched their bad habits. Regular society teaches us that your irrationality is permissible within certain bounds. Just don’t build a killdozer and go whacko on police authorities. Don’t type certain terms into the search bar and you’ll be OK. Try to not rape, kill, or steal unless you have a net worth of above $30million. Above that mark and someone will bail you out for a handsome cut and enduring tribute. Try to not walk around in society butt naked unless you’re in Portland or Seattle.
You’re allowed to do a lot: -as many drugs as you’d like -have as many children as you can IF you’re nonwhite (donde esta mi SNAP) -you can do most crimes to White people -you can doom scroll until your eyeballs rot -you can rehearse whatever kind of mystical sayings that comfort you -you can spend your Visa Rothschild chits in the casino economy, no problem -you can get into whatever political anything so long as you don’t organize –if you organize, be anything that isn’t Far Right or black SUVs show up to your house -you can do butt stuff -you can take on copious amounts of college debt -you can play woketard video games where the White man is bad -you can avoid the opposite sex like they’re the plague, especially if you’re White -you can avoid people, especially if you’re White -enjoy all the slop food your body can tolerate before you get fungi and parasites
Point is, you have lots of leeway to do whatever you’d like. If you didn’t receive peaceful parenting as a child, which is a 100% certainty for anyone born before 2008, you definitely got into something as a teenager or young adult that wasn’t good for you. Or your parents did something to screw you up.
Obviously there’s a continuum of “screwed up” but never underestimate what a few errant passes will do to a sensitive soul. Western Europeans tend to be like thoroughbred racehorses.
Your tiger pal in childhood becomes a mean monkey as you get older.
Are you 1-3 years into philosophy and feeling like utter shit?
Could be that the foundations of your life as you’ve lived it are being overturned. That’s hard on a person. Batters the ego.
I have the seen people with the absolute most diamond-hard constitutions turn away from philosophy because they couldn’t give up the violence in their personalities. They didn’t want to take the hard edges out because they had to define themselves by their hard edges to domineering, predatorial parents long before.
I have seen people laze their way into the minefield of their unacknowledged feelings and then step on landmines and fritz out, never to return to the barren land. Off they go into an entire adult lifetimes of distraction (entertainment, hedonism, academia) and abstraction (politics, conspiracy theories, careerism, religion).
I’ve… seen things. Things you wouldn’t believe.
But what I’ve never seen is someone double down on philosophy when the going gets tough and come out from it worse for wear. The person who doubles down on philosophy begins to know a strength they only glimpsed as a flicker on the horizon as a child.
Have you tried my patented chicken sandwich I invented last year?
That’s what philosophy tastes like, if you push through the “Desolation Within”.
What does “into philosophy” look like?
It doesn’t mean, “I listened to Stefan Molyneux for years man and yeah, great stuff bro. I love libertarian economics and when women get corrected and shit!”
That’s better than nothing.
But I am talking about the self-knowledge component. You gotta do the self-knowledge part. You’ve got to ask yourself where you’ve been in error. You’ve got to examine the mistakes of your parents. You have to look at your programming.
Been in a conflict? Programming likely had something to do with it.
Had trouble securing work or finding love?
Had a period of loneliness followed by illness?
Been caught up by the law?
Haven’t read any books in the past year or two or three?
Maintain self-defeating, short-term oriented habits that wreck your long-term prospects?
These can only be somewhat mitigated by listening to Stefan Molyneux’s wonderful show.
Working with yourself and getting honest is where most of the juice resides.
Thy cup overfloweth.
If you’re looking for more in this vein, try my older book Make Self-Knowledge Great Again. Some of it is fantastic and some of it, a bit dated or I’m at odds with.
If you’re falling to pieces, let it be because you used philosophy to tug at some seams that are now spilling open.
Life has to get messy before it can be tidy again.
Unpack the rot. Sunlight is the best disinfectant. Let your wounds breathe.
Try to not take it hard. This is part of the process. Learn to unwind strategically, not hedonically.
You cannot expect perfection. And philosophy shines a light on your imperfections. Great big abreactions happen because of something. They aren’t mystical codexes.
“Depressions” must be put into proper context. Empathy and patience allow for that process to play out.
Don’t give up on the process!
There are sunny shores. There are elysian fields. All is well… in a well-ordered and clean conscience. You can’t just will your way there. We are all challenged by a push and pull of the conscience. Sometimes it tells you to start from scratch. Sometimes it does not trust you. You’ve lived in error. All those endless choices I listed above have something to do with it.
Nobody voted for “regime change for Iran” or “free Iran” apart from a few snaky Washington DC insiders and people with Iranian family members.
The war is costing a billion dollars a day. Given the source is the Pentagon, which has famously lost tens of trillions of dollars in the past, the figure is likely double.
There’s this idea that “best known knowledge” is government statistics and figures but the best known knowledge is that government “is asshole” and when the ringmasters have a vested interest in cooking the books, the books matter less. Yet the majority of people charge ahead, perfectly satisfied with whatever meager disclosure has taken place on the part of the government. I guess to not do so would be enter “conspiratorial” territory, a view I don’t particularly share because I have another alternative: to think in principles.
Follow the money is the oldest rule in politics, I was so brilliantly reminded by my friend and firebrand Michelle Malkin through her masterful book Open Borders Inc. (currently on sale for a mindblowing $6 – that’s Clinton Era pricing right there).
Money moves incentives, whales move money, therefore whales move incentives. I go back and forth on the libertarian view that increases in government spending beget entropy when so obviously there is a will manifest in what the US Federal government is currently perpetrating on most of the civilized and uncivilized world. There’s a well-ordered symphony to all the chaos.
Unlike a lot of people given over to “conspiratorial” thinking, I grant there are immediate, personal solutions you can engage to slowly reverse the tide: Bitcoin (& Monero), peaceful parenting, UPB, and self-knowledge.
You have to pound the solutions into the dirt like a tent stake or people tend to drift off, become unmoored, and too loose in their thinking. Then they try to pull you into that. I won’t be drawn into that like I once was. Formerly I needed the adulation but these days, I’m full up like a big chonker.
The Iranian brass seem to want to come to terms. The American-Israeli coalition carries the bigger stick.
Once the money’s been stolen (from future generations), all fire breathing about the war devolves to what serves who’s personal interests. On Telegram I like to play with this equation by repeatedly calling for variations of Tehran to be regime changed if I can get India nuked as part of the deal.
A lot of people’s programming tells them I’m behaving nihilistically but not really, just finding my legs after being not up to snuff for a few years. There is a lot of thought that goes into these quips. I play the quips close to people’s programming but there’s always a thought going on in the background. I’m not sure anyone notices or appreciates it much but it’s fun to me and that’s the way to keep me engaged: keep it fun.
AI gives strange gifts.
Iranian shitbag mullahs, lay down your arms. Our Mexican-American fighter pilots armed with top Israeli spec are too much for you.
I have no love for the mullahs. I have no love for the banking system Iran will be put on. Please don’t make me choose. I have no stake in this. I want gas back under $3 a gallon where it was before Operation AIPAC Fury began. I don’t know anyone from Iran because I grew up in Oregon cattle country (PETA is taking over the state, by the way).
There is the specter this will be the first war since WWII where there is significant punishment for those who speak out. The harder the speak out, the worse the banking sanctions. The longer the war goes, the less face that can be saved for our GOP overlords.
By speaking out for Trump and America’s interests in the first place, not only was my social media career completely kneecapped, resulting in well north of $1million in lost business potential, now if I can’t speak out I don’t get to eat zee bugs? No, thanks. I’ll just sit this one out. Remember, I do other stuff now, too. I can help mend relationships, salvage bad parenting, vet potential mates, increase job performance (good at this one), or help overcome bad personal habits. Did a lot of studying and have had a lot of practicum in order pull that off.
The People are not in charge. I wonder to myself if I am beginning to regret going for Trump in 2016 and 2020 given how I absolutely do not regret holding out in 2024. It was an odd stance because it was less about how Trump would be weaponized, which was obvious to see, and more about the lack of Americanness of the politics – which to my discredit I did not well convey. I wasn’t in a forthcoming mood. That’s changing.
There’s a lot more to be said here but other duties call. Thank you for making it this far. It’s you deep readers who I admire the most. And for the donos, I’ve been mulling over some subscriber only content here on Substack, so stay tuned!
