StevenFranssen.com

Category: Blog

  • The Freedom Tipping Point

    Recently I’ve been reflecting on a unusual experience I’ve been having stemming from an observation of increased myopia in the world and my experience of others directly.

    At times I’ve had the “answer” flit into my head but sensed the “why” needed more fleshing out.

    How I have come to see it that there has been a “freedom tipping point” that has been passed in the world. I’ve approximated this concept before by talking about a rising transaction cost in the face of ever increasing statism. Statism is an inherent drag on capital allocation and one that we all foot the bill for, even if it’s just a credit card fee at the pump.

    What’s a man to do?

    During the 2020 election steal, I kept having this unreal sensation that some gigantic piggy bank was being broken into – something irreversible was being done. I fought with all my might against this, which amounted to not much. There are just way too many people that have been created by State programs who feel little incentive to improve themselves and discover universality.

    Those people will be “put” somewhere.

    The world fell out of balance when COVID happened. There was a massive contraction in freedom – in America more temporarily but in Europe more permanently. That European component was enough break the camel’s back. We could also point to Canada and Australia going the way of the dodo.

    It no longer pays to be good.

    That’s a different way of looking at it. Statism, through the corporation which is purely a fabrication of the State, has choked out a sufficient amount of the voluntarism in the world that now there is no central basis. There is no bastion. There is no regenerative capacity in the ecosphere.

    There is an ecological collapse happening — in economic terms.

    I was watching this film Tuner starring some young hunk, a Hapa lady from a wealthy background, and Dustin Hoffman. In it, the old fogie Hoffman is dying in the hospital and so the young hunk piano tuner has to take work breaking into safes, on account of his incredible hearing, in order to keep things financially afloat. The bill he has to cover is $36k.

    There is no lucrative work for him to immediately branch out into in NYC because the entire region is completely suffocated by regulation and licensure rules. The film’s logic just assumes this, correctly. It would not work within the scope of the film for the hunk to go out to North Dakota and work an oil rig for 3-4 months and that’s if he could even manage to secure the job. The only way to even remain in NYC at subsistence level is to continue his piano tuning work. Imagine it, his Hapa honey pining for him over FaceTime while he’s off on a fishing boat or something. It works in absolute real terms but in terms of movie magic, it sucks.

    Inflation has created conditions where stillness isn’t a thing. Everyone has to be an economic transient and ride these strange warps in space and time that increased government budgets and corporate financial dealings emanate outwards. No sole proprietor is creating incentive sets for other people, in comparison to the financialization that’s happening. That doesn’t mean a person should give up. That would be an ideological statement. To make it work, people have to compartmentalize, tell themselves what they need to in order to keep going, and look for what give there is in the situation and work it.

    95% of corporate hiring under Biden went to non-White men.

    Obviously, the entire Dem leadership from that time should currently be rotting in prison.

    Financially, this means that White men have far less disposable income than they had 10 years ago. They cannot put their money where their values are. They’ve been swamped by concerns of basic sustenance, upkeep, and taxes. They’re not clearing the high bar like they used. We have tech company stocks going nutso, through corporate investors, rather than Winchester and I dunno, Fender stocks going nuts.

    And neither is anyone else clearing the high bar, save for an ethnic group or two that have positioned themselves immediately proximate to the money printers.

    White men are the ones who pay others to be good. But they’ve been relegated to daisy chaining mortgages on a dying real estate market, building condo villages in Red states that Blue staters are fleeing to (who finances all this?), and working construction. These are involved jobs that leave little room for creative thinking and entrepreneurship beyond this take-the-next-fruit-off-the-branch kind of hot-shottery that passes for elite level entrepreneurship. There is no breathing room to step back from the painting and take it all in. Everything is detail work in the wake of bankers.

    Again, I’m not saying, “Don’t do it.” It is the way that it is and you either wallow or you get moving. I prefer people kept moving, honestly. It is destabilizing for motion to stop. I’d rather we continue to have a strange, mutative momentum in freedom’s underbelly with perhaps a .5% movement upwards than everything drop out and everyone go nuts.

    Most people are NPCs with murder/death/horror programming put into them. They literally can’t handle the loss of a job, let alone a massive market contraction or a generalized state of emergency with US troops running martial law. They’ll just bleat for the government to do something about it.

    We are going to live with libs throwing more tantrums and eventually their near-endless pool of bloodthirsty migrants will exhaust itself. Until then, count what few friends you have, notice what little loyalty there is, and keep following your dreams.

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  • An Excess Of Self-Concern

    When not-enough is too much.

    I have lived with chronic illness for roughly 10 years now. I know exactly what it is — it’s just treatment resistant and modern medicine doesn’t have much in the way of answers, mostly because modern medicine spawned it. Lots of people just kind of give up in the face of it and live restricted, diminished lives. The good news is that it took me 9.5 of those years to even have the exact name of what’s plaguing me.

    So every day I wake up or stand up from being awake for a lot of the night, and do a ritual where I read, consult AI, mark down data, do an adjustment or two, and get on with my life. But this health struggle used to consume the entirety of my thoughts.

    I would love to not have to think about it or account for it anymore.

    Thankfully, I have a lot to live for, am active in the lives of others, and had a tremendous tour de force on this philosophical journey before any of the health stuff kicked off.

    But for people who have been saddled by child abuse and its resultant madness, there can be no North Star to compare to.

    There is this agonized middle ground that some people walk where they are cognizant that there’s something wrong with them, therefore they take steps to alleviate it, and what modicum of improvement they gain is what they satisfy themselves with, not knowing that it could be so much better for them.

    I met a lot of people like this when I was in a Masters for Counseling. They’d done some baby steps and thought they were ready experts. And compared to most of the sandaled goyim at Walmart, they were!

    Fortunately, self-knowledge is a merciful process. Only a small portion of it ever “holds out” against your best efforts, usually in the form of a difficult addiction. If you put in the work, you see results. But “the work” is different for everyone and you need some good feedback to bring it into focus.

    A lot of depression is an inability to get out of the drama. You have these critics and cynics just running in your head 24-7 and you are inundated.

    You turn toward yourself to make it better and you drown.

    This is why connection to others is so important.

    Late last summer and into the fall, I went through a phase where I just had to vent about my medical issues to people behind my paywall. I was in the thick of talking to specialists, getting prescribed crazy, expensive pills, and trying to make sense of it all — all with my typical perseverance and my refrain, “Guys I am about to fix it this week!” That support from others was crucial and it helped me to knock a lot of the maladies off of the list. I went from having 5 not-so-good and 1 bad thing going on with me to now just 1 bad thing.

    This can be likened to madness and addiction. The relevant treatment for madness is interpersonal connection, physical exercise, moral/philosophical discernment, and then you get a “clearance” experience where you breath a tremendous sigh of relief.

    I would caution against too much self-reliance. There is an Aristotelian mean for everything. The more resourced I have become, through speaking to people far and wide through the Internet and through LLM’s + research, the more knowledgeable I have become. I am more humbled and awed by the collective genius of mankind.

    I would love to work in the medical field in a lab research setting but the credentials to get in there are goofy and not what I want to spend my time doing, especially with a young family.

    With madness, the more adept you become at resolving it, the more capable you are of transmitting outwards in a way that leads to more rationality and solace for others. The more rational you are, the more of an organizing force you are on the world.

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    With resolution comes an availability to look outwards and resolve what is beyond you.

    When I was younger, I thought my life’s work was firmly squared on philosophy + counseling. But as I learn more and more, I see just how rampant the chronic illness epidemic is in America, largely due to statism’s effects on the food, air, and water supplies. There has also been an extreme over-prescription of antibiotics that is leading to incurable conditions. I want be of assistance somehow!

    Everyone has their own strengths and tendencies to develop — not everyone is a “healer”. There are plenty of fields outside of “healing” that can benefit from integration with philosophy. Maybe you will be the first to do it…

    Seeing the self-defeat alleviate in someone and be replaced by motivation, enthusiasm, and inspiration is a tremendous honor and privilege.

    Through our meaningful work in the world, we see such restoration in others. But getting to that meaningful work can involve walking a personal labyrinth for a time. Lots of people remain stranded in various stages of maturity because they will not address their blind spots or cannot muster the courage to make a leap. Not everyone “makes it”.

    Getting outside contact to people who have “made it” is so vital for your calibration. I’m contending with something highly pathogenic and treatment resistant, yet I do know there’s hope because there’s roughly a 60% clearance rate for the intensive track I’m on.

    Self-knowledge is doable. It can be done efficiently. It doesn’t have to take forever. You will see results, especially if you are not trapping yourself in a solipsistic concern that leaves little room for education enrichment and talking to people who have “cleared madness”. But woe to the person who stays ensconced in their own resources and does not reach out. Isolation is a hell of a drug. World scary and bad. Digital device safe and snuggly.

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  • Welfare Is The Modern Plague

    Seven years ago I released a children’s book titled The Big-Headed Farmer.

    The basic premise is that Justin Trudeau sweet talks his way into being in charge of a farm, makes a deal with Satan to gain more influence, and then boggles the farm so badly that the farm animals chase him off.

    The book is a perfect primer on welfare with a touch of wishful thinking.

    Wealth redistribution, at the point of a gun, does not work and is immoral.

    The effect of welfare is that people engage in all manner of hedonistic, degenerate, high time preference behavior that sullies everything it touches.

    The more welfare in a society, the more it reflects “welfarism” back to others.

    Everything becomes catered to abortionist, careerist women.

    The halcyon days of White guy guitar virtuosos putting on sincere, soulful shows for factory worker White guys are over.

    The people who do most poorly under race Communism are the people most capable in a free society. This cannot be denied.

    The media landscape in 2026 is a whole lot of signal-boosted welfarism.

    Every bit of celebrity gossip.

    Every arena concert.

    Every sitcom in syndication.

    Every opinion column.

    Every facet of the mainstream media – all of it a leftist fabrication meant to eradicate the remaining productive people of the world.

    You can feel the desolation and opiate nature of places like New Mexico, Arizona, Kentucky, or Rhode Island.

    My home state of Oregon has “legalized” rent caps, tax per mile on hybrid vehicles (you have to report your odometer), and the prospect of making any kind of money in your 20’s or 30’s has been completely gone for at least 25 years. The only reason healthy, decent people even live there is because the natural beauty is completely off the charts. And the State of Oregon knows it and squeezes your balls for it.

    Government employment is a form of welfare.

    You have all of these untalented, spiteful people who exist primarily because their parents “worked” in government or next to it in some kind of contracting role.

    You also have “entrepreneurs” who act like big hot shots because they sold for a big exit. But when you ask what they actually did, it was some kind of government-integrated service. Even one of my very favorites, Stefan Molyneux, ran a waste-management software company that had big government contracts (I’m open to a correction here!)

    The path to an independent livelihood has never been narrower.

    Government touches everything. Even the ballyhooed trades are flush with cash only because of mass migration and the mass surveillance state that is being erected.

    Rules are put into place everywhere, particularly through land-use laws but now through aquifer capture via surveillance centers, to adversely impact the middle class, independent operators who still manage to earn an honest living. Their lot is compounded by Trump and Netanyahu’s Forever War with Iran that is choking fertilizer and fuel prices to death.

    Here’s the bottom of the welfare usage per capita list:

    You can really feel the difference when you step into states where there is a low government budget and a lower welfare per capita usage. Places like Wyoming, Missouri, South Dakota, and Utah (outside of SLC) spring to mind. The people in these places forgo the “competitive advantage” of welfare in order to live as more free, independent people. Even Florida, a place where people would use welfare like gangbusters if the rules allowed it, has an air of business to it that you don’t feel in liberal hellholes like California or Maine.

    Welfare is completely disturbed in a certain sense, when you consider it.

    For example, with abortions: to get a “free market” abortion —which is a ludicrous prospect— would cost many hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars. The liability that the child-murdering doctor would incur for taking a risk like that would be off the charts. That gets priced in.

    But in Blue states, you can get an abortion for the cost of gasoline to get to the “clinic”.

    In America, women have aborted 60 million children, which is more people than have ever died in American wars — and America has been at war for all but like 5 years of its existence.

    Let’s say a “free market abortion” costs $1.5million X 60 million dead kids = $90trillion.

    “Women’s health” has cost White men more money than the national debt, which recently surpassed $39trillion. Those are our brothers and sisters that have gone missing in such massive numbers. Those 2-child households in the 1990’s should have been 4-child households. Now people aren’t even having kids.

    Who can afford them?

    If you’re wondering why everything is a complete hellscape of irrationality, consider the hidden costs of all those abortions: money burned, genius children blinked out of existence, marriages and relationships destroyed, baby-killers raking in money and using it to advance their personal and political interests, and on and on everything compounds into further and further entropy.

    Culture is a social phenomena. I plug away in obscurity because there is no popular support for a stateless society, peaceful parenting, AND breaking from abusive parents. That last piece has cost me any popularity I could have gained. And I did an A – B test in my life, my stint in politics, to prove to myself that I could attain popularity if I diluted a couple key components of philosophy for a time. Censorship finished me off. But still I hang in there like a junkyard dog because I’m proud and ornery.

    People don’t need to be governed.

    Welfare people want to be governed.

    There is a tremendous difference here. Just yesterday you had, at the socialist World Cup, professional lip readers noting Trudeau and Newsom blabbing to each other about how Trump was a “great President”:

    Trudeau and Newsom mean it in the sense that Trump is a capable governor, not that they agree with his policies.

    Governance is the policy.

    The world will just have to suffer more fools thinking they can “go in and change things” while simultaneously deliberately omitting the kind of education for their audience that would permit their audience to be free of their governance. It’s so cynical how it all works.

    Parenting that inoculates children against abuse isn’t allowed.

    Music that inoculates people against ugliness and artificiality isn’t allowed.

    Open-source tech that puts people in the driver’s seat of their workflow isn’t allowed.

    Energy technology that breaks people meaningfully from the grid isn’t allowed and is one of the quickest ways to ensure government agents show up with rifles at your house.

    Privacy isn’t allowed. Space Force has a live low-orbit satellite view of everything you do on American soil. Trump basically said as much this week. This is welfare.

    So the government has shitted out tens of millions of work-averse people who are brain damaged by the schools, the food supply, antibiotics, and media programming and those people will then vote for increased government budgets — whether owing to EMERGENCIES or owing to suicidal empathy.

    It’s all too much to track so I’ll leave it here for today.

    If you can pierce the veil, you can see through to the beauty in life.

    “To see the farm is to leave the farm,” Molyneux used to say. I always appreciate him for that one.

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  • Rescuing A Woman

    If you’re unfamiliar with my term Heartbreak World, it’s basically a descriptor for the social matrix we’re all caught in:

    -loyalty is praised but not actually practiced to any real extent

    -people’s brains are cooked by their private hedonism they engage in on their devices whereas in yesteryear they would have been forced to go on a walk or go to some social event or maybe just do drugs which at least was seen as wrong back then

    -the institutions have been wholly captured by the State and thus promote as much agony and misery as possible

    We’re all inhabitants of Heartbreak World.

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    The entirety of this social arrangement traces its roots to the condition of the parenting, which is pretty much shite but improving. The Boomers spanked at about an 88% rate (off the top of my head), Gen X spanks at 45%, and Millennials spank at about 20%.

    The younger generations still have a way to go on the verbal side of things. Doesn’t help that everyone is becoming illiterate.

    You wouldn’t know parenting is improving because spankers, who are hotheads, are the most full-throated about their bad habits and will gnaw off their own leg to justify hitting children in someone else’s eyes. This is simply a repetition of their own histories where they were crippled by their abusive parents.

    It’s ugly. Anyway, to the topic at hand.

    I have this phenomenal track record at this point, stretching back well over a decade, of getting men into marriages.

    The main ingredient necessary is a willingness on the part of the man to humble himself and learn what needs to be learned, by the logic of his own life, what will get him across the finish line.

    Inquire at stevefranssen@protonmail.com.

    Most men don’t have the stones.

    Philosophy is a mirror. If a man can’t face the damage he’s done in his life, he will inevitably personalize with you, who are holding up the mirror, and either storm off or slink away in bitter dejection. The more proud ones will latch on to some lesser figure who isn’t as good at holding up the mirror and will endlessly console themselves as if you were the perp. It’s childhood all over again for these guys.

    People who weren’t encouraged in childhood will interpret encouragement as domination in adulthood.

    I really should make more YouTube videos where I explain the finer details of all this. I’ve written some hearty-helping books, such as last year’s Family Formation. I’m like the 21st century’s Carl Jung/Hermann Hesse/Aristotle/Mel Gibson/Bruce Springsteen.

    To rescue a woman, if she wants to be rescued, you have to be willing to burn the midnight oil in your self-knowledge work. You have to be willing to weather incredible storms of self-doubt. You have to be willing to reckon with the depths of your own depravity and your seemingly unending capacity for intellectual manipulation. You have to be willing to back to Beginner Mode and live with the incredible impatience this decision provokes.

    And if you can do this, it’s honestly just a quick hop, skip, and a jump to things working out for you.

    But people typically don’t want to be emotionally available like that. They want to keep extensive contact with their families of origin. They want to bury their heads in work. They went to stay hooked on their addictions. They want to have some PODCAST blaring in their ear so they can assuage all those teeny little voices of intellectual insecurity in themselves.

    It doesn’t take that long to get into fighting shape, if you’re willing to be humble.

    Humility is how you rescue a woman from Heartbreak World.

    The more hubris, the more skewed your life will become:

    If you already got a woman for yourself, 99% of the time because you’re decent looking and have a sex drive, you will damn her to having to live with your unresolved demons. You won’t do the “Big Reset” that is required for virtue to flourish in a romantic relationship. And the best you can hope for in the face of your stubbornness is a life of petty vanities — which of course you run the risk of your children making a complete bonfire of, particularly if they sniff out ole’ Franssen’s online work. Aren’t I the meanest man on the Internet? I wrote as much in my 2019 sleep-deprived book of allegories Coom, Consume, Comply. People didn’t know what to make of that but a few souls did listen. And of course, I say “mean” tongue-in-cheek cause it’s the opposite that is true: I’m the sweetiest. I’ve been the sweetiest peetiest person alive on this planet since Freddie Mercury died of AIDS in 1991.

    Rest in peace, sweet prince.

    Sometimes it’s like I’m roller-skating, chewing bubble gum, and making the finest philosophy this world has yet seen. Just have to get a wee bit of shut eye.

    Did you have fun on this jaunt?

    You thought I was going to give you a simple formula like:

    A) Bonk woman over the head

    B) Drag her back to your cave

    C) Quietly watch over her to ensure she does chores

    D) Put baby in her

    That’s what a lot of guys like to hear these days. Use penile implants! Obsess over your appearance! Pay $995 for the Man Camp! Pay hundreds and hundreds for an hour of the guru’s time!

    Is that what you want me to be, you brigands?

    You abuse me!

    Toodle-loo.

    Watch my anti-spanking SAM HYDE video that is my #1 most watched video on my new, much reduced YouTube channel. The spankers came out in FORCE! Dang!

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    “Hoedown, gotta lock her up before she wrecks this town.”

    Listen to my 2023 song Hoedown on Soundcloud!

  • How To Disagree With Someone

    You’re online, you bump into some portion of what someone wrote and you don’t like it.

    What you do from here is today’s focus.

    The first question to ask yourself is, “Am I reacting?”

    If the answer is yes, why give up your personal power – your time – in some kneejerk response to someone? What do you have to prove and to whom? And if you have to prove something to someone, why are you in this arrangement with them? Does it give them power over you, given how you will rush to respond to something you don’t like – on their behalf?

    Why are you living for someone else’s approval? Why do you need what they have? And if you are convinced you need what they have, is there a way you can get that without being in this power dynamic with them? If they make it impossible, why are you mentally triangulated with someone who ultimately stands in the way of what you want?

    This one of the many reasons why valuing personal freedom, and perhaps even taking a bit of time to learn about it, can get you out of sticky situations before they even form.

    Philosophy is about prevention.

    Everyone is running full steam ahead.

    If you can preclude the need for someone else’s approval, which is usually born out of not being guided toward independent opinion-making by your father, you won’t become somebody else’s online attack dog.

    Then you can have real thoughts.

    And someone is going to have an opinion you disagree with.

    When you are working on behalf of your own sovereign self, you will tend to find that disagreement goes better already because what you say in objection isn’t jingoistic and therefore easily anticipated by someone who already thinks for themselves.

    If you’re disagreeing with people who don’t think for themselves, you have to ask yourself, “Is this personal for me?”

    Some people feel a need to defend their own reputation against Reply Guys but people who think for themselves don’t go reading the reply section for points-scored-against.

    This is why I “let them talk”.

    In fact, if I have a tweet that goes viral, I just mute it because 98% of people I’ve ever met don’t even exist philosophically. They are not ontological beings. They are programming. People can be a kick, though.

    This one went KINDA viral. Always getting kneecapped on X, the military app.

    If someone is actually real with me, they tend to be willing to go to my Telegram public chat – which is a really pleasant place, curated by yours truly. Or they write me an email, usually asking for a deeper conversation which I am happy to facilitate. Sometimes people DM me on X.

    I don’t disagree with someone unless I want to be helpful to them.

    If I disagree with someone and I don’t want to be helpful to them, I keep it to myself or I try to distill it into a universal so I can speak on errors that people make commonly. This way, the principle is extracted and others broadly can benefit.

    If I want to be helpful to someone and I disagree with them, I reach out directly. But most people aren’t interested in being helped. I used to be surprised by this. Years and years of me offering a different point of view in a non-threatening manner and getting ignored. This is literally everyone I have ever interacted with in the “influencer space”. A couple of people actually accepted my help and entertained my different opinion, both of them retired from public and even private life many years ago. I miss them! A third one reached out to me and almost took my advice but didn’t. This would have saved the world a lot of pain. This is a person who is in the Oval Office every week. But that is a story for another time.

    This experience in the last two paragraphs has largely shaped my view of the world. I try to base all knowledge and theories on empiricism. And I am quick to look at myself for any bias. This is what I have found.

    This world is an extremely cruel place. The casual sociopathy is completely off the charts. The world and most people in it are Child Abuse Coded. It’s hard to unsee once you get to a certain level of sensitivity. This is part of what makes me so valuable and enduring as private counsel. I also just have tons of wisdom from having lived idealistically and philosophically for…20 years now. I try to be good in my private life, always make amends, and have valued my innocence since I was about 14 when I figured out that media was trying to steal it from me and my cohort, deliberately. Imagine being me at my 8th grade dance, seeing everyone go hedonist baboon mode to the latest hits while I had a head full of Gordon Lightfoot. Still, I found my own way of having fun and many people would follow me into it. They always have. I am a leader!

    Given the cruel world, at some level, the going gets tough and the tough gotta get going. Always helps to have a capitalistic mindset.

    But taking a moment once in a while to see if someone else will stop that full-steam-ahead train is an interesting and worthwhile experiment.

    Humanity still has the brightest potential!

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    A song I listened to while writing it.

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  • Arguments Over Opinions

    The art of the argument, always and forever.

    This is one of those where I have to start out with definitions. We’ll go with the most commonly accepted definitions and then I will refine.

    • Opinion – a view or judgement formed about something, not necessarily based on fact or knowledge.
    • Argument – a reason or set of reasons given in support of an idea, action or theory.

    There’s the old English idiom on opinions, “Opinions are like assholes, everyone has one.”

    Opinions can be viewed as the garbage that NPC’s spit out. They’re reactions based on one’s personal programming. The more a person is programmed, ergo the less self-knowledge they have, the more they tend to spew out opinions.

    It could accurately be said that White liberal women are a collection of opinions based on State and corporate programming. There is a full scale blitz on White women, through the State and Facebook/Instagram, to refashion their programming so that they will open doors to invaders and ultimately wreck their own tribe so that they no longer pose a threat to a certain outgroup. We must all live as a rabble with White men torn asunder.

    Opinions are generally effortless to elicit from NPC’s. Most people have never been validated by their parents, that is to say, had their opinion-forming process checked over for integrity and soundness. Most people are hard-up to get some kind of validation from someone with more status than them. This goes deep into childhood and remains the case for most people as they age, only they care less and less about anything because they burn out from private hedonism and turn into nihilists.

    When you encounter someone that has been “elevated” by someone much higher in status than them, you know they are an initiate in the cruelty of the elite. Opinion-forming is the work of the elite.

    You can’t get arguments out of people because most people have never been trained in logic, rhetoric, argumentation, etc.

    If a person hasn’t been trained in these things, there’s an exceedingly high chance they will not be able to display the skill set. The only people who pick up The Argument through their form of employment are entrepreneurs, people in non-employee roles. This is because entrepreneurs live or die by their wits. They have little to no institutional support to lean back on. Some people who are intelligent employees will ape entrepreneurs but are ultimately not invested in their own arguments and tend to defer to entrepreneurs when the going gets rough.

    Opinions (“this is bad” or “this is good”) are difficult to elicit from people with self-knowledge. This is for a number of reasons. One that springs to mind is that mobs tend to form around opinions. Pitchforks, torches, and all that. Mobs will attack or disregard based on a person’s opinions, which can even default to whether a random on the street is conservative-presenting or not.

    Another reason people with self-knowledge tend not to give opinions readily is because it prioritizes opinions, which can change with new evidence, and it deprioritizes The Argument. Making an argument is a complex art and if you can do it well, you appreciate just how much deferral of opinion went into the building of the methodology for you.

    Another thing with opinions is that if you’re “highly opinionated”, you tend to incept yourself further and further into an existence that is dependent upon your ability to read the tea leaves and surf power dynamics. This is why businessmen flock to major cities. This is why businessmen turn to politics when they can no longer tolerate making value appeals. They turn to securing loot for a constituency while hiding CIA/Moss*d assassination threats from that constituency.

    Opinions are highly dependent on the experience of people receiving them. This is because opinions aren’t reasoned to. They are a form of manipulation borne from programming. This is why it is supremely easy to corrupt politicians and non-productive enterprise businessmen – i.e. businessmen that aren’t involved in anything that is actually made. They didn’t have integrity to begin with, just the “profit motive” that the Communists are kind of in the ballpark mildly correct about (even though they’re much bigger pieces of shit than a somewhat spineless White dude businessman could ever be).

    Now and then you will encounter a businessman who thinks he’s a big swinging dick with philosophy but if you scratch the surface, you’ll find he’s like a poopy baby who will knife you if you reveal his poopiness to anyone. It’s kind of a trip but these guys flash money around and hey, a nucka gotta eat. And remember, dyed-in-the-wool Commies are like a thousand times worse. And they’re massing, waiting for a Democrat POTUS to give them carte blanche. And Newsom would.

    I mention businessmen with bad consciences actually because I think my material can be of use to them. I make no overtures to liberals but am always pleasantly surprised when one finds my material and can reform to some extent.

    He read Marcus Aurelius in college and Nietzsche through the Internet.

    I try to not offer opinions. I do some on X and that’s probably not a good thing, in the long run. The things I say that do well tend to blend some with the programming that Elon Musk’s handlers have decided X will put into the average American’s head. Always to get inflamed and indignant, never to organize, always to rely on the government to do something about something. No sheriffs allowed.

    I also will post links to songs that I like over on my public chat group on Telegram. I view this as Opinion Lite.

    The Argument means that you are displaying models for reasoning as opposed to neat end products for mass consumption. All of my favorite artists (Bach, Van Morrison, Queen, Sting, a few others) are adherents to methodologies. They are not going for “hits”. Hits get people high. But bread and butter is in songwriting. It is a love of the craft, of something well done to internal standards of excellence. This is why I don’t like noodlers on the guitar. Sure, it’s a show of virtuosity and that’s nice in brief bits, but ultimately, nothing existential is being conveyed to the listener. Existential exposition interfaces with philosophy because the strength of the story in a song lives or dies by the internal consistency of the songwriter. Musical noodlers usually don’t have consistency because of their obsession with practicing the instrument. They tend to get obsessed with substances because of their addictive nature that drove them to virtuosity. People like this are better contained in an ensemble, even as the lead man, where they learn to be reliable for others. You can hear their voices “even out” and “broaden” as they get older.

    This is why I do not put stock in youthful “flash in the pan” energy. I put stock in consistency of production and integrity of internal standards – which of course is only a proxy for the kind of discipline it takes to form an actual argument. Ultimately, I want philosophy over anything else. But I understand not everyone actually gets there – yet they still have wonderful things to offer the world.

    That was a nice jaunt, eh? If you liked it, be sure to DONATE.

    I know this Trump/Epstein/Lutnick economy is complete trash and it’s brutal for people out there, so if you don’t donate, it is what it is. I would ask that you share instead and leave a ‘like’ to boost engagement. Some fiat is better but it’s tough out there.

    This might be my last article for a week or so. We’ll see. Maybe I’ll squeeze another one in here soon. I’m going to take some personal time off, just waiting on the thing, wink wink.