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!
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.
In my now not insignificant years of being in the world, I have noticed an alarming trend.
Same guy just happier now. Wildly clearer thinking.
This first began in my early adulthood when my good college buddy got a girlfriend by the middle of freshman year. He and I were on the same floor in the dorms. The girlfriend started sleeping over. She’d bring her friends over. The other guys would go stark raving mad and congregate in large numbers in this small room. I quietly resented the change in our floor’s dynamics and tried to stay out of it. The women would bring the most inane chatter with them. There was always some girl on the periphery that was being a slut – big source of gossip. The men would nod along in a daze or play Xbox or chitchat. I’d pop in but I couldn’t handle it. There was one young woman, Morgan, who in particular I felt just sunk everything to such a putrid level. I resented the change. In the early months it felt like the guys and I were building something. We were building what were supposed to be long-lasting bonds. We’d go on joy rides. We’d do all sorts of wild stuff. One of the main guys gets a woman and suddenly he’s the main guy and everyone is congregating around him and his girlfriend.
At my university, there were co-ed dorms and lots of birth control freely available. I thought it was kind of psychotic and strangely scientific without fully understanding why. I started to read the works of Neil Postman and came across the term “social engineering” and then better understood all that was repugnant to me but couldn’t divorce myself from.
The women invade the men’s space, terraform things to their liking, and the men go soft and doughy.
Let’s cuddle on the bed and watch TikToks, Daddy Poopee.
Women have a domesticating effect on men. That’s no secret.
It’s the way that men respond to it that unnerves me.
I write you from a firmly ensconced position of domestic bliss: -I am a father who practices peaceful parenting -my wife and I have been together for 16 years -my day-to-day concerns revolve around the needs of my family -I had to retire from politics due to health concerns and family considerations
I go back and forth on the domesticating effect women have on men.
This is from a recent livestream Stefan Molyneux did with his daughter where she did his makeup. Is this a good or bad thing? If I was in a will-to-power, I would automatically and reflexively say YES with contempt. But that’s just programming. I thought the livestream was funny. I guess his daughter wears makeup. If everyone is doing it, you leave yourself at a disadvantage by not doing it. I will say, Stefan is manipulating his SMV upwards here by wearing makeup and that’s a form of dishonesty 😉
Would I ever do something like this? Hard to say. I don’t know – ask me in 20 years. Stefan is 20 years older than me. I’m so far removed from Makeup World. My wife stopped wearing makeup like six months into knowing her. She never felt right about it. She is lovely to me without it.
Without his daughter and wife, Stefan wouldn’t be the person that he is. And I rather enjoy the person he is. He offers a genteel touch to the world that it so desperately needs. He’s British and has a theater background, which is a part of the charm – if you’ve read any Shakespeare you just kinda get where he’s coming from. Shakespeare lived in a fun world with far less government and zero multiculturalism.
The way men respond to women’s domesticating effect is what unnerves me. There’s a privation men express in their over-enthusiasm to be tamed. Like they weren’t brought up enough and so they yearn for some kind of direction. Perhaps they didn’t get enough mothering and never sought to work that out in themselves before getting into a relationship. That’s probably it.
Fockin’…
I never ever wanted to take my cues from that direction. Despite rough health that has diminished me, I have always sought to reach out and up toward the stars. I’m not saying I haven’t changed relative to my wife’s maternal and nesting instincts. That’s an important part of being human. I’m saying that that’s not all there is to me. I am not subsumed by it.
Rather than do the hard work of self-discovery, a lot of men leave large portions of their personality up to the effect that their marriage has on them. And if their woman is psychologically immature, they sort of live with that and let it be the way things are until things change on the woman’s time. They don’t permit themselves to feel impatient and dissatisfied with this arrangement.
I never wanted that for myself.
I have never wanted to live in reaction to someone else. That does not mean I don’t ask my kid with some frequency what they need, would like to do, or how I’m doing as a parent. The experience of the people around me is of vital importance to me. This is so much the case that when my health was at its worst, the family gave me the feedback that we should move south a ways to sunnier climes and I made sure we did just that.
We are talking about a compass orientation. The typical situation with Western men is that the woman enters the room and all other considerations are dropped. I refuse to live this way. The main thing is the main thing.
Men are broken by giving up the hunt.
Women will goop men’s brains by cuddling them and encouraging them to watch TV shows. And let’s be honest, the word “encouragement” here isn’t actually what happens. They whine and blather about their “needs” as if they have self-knowledge when 98% of the time they fockin’ don’t.
I don’t partake in this. Never have. Never will.
Women are trained to be feminists and none of that programming is ever undone unless she runs into a philosophical, self-knowledgeable 🔥White Man🔥 who keeps the flame and burns away the programming, no matter the cost. There is a superstructure, a super-sophisticated curriculum women have been raised in and their every impulse is to be the water the seeps into the rock of the man and breaks him apart.
The media landscape is so radically pathetic and meager. And that is where men take their cues from. And so they give up – quietly and to little fanfare.
The quest is gone. No search for the Holy Grail. Just cummies and rubbies. Snackies and whackies.
Who still yearns?
I cannot hide my disgust response.
It’s a bitter disappointment to see so many men step off the path. Over and over, my whole adult life has been seeing men do this.
Men’s hormones are getting wrecked by modern pollution and guys just unconsciously accept it and lose frame. Their women help them. The wildness goes out of the man and he forgets.
Men are so cowed that they forget the glory of the past (liberalism). Or men get into these clever arguments with themselves (aspects of libertarianism) that they forget what drives them and animates them in the first place: to build, to spread virtue, to expand, to perfect justice, to fly.
I won’t do it. And yet I am happy, fulfilled, and my home is peaceful – full of love. It’s a good situation. You can have it all in this life.
–the Supreme Court has struck down MAGA tariffs -Trump has directed the Secretary of War and other relevant departments to begin releasing government documents regarding alien and extraterrestrial life to distract from… -the DOJ has refused to release any more documents or footage related to Jeffrey Epstein despite speculation that it may have only released 5% of the total -the largest massing of American forces in the Middle East since 2003 has taken place, with limited aerial strikes on Iran expected in the coming weeks –Democrats have an 83% chance of winning the House in the midterms
The job market is sour:
MAGA has been sold out, abandoned, and left to the wolves.
I ran a poll to see what you guys think:
Personally, I’m split but I like to stir the pot a little and so I voted Yes.
What is the average guy to do?
Walk toward the fire.
All there is to do is serve the good.
This is most immediately possible in your personal relationships. What is the quality of your personal relationships? Are you missing anyone that could be brought into your circle? Do you owe someone an apology? Do they owe you an apology? Do you have quality conversations on a regular basis?
It is important to remember with some frequency these essential questions.
I like this Andrew Breitbart quote and circle back to it infrequently…
Be excellent even despite the ever increasing rates of taxation and theft via money printing. Town, county, and state governments have gone completely apeshit.
Be excellent even if you are discounted, mocked, attacked, vilified, sexualized, stricken by illness, overburdened, underappreciated, so on and so forth.
Have you checked in with your people? The people who share your values? Are you isolating out of fear? What’s your upper body strength like? Have you done some squats recently? Have you gone and grounded your feet on the bare ground recently?
If you keep walking toward the fire, whatever that is for you in your life, you can be assured there will be strenuous challenge involved. But what else is there to do? If you don’t do what you were put here on this Earth to do, you will fall into despair. If you cannot spread virtue in this life, you are a net drain to everyone and your conscience will torment you – even if the power structure rewards you amply.
There is little gratitude in this life for doing the right thing. Just little drops of it once in a while.
Gratitude in droplets.
The people running things see us as tax livestock. Their work, as they see it, is to demoralize us as completely and totally as they can. They make their bizarro displays of eerie dominance because their predatorial instincts tell them their symbols grant them power. For whatever reason, it is in our primordial programming to recoil from such symbols.
These masks are meant to terrify the inner child into submission.
The Epstein files show that Jeffrey Epstein was intimately involved with the Rothschild family. He had unlimited access within America’s borders and it seems to have stemmed from this association. He interfaced with all the top intelligence agencies with ease and at one point appeared poised to buy the literal Pentagon.
Your conscience will tell you what the answer is, the moment you ask the question, “What is it that I’m avoiding?” Philosophy is about asking the right questions. You get to the right questions by knowing how arguments are formed, how feedback is collected, and how to determine what is truth from falsehood. Without a study of philosophy, you are completely lost to happiness because you haven’t the ability to form the essential questions.
Make the time for philosophy in your personal life, your time off from work, and watch your effectiveness increase.
But be prepared for the fire.
Sometimes it do be like this.
Spreading virtue can be a thankless job. Worse than that, it can get you crucified if you do too much of it. Moderation in all things.
I used to think the proverbial Pain Box was limited to just political action. If you exercised a will-to-power, to dominate and subjugate others, you’d be enclosed by the pain box. But standards have dropped so low and so fast that honestly, even just showing up for work or paying bills on time has appeared to give people this experience. The disaffection is near-total. How could it not be?
The revelations of the past two weeks have painted the grimmest picture possible. And a huge majority of people, because of their addiction to violence and their hatred of children, are in on it.
All the more to raise yourself up. Why wallow with the rest of them?
You were born into a situation not of your choosing. You were born into a slave field overseen by the most vicious and nasty verbal abusers yet to date, oh and they have AI now. The Internet has been invaluable for human freedom but it has also been used by the predatorial elite to entrench and upskill their sophistry and wealth extraction.
Don’t separate from the good in life because you are discouraged. Take heart in the good things you have going, whether they are natural gifts, good health, a decent sleep schedule, a meaningful friendship or two, a loving family, good exercise habits, a good diet, or a job that augments your value to others.
Don’t count yourself out because you have not attained acclaim or security in the service of virtue. These are the most fleeting of possessions because they are at total odds with the prevailing order. Such a thing wasn’t possible by the late 1950’s. America saw a spate of traditional Christians retire from public life because they were so fed up with the subversion they were witness to. There is no “retirement” possible now – only to march steadily forward in service of future generations.
Don’t let the financial elite get you down.
The prison bars are already legion. Don’t add any.
There are thousands of influencers competing for your attention. I think I’m the best! If I’m up there for you, help me continue this work. Together we can bring these values to the fore.
