Children at Play

1. The parent does not understand how the child conquers his boredom. The parent does not understand what the child develops through play. What occurs when the child appears to scribble idly? How does his climbing on the swing set in the park do him any benefit? What does he learn from conducting a battle between plastic enemy soldiers on the living room floor?

2. The play of the child seems undirected by reason, disorderly and even wasteful to the adult observer. The parent is convinced it best to as early as possible send him to a school and engage him in programs. There a curriculum can be administered to the child. The child can take part in organized activities to learn teamwork and a proper response to authority. Implicit is the assumption that that which can be tested and quantified, a method of learning that is explained by trained education professionals, will improve the child and more quickly prepare him for economic life. Because it is assumed too that the child can learn little on his own outside such programs, or that what he may learn is inferior and will result in bad habits.

7. The child develops through play the self-sustaining creativity to conquer his boredom. The development of this ability is man’s most important: that he has the confidence in his creativity to overcome that which might destroy him.

19. Man has rejected boredom. Man fears his boredom and looks to suppress it through distractions, the purchasing of pleasures and entertainments. Yet he also dislikes the work that would keep him from boredom. He looks to disengage himself from both the boredom that emerges from his idleness as well as the expenditure of energy that comes from work. He wishes to be idle but not bored. In the absence of the self-sustaining creativity developed in childhood, he turns to drug use, overeating, shopping, video games, etc. as responses to the problem. Indeed, autistic man might very well be an evolutionary response to the problem.

24. Verily, it is by man’s creative response to his boredom that civilization is often advanced. Civilization does not advance upon men trained to submit to authority, team-players, and those who would avoid boredom at any cost through drugs or programmed distractions. Man’s experience of boredom is his challenge to greatness.

Social Construct vs. Hard-Wired

3. What they call “hard-wired” is just a “social construct” that has existed for a long time; that has been repeated many times over, with slight variation, in many successive vintages of man. It is what comes to be encoded most deeply in a man's genetic memory and institutions. What is hard-wired was constructed and subsequently refined and repeated by man's ancestors over many generations.

4. What they call “social construct” is an institution or value that has appeared more recently, usually defined as being in opposition to what is “hard-wired.” It is a conscious attempt at remaking or correcting man so that he may live within some new myth or value.

6. Some want to denigrate the so-called social construct, saying that it is not how things have been. What is hard-wired has existed for longer and is thus truer and more authentic, they say. Their's is a conservative attitude: the conservation of the past. Furthermore, many of these conservatives argue that man cannot be changed in any meaningful way from those values characterized as “hard-wired”. But man is an animal with consciousness, and with consciousness any sort of overcoming is possible. Though, verily, what is oldest is only overcome with the greatest difficulty.

11. Man can overcome himself with new values and new institutions, and he may very well carry out a program to reconstruct his society. But the resulting transformation will be far different from that which he intended. Indeed, the restructuring may result in a new generation of men hard-wired for something entirely unintended (autistics and the obese are prime examples). For it is both man’s privilege and curse to be conscious of his own development and to reflect upon it, and sometimes to actively fight against it and remake it.

19. Indeed, those that encourage the distinction between social construct and hard-wired fail to recognize that a man's genetics do not reveal themselves in the absence of the institutions they were charged with responding to. For genes and institutions require each other for their expression. What is hard-wired emerges over time from what was socially constructed.

A Silent Negotiation

He does not know what sort of man he would be. There is truth in action and it is this truth he keeps from himself.

He imagines, he grows the fear in his imagination. He imagines what is as yet unknown and is frightened by it. He imagines terrifying scenarios.
–Cus D’Amato

28. There isn’t any training necessary for a life of fucking around and expressing your domestication. There isn’t any training required to be a part of institutions. Institutional life is untrained life. You are born into it. Training is something else entirely. You train for life outside institutions.

40. The only truthful action is that which reveals his character. It is action that is beyond the expectations of institutional life. It is action that sets him apart from other men.

42. Only institutionalized men say there is no truth. What they mean is there is no truth for all of us.

67. In training a man begins to express his character. His character will appear most forcefully when he is without the protection and anonymity of institutional life. It is what is true and only he will know it.

70. Men live within institutions because they fear themselves. They do not wish to examine their characters. They do not wish to be exposed.

85. And so he begins a silent negotiation with himself. The silent negotiation is unknown to other men, but its results will be clear. He will have settled. The pain, and uncertainty of more pain, have overwhelmed him. And with himself he negotiates a way out: “But I feel a little sickness today. I will abort this last bit of training. I do it for my own good. Surely it is for my own good that I stop. Yes. Yes, it is.” Then afterwards he deepens the lie: “And I will be stronger tomorrow for being so wise to stop today before I injured myself.”

96. The smile he exchanges with the boss he disdains to curry favor for a promotion. The nagging woman he quietly listens to on account of the child he is raising with her. The drunk at the bar he backs down from when challenged for fear of injury or arrest. Such are the tiny treasons that whittle away at his character. He negotiates with himself until he is flimsy and weak and easily swayed, until he is capable of any kind of whoring. It is how a man becomes domesticated and defeated.

109. His silent negotiation will go one way or the other. He will go the extra set, go harder, go faster; or he will come upon the excuse that relieves him of his obligation. He reasons away his failure, he makes it acceptable and thereby renews his confidence. He may even call his failure a decision made in the best interest of his future.

112. His days are more and more composed of little failings, often repeated, and he grows accustomed to them. He assures himself that when it really matters he will make a stand. Or perhaps he tells himself the world is worthless and instead attempts an escape of transcendence.

Lonesome

What he enjoyed now was his advance. He consumed the minimum and avoided all that was sugary and artificial, all of the fleeting pleasures. Only the ideas that had lasted longest concerned him. The simple, passing pleasures of the others disturbed him and he steeled himself against them. Still, sometimes, he reminded himself of his mediocrity. After all, he was one of the others, the many others. He had been shaped by the same institutions. It was important to remember the places he had come from and overcome. Still, he did not lapse often. As much as he could, he choose not to require the others. He trained alone; he choose what was difficult; he made his life in such a way as to need the others less. He went the longest, hardest way whenever possible because how else, he thought, could he become extraordinary?

Living your life as every other man and relying upon transcendence was a joke. Mental acts were a joke. The men who thought ideas but didn’t act were gutless cowards. The world didn’t need any more writing or writers. He had the deepest contempt for each of them. His contempt was bottomless when it came to the men who thought and talked and wrote, but failed to act. He much preferred the men who had committed themselves to the average. He admired their unthinking, unreflective commitment to the institutions, the purity of their groupishness, their domestication. He sometimes in weakness longed for the comfort of their lives. They belonged to institutions, while he no longer could.

To be without institutions was to be deeply insecure, homeless. Though he was learning of other, older institutions, he could never belong to them with the commitment a man has to the institutions into which he was born. Having rejected that birthright he would always now feel somewhat outside. For a man belongs best to the way of life that has chosen him. It does not work the other way around.

So he did not belong and would have no comfort. That was what he had chosen. Part of overcoming was embracing lonesomeness. Because other men and their institutions were a fact of the species, solitude wasn't possible. A man could never be alone. His break with other men was never quite complete. It couldn’t work. And that's where the lonesomeness came from. It could only be tragic. And it was hard to choose tragedy. Few had the courage for it. But tragedy was good. That's what the Greeks said. It was how the gods punished great men. The Greeks were alright. Yeah, the Greeks were alright.

Nothing

Certain deep thinkers will say of the waiter at this café that he is not really a waiter. These deep thinkers will say that this waiter does not really prefer the color blue; that he is not really attracted to young boys instead of women; that he is not really a Marxist; that he does not truly fear the Chihuahua. None of this is truly him, certain thinkers will say. He is a nothing, they say, a blank slate upon which these characteristics and roles and ideas have gathered. Other ideas might have gathered there instead and he is just stuck on these. It is a lack of will, a fear of realizing his being nothing that drives him to the comfort of these roles and feelings. Or maybe bad parenting or schooling. Perhaps he is no way responsible.

To call him nothing is to strip him of a becoming particular to him--to say of his life, his job, his fears and passions that they were simply accidents to which he has grown accustomed. But man is born wanting and needing and motivated, born into triumphs and traumas that shape him as he grows; he is an inheritance of physical characteristics and the histories of those who were destined before him; he has a genetic lineage and a culture, and taken together his is a motivation unique in the world. His life is not be a series of accidents or contingencies, but the development of a particular destiny. To call him nothing is to diminish him, to equate his life with every other human life, to say of the physically strong and the smart and the weak, the master and the slave, the man and the woman, that they were equals in the world.

Man is conscious of himself as a strange consistency of choices over time. As he ages he more forcefully becomes that for which he was destined. What was strange becomes clear. The pederast, Marxist waiter who fears small dogs, does not constrain or limit himself by conceiving himself in these terms. Rather the consistency of his choices in the world and his commitment to them is his fullest expression. Each man gets exactly what he wants from life in each his own way. To say he is nothing, that there is no path of becoming particular to him, is to posit a sameness and equivalence among men that undercuts any idea of the individual. If all men are nothing, none is unique, none different than any other. It would be to say that his wants and satisfactions and the comfort and discomfort of his choices--his destiny--was all an error.

(Though the peddlers of the nothing fight hard against it, greatness and overcoming are never accidental or possible for all men.)

Note on Women + Aphorisms (for men with projects)

To chase after her is to accept her as necessary and to privilege one’s interaction with her. But to chase after a creature that is physically weak, intellectually short-sighted, superficial, resistant to challenge, soft, and security-driven is his greatest mistake. A man will be unable to gather himself for his own project if his concern is with a woman. For to be with a woman means to enter into her world, a world of frivolity and dilettantism.

Rather discipline oneself to resist women. Choose instead to put the project first and relate to women only as a break from your work. If the project is strong and your commitment sincere she will sense it and be drawn to you. A man with a project can relate to a woman as a light and infrequent diversion from hard work. Because he does not need her, he need not take her seriously. Jealously wanting to be as important as his work she will be the one to give chase.

But beware, as much as she may present herself as a cheerful and patient companion, it is her nature to be primary and she will come to resent your project as though it were another woman. Because she cannot go to the hard places and do the hard things to which a certain type of man is called, her presence can only undermine and weaken what is strong and disciplined. His greatness can only exist alone or in the company of men who have also put great projects first.

There can be no greatness in the company of a woman.

A man with important work must be always wary of who he surrounds himself. Many are careful in their selection of other men, but fail to be as selective regarding women. They allow to be closest, to sleep beside them at night, she who while seemingly supportive at the start, slowly sows the seeds of his destruction, slowly softening him, lessening him, gently remaking him according to her needs. And then, when his will to greatness has been destroyed, his project abandoned, and he has been recast as she would like him, she loses interest. If she still has her looks she leaves him for another man. If she has lost her looks she stays with him, despising him every day.

*************************
APHORISMS:

11. Around a woman he must not linger too long. A man strays into dangerous territory as his physical desire for her wanes and he begins to provide himself other reasons for keeping her around.

13. “Women live for the species. Men live for the individual.” (paraphrased from Art Schopenhauer) But that was more than a century ago and is no longer. Men no longer put their projects first or aspire to have them. They live as women live, frivolously.

14. Game = men living for women

17. Game is a woman’s dream come true. “Finally,” she says to her girlfriend, “men have learned how to wear makeup too.”

For 4130.2010

At least you have made an account of this nonsense because it is a good account and you have written it truly.

But there are sufferings that a man brings upon himself by choosing a path of conflict with other men and their systems, and then there are the private sufferings which are a man's own, that maybe the world knows nothing about and never will.

I think you bear a private suffering you are as yet not articulate enough to express to yourself--as to express it would be to understand it, to find a language that would make sense of it. Instead you have chosen a public suffering to distract you from what you feel privately but which remains most obscure to you.

It is an easier path to suffer publicly--to suffer among other men, at their hand, to be forced about and prodded and paraded around by their systems. To suffer publicly at the hand of lawyers and courts and jails makes a type of suffering manifest in a way that one's private suffering cannot so easily be made.

I think what you are calling an “adventure” is a placeholder for a more serious and private adventure you do not yet have the equipment to make. You may gather this equipment at some point, but these adventures among other men and their systems (misadventures really) will only distract you from the hard, lonely, silent work of gathering the tools to approach and overcome yourself.

Maximin and I both left the world of men for more than 10 years to perform this work and study. We did it in different ways but it was brutal, exhilarating, spirit-crushing and spirit-soaring. We were both very right and very wrong along the way and we went up the highest mountains that a man can climb from a small, cockroach-filled room in a friendless, empty town. There were no girls, no friends, no families, no jobs, no careers, no vacations, no tvs--nothing. It was 10 years of reading and writing, communing with other men long dead, who had done as we were doing and had left their account of it.

What I am trying say is that you are distracting yourself from some fucking hard work you may need to do. 10 years of hard study is the only way to get to where I think you want to go. Our guy Franz has written eloquently of the jail and trial and the incarceration so that you do not have to. He has written of it so well that you do not need to experience it. Brother Franz was that good.

What you must also recognize is that The Castle has no end. Franz just stops writing it. The systems of men do not have an end. If you choose to adventure inside them it will be your only adventure, an adventure administered to you by other men.

There is nothing private in such an adventure. Saying that it is “in your mind” does not make it a private adventure. It is a cowardice, a retreat, to speak of a “world of the mind.” There is no such world. You--your body--is being pushed around by other men. That is your world, and when men touch you and have a hold of you, when men take your fluids and tell you where to go and you are made to do their projects, then you will be too distracted to ever develop a project of your own, to explore the private sufferings that await you and pass through them, to overcome and to strike a new path and maybe, if you are lucky, to leave some sort of account of this great overcoming.

But as I wrote above you need 10 years of silent, preparatory work to gather the equipment for this adventure. You will find you have it in you to spend 10 years preparing for this journey, or you will not. Most men lack the courage and the will to leave the world of other men and prepare themselves for what is obscured and private. They look for shortcuts among other men, and it often takes the form of a public suffering. These are the unfortunates. Their lives are privately troubled by something they lack the will to engage and express and so they choose to suffer it publicly.

It is my observation that you are pursuing this unfortunate path. But there is time to change it. You must discontinue the public suffering and withdraw from the world of men. You must go to where it is most private and secret, the most lonely of terrains, the higher blue peaks, only sometimes visible in the distance.

When you have climbed that high and lived and worked there for 10 years you may come down from those mountains. Men will seem very different to you, but they will not have changed, for man does not change. This is work best done when you are in your teens and twenties, but it is work that can be done at any age, though it is harder to commit to it when you are older.

The question is how to live and each man who asks this question must develop his own vocabulary to ask it. With hard work and luck you may come to understand the question. The luck I can wish for you, but the hard work must be your own.

Prolegomena Fragment: Work Left Undone

But now food, clothing and shelter are in abundance. He has worked diligently to construct a system (through exchange, specialization and communication) to make available and abundant both security and energy, but yet what does he do? He works to expand this system, to make more security and energy, and to reproduce them in new forms. He works ever harder to collect more of the things he already has. His original project of sustaining his own life is merely amplified. Man has the opportunity today for something more, something beyond the base elements of his survival, yet he does not try for it.

Multiple homes, huge wardrobes of clothing, whatever food he wants available to him whenever he desires it--none contribute significantly beyond what has been achieved already. He has simply restated the terms of his survival in more plentiful, more luxurious forms. He has not decided upon any end goal for the achievement of his survival. So he continues to collect more food, clothing and shelter. He is a collector. He never seems to have enough. Western man has become a storehouse of security, with the marginal utility of more security effectively zero.

Today he works ever harder for the latest repackaging of security that is sold to him. Men live in a spirit of competitive collection, each working to possess a better version of what is currently celebrated and promoted.

But after he has his food, clothing and shelter he should ask: “And how now should I live?”

Those who ask the question ask it too late. Man often asks himself how he should live when there are cracks in his system, in old age, or when his health is deteriorating. He does not question how he should act when he has both his physical capacities and the food, clothing and shelter to survive. Hence many men die regretful, with the feeling that there must have been something more to life, something else, some other work left undone.

He remains essentially a slacker, hoping to avoid work or survive with a minimum of it. He continues to despise work as if the energy expended posed a risk to his life--as it once did. Yet the hardest work is to be done after the threshold of food, clothing and shelter has been achieved. The work of greatness is possible then. The work of becoming something beyond the animal that has learned to survive best. It is the work that exists beyond economics and the systems he has constructed. It is the work for which there is no return. It is work that contributes nothing to his security. And it is dangerous work because it will isolate him from other men.

His instincts are those of the Pleistocene, though he lives in a time of abundance.

For 99% of his history man has struggled daily to survive. His desire for food, clothing and shelter is a central component in his genetic makeup, and, due to its overriding power, one difficult to fully satisfy. The work of greatness will be an overcoming of the genetics common to all men, as well as those specific varations he has inherited from his parents. He will need also to overcome the systems he was born into and the other men, both past and present, with whom he shares a culture. There is great work still undone.

Initial Aphorisms On Overcoming

21. Where your body is and what it is doing is what is meaningful. The activity called “transcendence” is for he who lacks the courage to act and to physically change the world; a mental exercise for the physically weak, the decadent, the degenerate: a denial of the body and the world. It is a trick men play on themselves to get through the day.

44. If your project is strong enough you will sleep alone. Even when she sleeps beside you.

76. One is 50% one’s father, 50% one’s mother. In the absence of dramatic environmental factors (the breakdown of society, for example) or life-changing accidents (i.e. a choice that improbably changes your life--the outlier), it is likely that you will trend toward the average of your parents. By your mid-30s your life will have narrowed to an approximation of who they were.

77. Research on adopted children shows that by their mid-30s their lives are significantly more similar to their genetic parents than their adoptive ones. Additionally, studies of identical twins separated at birth show them by their mid-30s living very similar lives in terms of education level, occupation, number of children, and lifestyle. Should one choose to do what feels comfortable, one should expect to become his parents.

83. One’s development, as guided by genetic and environmental triggers, is mostly complete by the age of the 30. The genes involved in physical development have gone dormant and his hormone production begins to slow. He settles into life as his parents. He acts and responds to the world as they did. He is human, wonderfully human. And he lives without any knowledge or experience of what it is to overcome.

87. He who overcomes acts outside the society he was born into (his environment)--he does what other men do not and do not consider. He who overcomes acts beyond his parents (his genetics), doing as they never did. He who overcomes becomes alone, without other men and without parents.

89. To overcome other men is to exchange nothing with them and ask nothing from them in return--it is to act beyond economics. One becomes a gift to men, a sort of saint or messiah, and just as likely an outlaw.

95. But only he will know if he has overcome his parents. This overcoming will not be apparent to other men. Perhaps it will not be clear to him either?