Every single person who sets out to put themselves together ethically is a net positive to everyone around them. There is no downside to that

Power in a hierarchy is the right way to be. Human hierarchies are very complex and that the way that you win human hierarchy is by being competent and reciprocal

You have to work to take care of yourself and what you want in this moment but then there's you tomorrow, and there's you next week and there's you next month the next year, ten years from now and when you are old... So because you are self-conscious and because you are aware of the future you are actually a community unto yourself. And if you are selfish and impulse all that means is that you are serving the person you are right now in that impulsive way but not the person you are going to be. That's not a good ground for any sort of ethical behavior

The antidote to the suffering and the malevolence is to take on more responsibility for themselves and for other people. That's aspirational

There's value distinctions between things. Some things are worth doing and some things are not and you can kind of discover what that is for yourself and then you should aim at the things that are most worth doing and what you'll find if you watch carefully is that the things that you find worth doing are almost always associated with an increase in responsibility

You should be responsible because you need to have a deep meaning in your life to offset the suffering so you don't get bitter. And the way you do that is to bear a heavy load. To get yourself in check for you now and for you in the future and then to do the same for your family and your community. There's real nobility and meaning

If you don't get your act together then you leave a little space for hell

Anonymous accounts in social networks are problematic because it certainly enables people to allow their worst to manifest themselves, especially if they are resentful and angry

The better the goal the more full and rich your experience is going to be when you pursue it. That's one of the reasons for developing a vision and for fleshing yourself out philosophically because you want to aim at the highest goal that you can manage

As you move towards the goal there are certain things that you have to accomplish that frighten you. Maybe you have to learn to be a better speaker, a better writer, a better thinker, you have to be better to people around you or you have to learn some new skills and you are afraid of that... whatever. Because it's going to stretch you if you pursue a goal and so that will put you up against challenges

What you try to do if you are a behavior therapist is you break down the thing they're avoiding into smaller and smaller peaces until you find a peace that's small enough so they'll do it. It doesn't really matter as long as they start it. Then they can put the next peace on the next peace and what happens is they don't get less afraid exactly, they get braver

If you put yourself in a new situation, then genes code for new proteins and build new neural structures and new nervous system structures. Same thing happens to some degree when you work out - your muscles are responding to the load. Your nervous system does that too. Imagine that there is a lot of potential you locked in your genetic code and then if you put yourself in a new situation then the situational stress unlocks those genes and then builds new parts of you. And so that's very cool because who knows how much there is locked inside of you

In order to really truly learn about yourself and about life you have to overcome adversity, you have to experience things

in order to truly appreciate love you have to understand and really have felt hate and to really appreciate camaraderie you have to feel loneliness. This is just a part of being a person

We are built for adventure and not for peace and happiness

Imagine that you are like the potential composite of all the ancestral wisdom that's locked inside of you biologically. But that's not gonna come out at all unless you stress yourself, unless you challenge yourself. The bigger the challenge you take on the more that's gonna turn on. As you take on a broader and broader range of challenges and you push yourself harder then more and more of what you could be turns on and that's equivalent to transforming yourself into the ancestral father

One of the things you'd like to know if you wanted to know something deep about yourself is that you could face the worst that there was and prevail

Despite how tragic life is and how malevolent things are, our spirit has the capacity to confront it courageously and fix it, not only to deal with it psychologically but to deal with it practically. And that we could make things much better

The world is full of suffering and you should accept that as your responsibility past present and future. You are supposed to do something about that as much as you can

The two major problems that people face obviously are suffering - tragedy and malevolence. You are supposed to look at the capacity for human evil as clearly as possible

The cross is sort of a symbol of the place of maximal suffering. So you accept that as a challenge not as something that you are victimized by

If you face the malevolence and suffering that opens the door to your maximal potential. The optimistic part of that is although the suffering is great and the malevolence is deep, your capacity to transcend it is stronger

I do believe that especially for the radical leftist types the whole notion of free speech among individuals is not only anathema but also something that is not possible within their framework of reference

If you are radically left and you are playing the identity politics game there is actually no such thing as free speech because you are only the mouthpiece of your group whether you know it or not

Equality of outcome is an absolutely deadly doctrine. Equity doctrine is at the top of the list of radical left mistakes

I certainly believe that there is space and necessity for a constant dialogue between the left and the right

No matter what you are acting out some people are way better at it than others. Doesn't matter if it's basketball or hockey or plumbing or law it doesn't matter. As soon as there is something valuable and you are doing it collectively there is a hierarchy

The distribution of the idea of individual sovereignty and property rights and free market economies out into the non-western world is making the non-western world rich really really really fast

Between 2000 and 2012 the rate of absolute poverty in the world fell by half. It was the fastest period of economic development in human history

You have to pursue things of value. If you do it with other people cooperatively and competitively, then you are going to produce differential outcome because people will be differently good at it

One way to not do very well in any hierarchy is to have a low IQ. If you have an IQ of less than 85 it's hard for you to read well enough to follow instructions. that's about 10% of the population. Might even be higher than that

Low IQ is good predictor of poverty. If you are less cognitively gifted, and you have children, they are going to be in a less enriched environment. These things spiral

Hierarchies are complex tools to attain necessary goals but they dispossess people

"everything you do dear is okay" - that's the terrible devouring mother from a psychoanalytic perspective. No! It's not okay!

Life is not a game, even a game is not a game. Because most of the time game is the beginning of a series of games. Let's say that you're on a soccer team. Winning a championship and winning a game are not the same thing. If you want to win a game the best thing to do is to let your star player make all the moves. But if you want to win a championship maybe the best thing is for your star player to do everything he or she possibly can to develop all the other team members. That's a different strategy and the reason it's different is because it iterates across time

Life is not a championship. Life is a whole bunch of championships. It's a whole sequence of them

You're not going to score on every shot. It doesn't mean you shouldn't take the shots. It doesn't mean you shouldn't try to hit the goal. But part of being able to continue to take shots is to have the strength of character to tolerate the fact that in that instance you weren't on top

The response is much more negative from the fans if you lose a fight and complain about it. It's ruthless because they understand that you've made a huge character error

The great athlete and the great person is not only someone who's exceptionally skilled at what they do but who's trying to expand their skills at all times and the attempt to expand their skills at all times is even more important than the fact that they're great to begin with because the trajectory is so important

What does the person who loses something important with grace do? The answer is fairly straightforward - he accepts the defeat and thinks - okay what is it that I have left to improve that will decrease the possibility of a similar defeat in the future

If you lose the match and then whine, what you have done is sacrifice the higher order principle of constant improvement of your own skills. Because you should be analysing the loss and saying - the reason I lost insofar as it's relevant to this particular time and place is the insufficiencies I manifested that defeated me and I need to track those insufficiencies so that I can rectify them in the future. And if I am blaming it on you or the referees or the situation that I am not taking responsibility and I am not pushing myself forward

Victory is really the victory over the lesser you

The question is - who should you defeat in the final analysis? The answer is - you should defeat your former self. You should be constantly trying to do that. And you are the right control for yourself to because you're the one who's had all your advantages and disadvantages. So if you want to compete fairly with someone then you should be competing with you

If you want to compete fairly with someone then you should be competing with you

If you are improving yourself then what you are doing is competing with your lesser self

What is lesser self? The lesser self world be resentful and bitter and aggressive and vengeance seeking and all of those things that go along with having a negative moral character and those are things that interfere with your ability to progress as you move forward through life

Personal responsibility is to compete with yourself. It is to be slightly better than yourself the next day

I'm a flawed person and I've got all my problems. Could I be as good as person X? - It's not the right question. The right question is - "could you be slightly better tomorrow than you're currently flawed self?" and the answer to that is - if you have enough humility to set the bar properly low then you could be better tomorrow than you are today. What you also have to do is you have to say - well here's all my flows and insufficiencies and the best that someone that flawed and insufficient could do to improve and actually do it is this!

What's the right way of being in the world? - It's not acting according to a set of rules. It's attempting continually to transcend the flawed thing that you currently are. Meaning in life is to be found in that pursuit

Things are tragic and difficult but there's always some stupid thing that you could do or someone else could do that could make it even worse than it has to be. So, that's life

Tragedy combined with betrayal and malevolence makes life even worse. Especially if it's self induced. You need something to set against that so you don't get bitter and resentful. What do you set against that? Doing something worthwhile!

You need some reason to get the hell out of bed on a terrible day because you've got something good to do. What's the best thing you can do? - Transcend your current wretched and miserable self. There's meaning to be found in that. That's a meaning that's associated with responsibility

Life is hard. It's tainted by malevolence and betrayal. That can make you bitter. You need a meaning to offset that. Where is the meaning to be found? Not in rights, not in impulsive pleasure but in responsibility. You take responsibility for yourself so you take care of yourself. If you're good at it you have some excess left over to take care of your damn family. If you're good at both of those then you have some excess left over to take care of your community. Those are heavy burdens. You pick up the burdens and you find that's meaningful. The best way to pick up the burden is to continually improve yourself. And that's where the meaning is to be found. That meaning is in the continual self transcendence. That's letting your old self die and the new self be reborn

Even if things are going really well for you now there's going to be a time in the future where things are rough. You're gonna be ill, family members are gonna be ill, a dream is gonna fall apart, you're going to be uncertain about your employment status... The flood is coming. The apocalypse is coming. It's always the case in life and you have to be prepared for it. And the question is - how to prepare for it? And the answer to that is to find a way of being that works even under the diarist of circumstances

Your best strategic position is how am I insufficient and how can I rectify that. That's what you've got. And the thing is you are insufficient and you could rectify it. Both of those are within your grasp if you aim low enough

There's a statement in the New Testament, it's called the Matthew principle and economists use it to describe how the economy in the world works - "To those who have everything more will be given, from those who have nothing everything will be taken". It's like very pessimistic in some sense because it means that as you start to fail you fail more and more rapidly but it also means that as you start to succeed you succeed more and more rapidly

You take an incremental step and well now you can lift 55 pounds instead of 52.5 pounds. It's one step on a very long journey and it starts to compound on you. So a small step today puts you in a position to take a slightly bigger step for the next day and you do that for two or three years. Man you are starting to stride!

You could be way better! You could be incompatibly better across multiple dimensions and in pursuing that better that's where you'll find the meaning in your life and that would give you the antidote to the suffering

The rule might not be - "follow this rule!" The rule might be - "you have to follow some rules!" It's a meta rule - "you have to discipline yourself" And the issue is how? That's not really the relevant question. You can pick a disciplinary path

"I don't know what to do" - That's okay, nobody does. Go do something. Do the best thing that you can think of. Put the best plan you have into practice. It's not going to be perfect and it will change along the way but it will change partly because you become disciplined pursuing the path and as you become disciplined you become wiser and as you become wiser you become able to formulate better and better plans so you can start vaguely and confused and develop a plan that's not so great and you start to implement it and then you accrue incremental wisdom as you implement your flawed plan and that enables you to fix the plan and so that's part of that process of incremental self-improvement as well

Be honest with yourself about what you are doing

You have to face what you don't want to face in order to fix it

If you know that you're the one that can transcend your problems most fundamentally then you have the faith that would enable you to take stock of who you are

Kids have been educated for twelve years and no one had ever sat them down and said - okay what the hell are you doing and why and how are you gonna get there? - Where do you want to go? - Why do you want to get there? - How are you gonna get there? - How are you gonna mark your progress? They've never walked them through that exercise. If you walk people through that exercise just to get them to do that increases the probability that they'll stay on track by 50%. That's incredible

Why write? - well, writing is a form of thinking. It's actually the most demanding form of thinking I would say

How do you write a good essay? - Pick a topic that matters to you because if you are not writing about something that matters to you it's like you are not living something that's meaningful. It's wrong. You are not going to write a good essay because you are wrong write to begin with. It has to matter to you

Something that matters effects how you make decisions in your life. Well why does it matter how you make decisions in your life? - Because if you make some stupid decisions, you're going to increase the sum total of suffering a lot. You're going to do stupid things to yourself, you're going to do stupid things to other people and you're not going to be as good a person as you could be. So not only will you do stupid and terrible things but you won't have manifested the good in the world that you could have manifested

Write an essay so that you can think and you think so that you can live properly. Write carefully, make sure that every single bloody word is a word that you want to use and you make sure the phrases that you put the worlds in are as solid as they can be. And you make sure the sentences are well constructed and that they're organized into proper paragraphs and the paragraphs are sequenced and the content of the thing matters and you put your soul into it. And you know when you've done that because it's gripping when you write. It's meaningfully engaging

Incremental self-improvement is the proper route. So how do you know when you're incrementally self improving properly? - The answer is it's deeply engaging. It's deeply meaningful. And the reason for that is you're actually adapted neurologically to identify the pathway of maximal incremental improvement

What's the antidote to the tragedy and malevolence of life? - The answer is to put yourself in the zone of proximal development because that's where the maximal meaning is and that actually does prepare you for life. So the question - why think? - is well you think before you act and you act to put yourself in the zone of proximal development and you do that as an antidote to the catastrophe of life

Where is the meaning? - The meaning is in responsibility. It's a burden but voluntarily hoisted. It's the place of maximal meaning and the more responsibility you take the more meaning you have and that's the antidote to the catastrophe of life

When are you sick of yourself? - Well, that's when you're being useless and irresponsible for yourself and for your family and for your community. You're not even taking care of yourself. You can't sleep with a clean conscience unless you are psychopathic if you're not taking care of yourself. Adopt a little responsibility for yourself and you can sleep with the clean conscience. What happens if you'd opted full responsibility for yourself and then for your family?

The fundamental measurement of unit is the individual and the fundamental task of the individual is to engage in the process of humble self-improvement

If enough people take responsibility for getting their individual life's together then we'll get wise enough so we won't let this process of political polarization put us back to the same places that we went so many times in the 20th century. I don't see another antidote for it. It's not political, it's ethical

Your house needs a lot of work man. There's a lot of rot in the floorboards. The plumbing is leaking. The water's coming in. You're not the sage and Saint you think you are. There's so much work you have to do on yourself that it would damn near kill you to take a look at it, to do everything you possibly can

You are a young man and all the women are rejecting you. Who's got the problem? - It's not all the women, that's a bad road to go down. If all the women are rejecting you, it's you!

Women outnumber men so the men hypothetically have more sexual opportunity but that's not what happens. What happens is that a small minority of men have all the sexual opportunity, a fairly large minority of men don't. The women are not happy because they can't find a committed relationship. It's bad for most of the men and the men who have all the sexual opportunity gets cynical

Solution to the relationship between men and women fundamentally is monogamous social norms

To the degree that we deviate monogamy we tilt towards a more violent society

If a polygamous society develops which is the alternative of monogamy, then a small minority of men get all the women and also making the women unhappy because the women don't have any access to a genuine intimate one-to-one relationship over any long period of time

I'm not in favor of unbridled hierarches. The proclivity of a hierarchy is that all the spoils go to the person at the top and that can destabilize the whole structure. We have to have a dialogue about how to rectify that

The problem with hierarchies is that they can get too steep and destabilize everything. That does happen. That particularly happens in the sexual domain

The man who are winning should be allowed to win and the woman should be allowed to choose. Yes except that there's the problem of children

Women are high Pergamus which means they meet across a knop dominance hierarchies and so if you're a male who's successful in a given hierarchy the probability that you're gonna have additional mating opportunities is exceptionally high. It's an unbelievably good predictor of that

Society's tilt towards monogamy across the world is human universal

Cheating is common but it's not the norm. It's still the norm not to do that. The norm is fidelity

How much you make is not the only hallmark of success in your life

How much socioeconomic success are you willing to sacrifice to spend time with your kids before they're three years old? That should not be none!

Once you make enough money to keep the bill collectors at bay, additional money doesn't improve your quality of life. Other things do

There's a tiny percentage of men who are hyper-competitive along those single axis of competition and maybe they drive most things. They probably do. But that doesn't make them right. It also doesn't make them most people

A world of equality of outcome could not be achieved if there are actual differences between people

Differences between men and women get more extreme at the ends of the distribution

As the societies get more egalitarian the differences between men and women get bigger. You make the societies more egalitarian men and women get more different

If you get rid of the hierarchy you get rid of the value structure, you get rid of the tools that allow us to generate absolute wealth and stop people from starving it's catastrophe. You have to have the hierarchy

You're not perfect man. There's hatred in you. And the probability that it's more powerful than love is pretty damn high. Look to your own viewpoint before you go out there and try to fix the hierarchies of the world

Agreeableness motivates aggression

The envious and the resentful can use compassion as a camouflage for their true intent which is to tear down anyone who has more than them

The biggest difference between men and women is an interest

The only thing that's worse than the pain of inequality is the pain of forced equality

We can't have equality of outcome amongst people with lower than 83 IQs

Don't do interviews that will be edited

It's not necessarily a mistake to lay yourself open to attack because sometimes it reveals the motives of the attackers

Spoken word is now as powerful as the written word. That's never happened in human history

Maybe ten times as many people can listen to complex information as can read complex information in terms of their ability to process it

When you edit someone and take their words out of context and change them around you are being deceptive

Big things disappear when they get crooked and ideologically rigid

As the technology is supplanted the ideological polarization increases as the thing dies

One of the most deadly things for a fighter to do is to overestimate his own position

If you overestimate your abilities you're in deep trouble because you're gonna get a wake-up call. Objectivity is one of the most critical aspects of development. You have to be objectively assessing your strength and weaknesses at every step of the way

Ego is the enemy

I can't imagine anything we could possibly strive for in our society that would make it into hell faster than equality of outcome. Historical evidence for the pathology of that root is so strong. You have to be historically ignorant beyond belief or malevolent or resentful beyond comprehension in order to think that that's a good idea

I know some guys that work all the time. They don't just work, they work so efficiently and so effectively and make use of every second in ways you can't even imagine unless you're in that sort of position. Doing that doesn't mean you'll succeed but not doing it certainly means that you will fail

If you have real true freedom, you'll never have an equality of outcome

Even if you don't know the history but have a complete understanding of human beings, you would say - well, equality of outcome does not make sense

If you took a random woman out of the population and a random man and you had to bet on who was more temperamentally aggressive, if you bet on the man you'd be right 60 percent of the time

Let's pick the one in a hundred most aggressive person from the random population. Well, they are all men. And that's why all the people in prison are men

Differences at the extreme are where the differences really start to manifest themselves. So you can have a small difference at the level of the average but out at the extremes it starts to make massive difference

Men are more interested in things generally speaking and women are more interested in people

Almost all the people hyper focused on things are almost all men and all the people who are hyper focused on people are almost all women

Relatively small differences in the average can produce walloping differences at the extremes

Unfortunately many of the people who are talking about things like gender differences they have no idea what they are talking about. They don't know the literature. They don't know there is a literature. They don't understand biology

Equality of outcome is a powerfully anti-capitalistic. It's powerfully anti-western. Why you would let that into your company? It's a big mistake

What the people who are agitating for equality of outcome don't understand is that you have to cede so much power to the authorities to the government in order to ensure equality of outcome that a tyranny is inevitable

"Nobody can have anything that everyone else doesn't have at the same time" - that's the ultimate outcome of equality of outcome

There's an idea in Christianity that you should pick up your goddamn cross and walk up the hill. Dramatically that's correct. That's the right answer. It's like you've got a heavy load of suffering to bear and a fair bit of it's going to be unjust. So, what are you going to do about it? Accept it voluntarily and try to transform as a consequence. That's the right answer

The consequence of not talking is that you fight. That's the end game. Because the only way you can stop from fighting with other people is by negotiating with them

A fair bit of your political preference is determined by your biological temperament. It's strongly influenced

If you are a creative type, who is kind of disorderly, then you are likely to be on the liberal left end of the distribution. And if you are a non-creative type and orderly, then you tend to be on the right wing end of things

There is a hole in our culture where there should be a discussion about maturity, truth and responsibility. No one is talking about that

Take care of yourself! Take care of your intimate partner! Take care of your damn family! Don't run off! Take care of your community! Rescue the wisdom from the past! Stand up straight and be courageous despite the fact that life is tragic and tainted by malevolence! That's ancient wisdom

You should be a monster, an absolute monster and then you should learn how to control it

Those who have swords and know how to use them but keep them sheathed will inherit the world

It's better to be a warrior in a garden then a gardener in a war

One definition of a winner is someone who never let losing stop them

Life is not a game, it's a series of games. And the right ethic is to be the winner of the series of games. And part of that means that you have to learn how to be a good looser because you are not going to win every single game

To be a winner, you want to be disciplined, you want to know what you are doing and you want to be on the edge where your skills are being developed. That way you are at a place where losing is always a possibility, because otherwise you are not pushing yourself beyond your current capacity

You want to have a life that's so engaging that you think despite the fact that I am limited and that we are mortal and that life is tragedy and there is evil in the world, despite all that this is worth doing

It's a stupid game to betray your future self to gratify your present self

Confront chaos voluntarily Establish and revivify order Constrain malevolence That's a good three-part for life

It's not like what's coming isn't dangerous, it's dangerous, but your best bet is to be dancing on your feet and ready for it, pay attention and be awake

Speak the truth because your life turns out better if you speak the truth

If you tell the truth, you transform the potential of being into a habitable actuality

How do you make the world better? Tell the truth! Because the world you bring into being as a consequence of telling the truth will be a good world. I think it's true metaphorically, I think it's true theologically and I think it's true at the practical and scientific level as well

You should treat yourself as if you are valuable, especially in potential. But you should concentrate on who you should become, especially if you are young

You should understand how much potential there is within you to set that straight and then you should do everything you can to manifest that in the world and then it will set it straight

No matter how bad your situation is, if you stand up and face it, with a noble vision, with discipline and intent, you can go far farther to overcoming it than you can imagine. And that's the principle upon which you should predicate your behavior

If you confront the world forthrightly, if you speak the truth and you expose yourself courageously to those things that you are afraid of then your life will improve and so will the life of people around you

Go out there, find the dragon, confront it. It's a dragon, it might eat you, it's dangerous, but it's worse to cower at home and wait for it to come and devour you. Go out there! Confront it! Get the gold! Share it with the community

It's painful to understand how much of what you are doing is not productive

If you are not a disciplined person it's uncomfortable, it's going to be painful, it's frustrating... You have to force yourself into this things. It's a muscle that has to be developed. These patterns have to be developed in your mindset. Incrementally

Clinical psychologists don't stick with high level abstractions, especially the behaviors, they are really practical

There is evil in the world of all sorts and some of it's the evil in other people. And some of it is the evil in your brother's heart. But part of it that you can really do something about that's the malevolence in your own heart. You can actually do something about that and that's actually way more useful than you think. Because if you can face it in you, then you start to understand it and that also makes you strong enough to identify it and to fight it when you see it in the external world. Plus you don't do any harm

Stop saying things that make you weak! Stop telling lies that you know to be lies! Stop doing things you know to be useless and counterproductive! Aim high! Adopt some responsibility and then see what the hell happens!

You are much more inclined to let other people live their lives if you are living your life in a satisfactory manner. That's exactly it

You want to lay your life out so that it's providing you what you need to not be bitter and to work for your best interests and for the interests of everyone else

You need to organize your family with a certain amount of discipline and a certain amount of structure so that you get to do what you want, so that you are happy to have your kids around, so that you won't take revenge on them

The thing that sustains people through life really is the lifting of a worthwhile burden. We are evolved to be useful to the people around us

The world is full of darkness. Each of us have a little bit of light. If we release that light, if we shine properly... The world is a lesser place if you don't reveal from within yourself what you have to reveal

If you are not everything you could be more people will die, more people will suffer, more evil will be unconstrained, more tyranny will reign, more chaos will remain...

Your family is more messed up than it could be, if you were less messed up than you are. So if you just got your act together like ten percent more your family would be one percent better. Do it!

When you do something that you should not do, it's worse than you think and when you do something that you should do, it's better than you think

It's not that easy to cleanup your room. You want your room to be set up so that when you walk in there it tells you to be better than you generally are. It's organized, it has got direction, everything is in its place. You try to do that in your chaotic household

Everything around you is full of potential. Everything! Maybe more potential than you could ever possibly utilize

Maybe all you have is this little rat hole of a room in some run-down place in the world. Fix it up! There is more there than you think. See what happens if you fix it up. And you'll fix yourself up simultaneously because you have to get disciplined in order to fix up the room. Then you have a fixed-up room and you will be a more fixed-up person. All hell will break loose as a consequence of that

There is more to you than you think, there is more than enough potential to go around. There is definite suffering and malevolence in the world. We could fix it. You haven't got anything better to do

We are not going to run out of potential

Aim at heaven! Start at home! Tell the truth! Let's see what the hell happens

Whatever they are, ignorant superstition is not a right category

You think but you can only remember so much. You have to write it down because then you can remember way more

There is something extraordinarily dangerous about having people revert to identification with their racial identity. It's really not a good thing

Something can have evolved as a virtue in some circumstances and still be of the type that if magnified beyond its proper limits becomes pathological

Your political belief is strongly determined by your temperament

Orderliness is associated with sensitivity to disgust

If you are a group of isolated humans and you meet another group of isolated humans and you trade pathogens there's a real possibility that you and everyone you know are going to be dead in no time flat

Disgust sensitivity is associated with orderliness and you need order in a society in order to maintain it and the Germans are very orderly and that was actually a canonical part of their civilization and part of actually what makes them great and powerful

On average women are more agreeable than men

Agreeable people don't make as much money and the reason for that is to make money you actually have to be disagreeable. Because you have to go to your boss and say - give me some bloody money or something you don't like will happen to you

Agreeable people overall make less money in the same positions and it's because they don't negotiate on their own behalf very well

Get your act together! Have a vision! Straighten our your life! Say what you think! Stay away from the ideological idiocies and simplicity and oversimplifications and try to put yourself together!

Well-developed individual is the antidote to the tyranny of society and biology

Many people don't want to bear the responsibility of developing themselves as individuals

If you are going to be creative it's because you are tormented by a problem. If you are not in a position to be tormented by a problem, you are not going to put in time and effort to take the risk necessary to be creative

Bible is the documentation of the emergence of the idea of the divine individual

Get the hell out of where you are safe into what you don't know. You are going to find the catastrophes of life but if you keep yourself morally oriented and you make the right sacrifices then you can transcend the catastrophe of being and prevail

"Let's just destroy the past" - No! That would be like saying well you don't need a body anymore, because your body is the collected wisdom of the evolutionary process across three and a half billion years

Your moral duty is to realize the archetype in the confines of your own life

It's extremely useful to represent the phenomenology of your experience as a domain of chaos and order. That works for every single environment for every person

The point of maximum proper being is right at the center of the border between chaos and order

The idea of truth is much older than the idea of objective truth. The original notion of truth wasn't objective true. When Christ said - I am the truth and the way - the truth he was talking about wasn't an objective truth

The landscape of interpretation is almost infinite but the landscape of applicable functional interpretation is unbelievably constrained and I think that constraint system is what we regard as ethics

People can't exist without a purpose

Post modernism is a dead end from the perspective of applicable wisdom. It leaves you bereft and nihilistic. And that's not good because people can't exist without a purpose

The square root of the number of people under consideration have half of whatever it is that's under consideration

If you have ten thousand people, a hundred of them have half the money

If you took a hundred classical composers ten of them produce half the music that's played. And then if you take the ten composers and you take a thousand of their songs, thirty of those songs which is the square root of a thousand roughly speaking are played fifty percent of the time

To those who have everything more will be given and from those who have nothing everything will be taken

When one good thing happens to you it makes you a little more powerful and attractive and so that fractionally increases the possibility that another good thing will happen to you

If you put more effort and more time and focus into your work whatever it would be whether it's a podcast or your YouTube videos or whatever if people enjoy it they gravitate towards it and then over time it exponentially increases the amount of people that are exposed to it

If you let a monetary system run, all the money ends up in the hands of a very small number of people

We know what predicts success - IQ and conscientiousness are the biggest predictors of success

Smart people who work hard are disproportionately likely to succeed

If you don't have any money, it's really hard to get some. Once you have some, it's not so hard to get some more

One of the advantages of zero is that you're driven by brute necessity and that can really be motivating. That's I think why the children of first generation immigrants often do so well. They're driven by necessity

In order for society to progress you have to allow the individual to compete in a relatively untrammeled space so that they can innovate

Don't let the inequality in your neighborhood get out of hand because the crime rate will skyrocket

Men who are men don't need money, they need function

University is actually not a business. It's like a church is not a business

To direct the market means to impose the heavy hand of the state and it's potential pathologies on the market but to leave it alone completely means that it wanders randomly through an indeterminate landscape

If you have good measures of conscientiousness and IQ, you can predict someone's success in the competitive landscape with a correlation of about 0.6

There are white lies and black truths. A black truth is when you use the truth in a way that isn't truthful - just like a white lie is when you lie in a way that isn't harmful. You can use the truth to wound and hurt and what that really means is that you've misused the truth and so it's actually a complex form of lie

You can be anti radical left without falling all the way into the far right

Anything that is not part of your dominance hierarchy is a snake

Anything that's outside of the hierarchy is a threat. Any stranger, any strange idea, any animal manifestation, any noise, any spirit,.. it's a threat to the integrity of the dominance hierarchy in many many ways

You don't know what the hell is coming at you when you let something new inside the dominance hierarchy, whether it's an idea or a disease. Words are a virus!

In the face of a stressor you are better off psycho physiologically to act voluntarily

Ideal person is the person who tells the truth

When you start to realize how much of what you've constructed of yourself is based on deception and lies, that's a horrifying realization and it can easily be 95% of you. Things you say, things you act out ...

The truth is something that burns. It burns off deadwood, and people don't like having their deadwood burnt off often because they're like 95% deadwood

The fundamental rule when operating in chaos is tell the truth

The optimists that I hear say - well the pendulum swings and then it swings back - and I think yeah well, sometimes it takes a hundred years to swing back and it takes a hell of a lot of people out on the way and sometimes it never swings back at all. Sometimes people go out to fight a dragon and it just eats them or it burns them, and that's the end of that

If you want to change the world you start from yourself and work outward because you build your competence that way. I don't know how you can go out and protest the structure of the entire economic system if you can't keep your room organized

If you can't even clean up your own room who the hell are you to give advice to the world

Don't be fixing up the economy eighteen-year-olds, you don't know anything about the economy. It's a massive complex machine beyond anyone's understanding and you mess with it at your peril

People can improve themselves I think to a degree that we don't understand. Because a human being for better or worse is something potential as well as something actual

Morality comes when you are a monster and you can control it

If you start to understand who you are, then you understand the Nazis. I can understand sex criminals. I can understand Nazis. And the reason for that is because I can see that as an aspect of myself, truly

It's a horrible thing to realize that you are a human and what being human means. Christ to Satan, that's the human being

The highest ideal that a person holds consciously or unconsciously, that's their God

Bible is actually a story. It's a whole bunch of different books written by a whole bunch of different people edited over thousands of years and then assembled by committee. It's a really strange book but it has a narrative structure and that sort of emerged as a collective decision across these thousands of years

You are not your own slave. You can't just tell yourself what to do. You have a nature

The proper goal of a Christian roughly speaking is to enact the meta pattern of Christ's life in their own to make it their own story

you have to contend with yourself and the adversary that's inside you that seems to oppose your every movement

I would caution any young women not to be deluded into the idea that their career will be of such high quality that it self evidently trumps having a family. You have to have a hell of a career before that's the case

Telling the truth is a good start because then you don't fool yourself about who you are

Why not lie all the time? Well, there is a bunch of reasons but one of them is that you can't trust yourself if you lie and there's going to be times in your life where you have no one to turn to except you and so if you've stuffed yourself full of lies then you're going to be in a crisis one day and you're gonna have to make a decision and you're gonna decide wrong and you're going to be in real trouble because you won't have the clarity of mind necessary to make the proper judgement. Because you filled your imagination and your perception with rubbish

What does it mean to have a meaningful life exactly? Maybe it means to take responsibility, because your sacrifices have to be worth something. It has to have some meat what you are aiming at. It has to be something that can elevate your worm-like self to the level of tolerability

Rational mind falls in love with its own productions or even more that it tries to elevate its productions to the status of God

As you retreat from the chaos into your own little prison, you get weaker and weaker and the prison gets smaller and smaller and the chaos gets bigger and bigger. It's really an ugly pathway and you get more and more bitter and resentful and much more afraid of having your prison walls breached. It's a downward spiral

As a member of a culture, you are somehow responsible for the past sins of that culture

If your group at some point in the past did something reprehensible then you were de facto responsible in the present for that

It's not like any system is perfect, but there's a difference between imperfect and consciously murderous

Agreeableness is a maternal instinct trait

Male human beings are very involved in the raising of their children which makes them quite different than many large animals

If you are very maternal, you are very compassionate and protective of those that are within your kin boundary

Things get to terrible places one tiny step at a time

Simple explanation is a good explanation unless it's too simple but distinguishing between simple and too simple is no easy matter

If you want to change the world, you should change yourself

It's more difficult to rule yourself than to rule a city

If you have a memory that's more than 18 month old approximately and when you pull that memory up to mind, if you still have an emotional reaction, that means you have not fully articulated the memory. You have not analyzed it causally, you have not freed yourself from its grasp and you are carrying it like a weight and your brain responds to that. The more baggage you are carrying like that the more stress hormone cortisol your brain produces and cortisol makes you old

If people write about uncertain things, past, present or future, so they can be traumatic things, they can be uncertain things, their physical health will be improved

There is only one reason to remember the past - to be prepared for the future. What you are supposed to do it to take the past and extract wisdom from it

what scientific truth tells you is what things are, but genuine religious truth tells you how you should act

Dogma is necessary because it conserves the structure. Spiritual aspect is necessary because it updates the structure

You have to believe things or you could not exist, you could not act. You have to hold on to the dogmatic structure of your belief. But you have to be open for it's update on a continual basis. That's basically what consciousness is for

There is nothing more important than the ability to pay attention

Pay attention and speak the truth, your truth! That's how you keep everything stacked up in order harmoniously That's how you keep the balance between order and chaos That's how you articulate your being That's how you revivify the world That's how you rescue your dead father from the bottom of the ocean That's how you adopt responsibility as a citizen That's how you love a proper life

There is nothing more complex in the cosmos than a human being

There is never a situation that's so bad that there isn't something you can do to make it worse

It's not an easy thing to live in a truthful manner but the alternative is hell

It isn't an alternative political structure that's the countervailing force. It's spoken truth that's the countervailing force

The ability to speak your truth is the bulwark against hell, and losing your job? That's nothing, compared to where things can go when they go badly

Try to say the truth, no matter what, because the alternative is worse. And it is worse!

Sort yourself out, marshal your arguments and put yourself in order so that when someone pushes you a little further than you should go, you can say no!

Nature of human being is such that it consists of a confrontation with the bounded finite with the unbounded infinite

The human self-consciousness is what separates us from animals

The closest a human being could ever get to direct confrontation with the absolute unknown was to look up at the night sky. Because the night sky, especially when it's sprinkled with stars confronts you directly with the fact of the infinite

If your sacrifices are not first-rate the nature of your relationship with the infinite is going to suffer dreadfully

How powerful the human spirit can be if it's willing to take on the obligation of it's relationship with the devine. And also how terrible things can become if the responsibility of that burden is not shouldered

You have to believe things because you just don't know everything

If you don't stand up for your beliefs you leave yourself bereft. You are open to the depredations of the infinite

every time you make a pathological moral decision, you move the world one step closer to complete annihilation

Every time you make an appropriate moral decision, and you manifest moral courage in the face of your own vulnerability, then you move the world one step farther from the break

Every single person is the center of the world

Inside every human being there is a spark of divinity

I am not an atheist anymore, because I don't look at the world that way anymore. I am not a materialist anymore. I don't the world's made out of matter. I think it's made out of what matters. It's made out of meaning

God creates Adam and Eve explicitly in his own image

The union of masculine and feminine produces a kind of perfect wholeness

Whatever consciousness is, it comes in masculine and feminine embodiments. The masculine and feminine embodiment are equally representations of God

God's judgement is something like - Freedom is better than safety

The injunction behind religious thought, fundamentally, is that you should live your life in such a way that the suffering it has to contain because you are confined and vulnerable, is justified

You have to live well enough so that the suffering is worth it

If you took advantage of every opportunity you have, if you crawl through every window that was open to you, if you lived as perfectly as you could, your life would be justifiable on its own terms, despite it's suffering. And despite the tragedy in the world

People are redeemed one by one and not in groups. It's an individual project

Human beings are built to take tragedy but they are not built to take evil

Faith is the kind of courage that allows you to welcome the possibilities of the future with open arms

The future is the manifestation of possibility into actuality

An identity is the proper union of faith and responsibility

There is no way you are going to be mentally healthy if your wife is measurable. First of all she wouldn't let you be

The burden of responsibility is not a burden, it's the greatest opportunity you could possibly have

There is no technical difference between thinking about yourself and being measurable

You want to be outside of yourself serving a higher purpose

If enough of us realized divine responsibility sufficiently, there is nothing we could not accomplish, there is no desert we could not make bloom, there is no reason for zero sum malthusian pessimism

We could have what we wanted if we truly wanted it, if we truly sought for it, if we truly asked for it