Wisdom

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

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