Rule III: Do Not Hide Unwanted Things in the Fog
Those Damned Plates
One small annoying thing in your life (or relationship) isn’t a problem.
But hundreds, or thousands of them, eventually make you unhappy.
When you don’t like something, say it. Have the fight about it now. Don’t wait, as it will make it worse.
Corruption: Commission and Omission
People that never voice their disagreement deceive. They deceive others, but they also deceive themselves.
Self-deception is from a logical perspective, impossible (you should not be able to deceive yourself because you know you are doing it).
But the human mind can actually hold simultaneously two contradictive ideas.
Freud believed that all mental illnesses were due to repression (which is a form of self-deception).
Other phenomena are:
- Denial
- Reaction formation
- Displacement
- Identification
- Rationalization
- Intellectualization
- Sublimation
- Projection
Freud made two mistakes.
- He listed only sins of commission (stuff people do) and missed the sins of omission (stuff they don’t do) while the latter also cause mental illness. And they also can be grave. Eg: if, as a CEO, you think your accountant is crooked and you do not investigate because you’d rather not know, you could end up in prison.
- Freud thought that we understood the things we experienced. He thought that memory was an objective record of the past (while human memory can be falsifiable). But it’s not. Eg: if you ask a couple what happened after a fight, you’ll get two different versions.
What Is the Fog
The knowledge you’ve gained since you were a kid has led to more disappointment than positive surprises.
You thought the world was all good and fluffy, and realized it is dark and mean (in part).
Maybe up to a point where you’ve had your world shattered several times.
So, why go through more disappointments? The last thing you want is to know more. Ignorance is bliss, isn’t it?!
Imagine you’re so afraid of reality that you don’t even want to know what it is that you really want. If you knew, you could hope to have it. But if you had hopes, they could also be shattered (again). Or you could fail. And you’d fail, you’d know it’d be your fault.
Do you want to live with it? No. So you hide. You refuse to see and learn.
The fog is the refusal to know.
When you articulate an emotion that has been repressed for a long time, you often cry. Who wants to do that? It’s better to leave things buried deep.
When your spouse makes an assertion very close to the truth, you often answer with a sharp insult. This insult is an obstacle that in fact, invites the spouse to keep digging. If he/she does not, the insulter often feels even lonelier and disappointed.
People hiding things in the fog pursue the following strategies.
- They show disappointment when someone makes them unhappy.
- They resent others when something does not go their way.
- They ensure that whoever said a bit too much is kept at bay and frozen by disproval.
- Not communicating about what others have done to disappoint them and force them to find that out themselves.
- They let others wander in the fog they have created.
The advantage of the fog may be comfort. But the price paid is purposelessness. Lack of purpose furthermore, creates:
- Chronic pain
- Overwhelming anxiety
- Intolerable chaos of unexploited possibility
- Too much choice
If you have a goal, you may fail. But if you don’t have any, you will fail.
So, what’s the alternative?
Dissipate the fog. Learn what you are afraid of. Admit what you refuse to admit.
It’s not easy. It can be embarrassing, and worse, it can be misplaced too (whatever you think about a problem may not be so. Eg: you think your spouse cheated, but they didn’t).
Admission and transparency demand trust. It’s not easy to trust because everyone has (been) betrayed. It’s hard to have faith in humanity, which is why trust should not be based on faith, but on courage.
Trusting is not saying “I know I can trust you” but saying “I will trust you despite the chance you can betray me”.
What does it mean in practice?
It means not asking your spouse “why are you ignoring me?”
It is stating “I feel lonely without your attention”.
Events and Memories
The past isn’t a database we can just use at will. It needs to be refined. We don’t only want to know what happened, but why it happened.
It’s difficult, and it almost guarantees that in order to make why useful, you’ll have to change. You’ll have to change to avoid repeating the mistakes you have made, or to do better.
The refusal to understand the past leaves you empty and confused. It leaves you ignorant, as you refuse to expand your consciousness.
If too much junk accumulates in your closet, it will inevitably explode at some point. At that time, you may not have enough energy or time to sort it out (this is the return of Tiamat).
There may be times when you will be able to open the door you need to open and understand what you need to understand. But there will be times when doing so will take everything you have got.
Do not hide unwanted things in the fog.
Rule IV: Note That Opportunity Lurks Where Responsibility Has Been Abdicated
Make Yourself Invaluable
If you want to be invaluable, do the useful things no one else wants to do (in the workplace, for example).
No need to start with “a lot”. Start with one thing you can do, and grow from there. It sounds painful at first, but you grow up when you take care of more important stuff.
This is good!
It appears that the meaning that most effectively sustains life is to be found in the adoption of responsibility.
We’re always happy to look back on the difficult things we’ve done. No one has ever had great satisfaction with doing something easy. Difficulty is necessary.
This is why games have rules. It wouldn’t be fun if there weren’t any.
Responsibility and Meaning
Overall, people are more upset by the things they haven’t done than by the things they did. Not growing up, like Peter Pan, is missing out on life.
In the story, Abraham only began living at 75. He then encountered famine, tyranny, conflict, and childlessness.
What’s the message? That it is those who see and hear what others don’t who become heroes. These are the ones that save the princess, kill the dragon, or rescue his father from the belly of the beast.
Rescue Your Father: Orisis and Horus
Osiris, the god of order and consciousness, was the original god in Egypt. As time passed, he aged and stopped paying attention. His evil brother Set got out of nowhere, dismembered him (you can’t kill Osiris), and spread the limbs over Egypt.
The goddess Isis then left the underworld and looked for Osiris. She only found his d*ck (true story). So she made herself pregnant with it and went back to the underworld where she gave birth to Horus.
Horus had one gift: his eye. He not only could see, but he also wanted to.
Horus left the underworld and confronted Set. Set tore one of Horus’ eyes, but Horus won the fight. He banished Set (you can’t kill him) and took back his eye.
After that, he went into the underworld to find Osiris, and gave him his eye. Together, they ruled over Egypt.
What’s the meaning? When you stop paying attention because your life is in order, the chaos can come pretty quickly and completely unravel your life. You need to look at things for what they really are and be courageous enough to fight evil to reestablish order.
Don’t lose sight of what matters, don’t sleep. Remain vigilant, and be brave enough to see even what you don’t want to see.
Neither Osiris nor Set can be killed, because chaos and order will always exist.
It is the alliance of wisdom and attention that helps a pharaoh rule Egypt.
When you look at new information, you look at who you could be. It’s the eternal human question.
When you look in the abyss, you see a monster. The further the abyss is, the more monstrous the monster is.
The nature of mankind isn’t to coward in front of the monster, but to fight it when necessary. That was the nature of our ancestors who were explorers, adventurers, founders of cities. These are the ancestors that you can become.
That ancestor is hidden in the deepest possible place, which is where you have to go if you want to be like him.
And Who Might That Be?
Let’s assume you have a moral obligation to take care of “at least” yourself. What does that mean? Doing whatever you want as if there were no tomorrow?
No, because you know tomorrow is coming and that all bills come due at some point.
Since you need to take care of yourself, you already have social responsibility: yourself.
The “you” you are taking care of exists across time. So, doing stuff that will have bad consequences is selfishness for you now, and a lack of care for you later.
In a way, how you should treat yourself = how you treat other people, since yourself in the future is somebody else.
Happiness and Responsibility
Everyone wants to be happy, but that doesn’t mean you should seek happiness. Happiness is an instantaneous thing. People only think about now when they’re happy and they become impulsive.
So, what else is there? Living with a sense of responsibility, to yourself, and (maybe) to a higher moral imperative, such as the responsibility to positively impact your life and the life of others.
What would be the consequences of that?
You feel positive emotions: the most powerful positive emotions come from going after a meaningful goal.
What does that mean?
That you can’t be happy without taking responsibility for at least yourself. Giving up on your goal is giving up on your responsibility, and that makes your life depressive.
Aiming at a lesser goal will make you ashamed and not motivated.
I have never met anyone who was satisfied when they knew they were not doing everything they should be doing.
You can’t escape the future, and you know it.
Pick Up the Extra Weight
There is a proper way to behave. That way is the way that has been working for everyone, forever.
Being is a game. Great players are attractive. They attract mates. The playing field selects the best players based on their ethical behavior.
You want to be the best player, so you imitate the best ethical behavior. When you do something opposed to your principles, you frown. You know you’ve betrayed yourself. When you’re not following the right path, you know.
And you know that at some point, you’ll pay the price.
If the cost of betraying yourself, in the deepest sense, is guilt, shame, and anxiety, the benefit of not betraying yourself is meaning—the meaning that sustains. That is the most valuable of opportunities that lurks where responsibility has been abdicated
If you pay attention, you will notice that your conscious will quickly tell you what’s wrong. If you stop doing it, you’ll naturally start doing what’s right.
Slowly but surely, you will live “in accordance with yourself”.
What is the antidote to the suffering and malevolence of life? The highest possible goal. What is the prerequisite to pursuit of the highest possible goal? Willingness to adopt the maximum degree of responsibility—and this includes the responsibilities that others disregard or neglect.
You may ask, “why would I want this burden?”
But what makes you think you do not want it?
You positively need to be occupied with something weighty, deep, profound, and difficult. Then, when you wake up in the middle of the night and the doubts crowd in, you have some defense: “For all my flaws, which are manifold, at least I am doing this. At least I am taking care of myself. At least I am of use to my family, and to the other people around me. At least I am moving, stumbling upward, under the load I have determined to carry.”
Your life becomes meaningful in precise proportion to the depths of the responsibility you are willing to shoulder
That’s because you are actively working at making things better.
As you go in that direction, a sense of meaning will develop.
Meaning is an indication you are on the right path.
We’re all possessed by an inner instinct to make us do the highest good. This is why people disappoint you and why you lose connection. However, these disappointments are signs of a lack of responsibility.
When you’re angry at your boss for a lack of something, that anger signifies that the way things ought to be is not the way things are. It’s an invitation to you to make them how they ought to be. It’s an invitation to take responsibility for something that no one is taking responsibility for.
Notice that opportunity lurks where responsibility has been abdicated.
Rule V: Do Not Do What You Hate
Pathological Order in Its Day-to-Day Guise
The author tells the story of a client of his rising up against w0k€n€$$ in her company due to her opposition to the ideology.
To do so, she had to become courageous, face social pressure, a career risk, and that made her stronger.
Few people would do this. Few stand up against what they believe is morally wrong. But if you’re not standing up now, when will you do so?
And why do you think you will not participate in the transgressions when they get out of hand?
Part of moving Beyond Order is knowing when you have such a reason. Part of moving Beyond Order is understanding that your conscience has a primary claim on your action, which supersedes your conventional social duty.
When you refuse to comply with something you believe is morally wrong, you can be part of the force of truth that brings corruption and tyranny to a halt.
It is the one conscious individual that prevents the group from becoming insane.
Fortify Your Position
When culture disintegrates—because it refuses to be aware of its own pathology; because the visionary hero is absent—it descends into the chaos that underlies everything.
Under such condition, an individual must seek the truthful principles that make life worth living, or drown in an ocean of despair, corruption, and nihilism.
You can’t do things you hate if you want to be a part of a great project. You must fortify your positions.
Otherwise, you become a puppet, and you live with the knowledge that you are responsible.
We’re not hopeless. Your enemy, as big as he is, may not be as strong as you think it is. And you are not as weak as you think you are either.
Practicalities
If you can’t stand your job, change it. Move. It’s tough, but it’s the best solution as the alternative is to have your own soul destroyed.
Rule VI: Abandon Ideology
Abandon Ideology
We have failed these last 50 or so years to teach responsibilities because we focused too much on rights.
As a result, young people ignore that meaning is found in the burden of responsibility. They look in the wrong places for it, fail to find it, and are seduced by easy answers.
Perhaps He Is Only Sleeping
Nietzsche proclaimed that rationality had killed religion and the bulk of values Western society had been built on, and that there were only two possible outcomes to that situation. First, political totalitarianism would occupy the vacuum left by God (he was right).
Second, in an objective and valueless world, a man (the superman) would make up his own values and project them onto the world (he was also right).
Freud and Jung said we weren’t good enough to create our own values by ourselves out of nowhere (at an individual level). Furthermore, a society where each individual would have their own values would be assembled by nothing.
But values, even when shared by everyone, are not objective, and religious experience is purely subjective too. So how can they gather people?
Well…it seems that religious revelations to individuals inspired them to assemble around these revelations.
We’re in a territory moving beyond objectivity and subjectivity.
As a result, the idea that values aren’t real may actually be false: values are so complicated that they can’t be explained scientifically.
But the fact that religious values can unite different people under a single umbrella means that the possibility for something universal exists.
Yet we all assume that it doesn’t.
The Fatal Attraction of the False Idol
Consider conservatives, feminists, environmentalists, socialists, etc. Fundamentally, these ideologies are religions with one or several gods.
These gods are the axioms and foundational beliefs that must be accepted, a priori, rather than proven, before the belief system can be adopted, and when accepted and applied to the world allow the illusion to prevail that knowledge has been produced.
Here’s how these ideologies are created.
The founder chooses a few big, unspecific concepts such as “the economy”, “the poor”, “the rich”, “the environment”, etc. These concepts call on to things that are immensely complicated.
The founder places himself on the morally correct side of the equation, and designates an enemy without which “everything will be fixed”.
The principles by which the ideology goes cannot be challenged, and whoever criticizes the new ideology is directly demonized.
This type of theory is attractive to people who are smart, but lazy.
This is what Marx did. He reduced man to his economic value and imposed a lens (the battle of the classes) to view history through. French sociologists at the origin of w0k€n€$$ simply replaced Marx’s economic motivation with “power” and boom, CRT was born.
Ideological reduction of that form is the hallmark of the most dangerous of pseudo-intellectuals. Ideologues are the intellectual equivalent of fundamentalists, unyielding and rigid.
They’re dangerous because they pretend to be rational, while fundamentalists admit their fundamentalism – so you know who you are dealing with.
Ressentiment
Ressentiment happens when a loser blames the fact he is a loser on the system and on the winners.
The system is “corrupted” and “unfair”, and the winners “steal” or “unfairly benefit”.
Once this has been established, all attacks on the winners are permitted.
In this story, the victims (the losers) are always innocent. If they’re losers, it’s everyone’s fault but theirs.
The path of ressentiment leads to bitterness. It’s also dangerous. Once the enemy has been established, it must be vilified and destroyed.
It’s much healthier to look for mistakes within ourselves than outside of ourselves (“the system”).
If you want to solve the world’s problems, start addressing the ones within yourself.
Rule VII: Work as Hard as You Possibly Can on at Least One Thing and See What Happens.
The Value of Heat and Pressure
Heat and pressure transform coal into diamond. They also transform a person and force him to become aligned with himself.
To be aligned with yourself means to be completely aware. Most of us want to change and be better, but we can’t get ourselves off the couch.
This explains why archaic societies thought our souls were possessed by demons. Psychologists call them impulsions. They can easily take control if we’re not one with ourselves.
How do we become so?
Choose a clear, well-defined, non-contradictory goal.
Clear goals limit and simplify the world, as well, reducing uncertainty, anxiety, shame, and the self-devouring physiological forces unleashed by stress. The poorly integrated person is thus volatile and directionless—and this is only the beginning.
If you aim at nothing, you have nowhere to go, nothing to do, and nothing of high value in your life, as value requires the ranking of options and sacrifice of the lower to the higher.
The Worst Decision of All
The worst decision of all is not choosing, not committing. People that can’t commit aren’t happy, and often look for other dubious goals like drugs, alcohol, and party.
The same holds true for people who cannot choose and then commit to a single romantic partner, or are unable or unwilling to be loyal to their friends. They become lonely, isolated, and miserable, and all that merely adds the additional depth of bitterness to the cynicism that spurred the isolation in the first place.
Those who can’t commit to one road are lost.
It’s better to become something than to try to be anything, and remain nothing.
Discipline and Unity
A child must be socialized by the age of four, or run the risk of never having friends. To play with others, one needs to accept the rules and become disciplined enough to respect them. This discipline stimulates the development of the child by teaching him what he can, and cannot do (with social ostracism as consequence).
Discipline is “forced” by the rules of a “game”. In the west, that game ended up being Christianity. Without a game (aka a set of rules), there is no peace.
When everyone abides by the same set of rules, unity emerges. That unity is what happens when you focus on one goal.
The extreme example of respect for the rules of a game (which we can call dogma) is Christ, which drew his charisma and spirit from this alignment (due to the extreme respect for the rules of the game).
If you work hard on one thing, you will change and find alignment with yourself. That one thing will give you some much-needed discipline.
Rule VIII: Try to Make One Room In Your Home as Beautiful as Possible
Cleaning Your Room Is Not Enough
Making something beautiful is difficult, but it is amazingly worthwhile.
By doing so, you will become more of yourself, you will better understand the importance of beauty and will develop a relation with it.
Working to make something beautiful is to establish a relationship with the transcendent.
The Land You Know, the Land You Do Not Know, and the Land You Cannot Even Imagine
You live in the land you know. Beyond that stands the land you don’t know.
And beyond that is the land no one even knows exists.
The unknown manifests itself with new knowledge. How is that knowledge generated?
It must pass through several levels of analysis. First you react to it physically. If it’s a noise at night, your body moves – or freezes. Then your heart accelerates. This is the second level.
Then you imagine what that noise could be. That’s the third.
Artists are the people that transform the unknown into the known. They transform chaos into order.
One Room
The author explains how his colleagues discouraged him to make his office beautiful. The lesson is that as soon as you stick your neck out, someone will be there to put you back down.
Art is a dangerous initiative, but it can be extremely rewarding.
