Self Proclaimed Person Quotes

Love yourself! You don’t need a man or a boy or a self-proclaimed love expert to tell you what you’re worth. Your power comes from who you are and what you do! You don't need all that noise, that constant hum in the background telling you whether or not you're good enough. All you need is you, your friends, and your family. And you will find the right person for you, if that's what you want - the one who respects your strength and beauty.

Self-definition and self-determination is about the many varied decisions that we make to compose and journey toward ourselves, about the audacity and strength to proclaim, create, and evolve into who we know ourselves to be. It’s okay if your personal definition is in a constant state of flux as you navigate the world.

Once upon a time there was a king who had three beautiful daughters. No, no, wait. Once upon a time there were three bears who lived in a wee house in the woods. Once upon a time there were three soldiers, tramping together down the road after the war. Once upon a time there were three little pigs. Once upon a time there were three brothers. No, this is it. This is the variation I want. Once upon a time there were three Beautiful children, two boys and a girl. When each baby was born, the parents rejoiced, the heavens rejoiced, even the fairies rejoiced. The fairies came to christening parties and gave the babies magical gifts. Bounce, effort, and snark. Contemplation and enthusiasm. Ambition and strong coffee. Sugar, curiosity, and rain. And yet, there was a witch. There's always a witch. This which was the same age as the beautiful children, and as she and they grew, she was jealous of the girl, and jealous of the boys, too. They were blessed with all these fairy gifts, gifts the witch had been denied at her own christening. The eldest boy was strong and fast, capable and handsome. Though it's true, he was exceptionally short. The next boy was studious and open hearted. Though it's true, he was an outsider. And the girl was witty, Generous, and ethical. Though it's true, she felt powerless. The witch, she was none of these things, for her parents had angered the fairies. No gifts were ever bestowed upon her. She was lonely. Her only strength was her dark and ugly magic. She confuse being spartan with being charitable, and gave away her possessions without truly doing good with them. She confuse being sick with being brave, and suffered agonies while imagining she merited praise for it. She confused wit with intelligence, and made people laugh rather than lightening their hearts are making them think. Hey magic was all she had, and she used it to destroy what she most admired. She visited each young person in turn in their tenth birthday, but did not harm them out right. The protection of some kind fairy - the lilac fairy, perhaps - prevented her from doing so. What she did instead was cursed them. "When you are sixteen," proclaimed the witch in a rage of jealousy, "you shall prick your finger on a spindle - no, you shall strike a match - yes, you will strike a match and did in its flame." The parents of the beautiful children were frightened of the curse, and tried, as people will do, to avoid it. They moved themselves and the children far away, to a castle on a windswept Island. A castle where there were no matches. There, surely, they would be safe. There, Surely, the witch would never find them. But find them she did. And when they were fifteen, these beautiful children, just before their sixteenth birthdays and when they're nervous parents not yet expecting it, the jealous which toxic, hateful self into their lives in the shape of a blonde meeting. The maiden befriended the beautiful children. She kissed him and took them on the boat rides and brought them fudge and told them stories. Then she gave them a box of matches. The children were entranced, for nearly sixteen they have never seen fire. Go on, strike, said the witch, smiling. Fire is beautiful. Nothing bad will happen. Go on, she said, the flames will cleanse your souls. Go on, she said, for you are independent thinkers. Go on, she said. What is this life we lead, if you did not take action? And they listened. They took the matches from her and they struck them. The witch watched their beauty burn, Their bounce, Their intelligence, Their wit, Their open hearts, Their charm, Their dreams for the future. She watched it all disappear in smoke.

Every person has the inherent right to "self-proclaim"--to announce, at any time he chooses, that he is on any level he chooses to be on.

Self-definition has been a responsibility I’ve wholeheartedly taken on as mine. It’s never a duty one should outsource. Of this responsibility, writer and poet Audre Lorde said, “If I didn’t define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people’s fantasies for me and eaten alive.” Self-definition and self-determination is about the many varied decisions that we make to compose and journey toward ourselves, about the audacity and strength to proclaim, create, and evolve into who we know ourselves to be. It’s okay if your personal definition is in a constant state of flux as you navigate the world.

Though I would grow up to fit neatly into the binary, I believe in self-determination, autonomy, in people having the freedom to proclaim who they are and define gender for themselves. Our genders are as unique as we are. No one’s definition is the same, and compartmentalizing a person as either a boy or a girl based entirely on the appearance of genitalia at birth undercuts our complex life experiences.

Some of the faithful had a distinct aspect of roostering, loudly proclaiming that they were going to pray on any number of topics, how God was walking beside them through their incarceration, how Jesus loved sinners, and so on. Personally, I thought that one could thank the Lord at a lower volume and perhaps with less self-congratulation. You could worship loudly and still act pretty lousy, abundant evidence of which was running around the Dorms.

Some of the faithful had a distinct aspect of roostering, loudly proclaiming that they were going to pray on any number of topics, how God was walking besides them through their incarceration, how Jesus loved sinners, and so on. Personally, I thought that one could thank the Lord at a lower volume and perhaps with less self-congratulation. You could worship loudly and still act pretty lousy, abundant evidence of which was running around the Dorms.

I strip myself emotionally when I confess need – that I would be lost without you, that I am not necessarily the independent person I have tried to appear, but am a far less admirable weakling with little clue of life’s course or meaning. When I cry and tell you things I trust you will keep for yourself, that would destroy me if others were to learn of them, when I give up the game of gazing seductively at parties and admit it’s you I care about, I am stripping myself of a carefully sculpted illusion of invulnerability. I become as defenseless and trusting as the person in the circus trick, strapped to a board into which another is throwing knives to within inches of my skin, knives I have myself freely given. I allow you to see me humiliated, unsure of myself, vacillating, drained of self-confidence, hating myself and hence unable to convince you [should I need to] to do otherwise. I am weak when I have shown you my panicked face at three in the morning, anxious before existence, free of the blustering, optimistic philosophies I had proclaimed over dinner. I learn to accept the enormous risk that though I am not the confident pin-up of everyday life, though you have at hand an exhaustive catalogue of my fears and phobias, you may nevertheless love me.

The “Word of God” is not simply the Christian Bible but exists in a threefold form: “The Word” incarnate (Jesus Followers’ King), the word prophesied and proclaimed (Prophets), and the word in scripture (Bible). All three are the self-disclosure of God, The One & Only ...in three, distinct & unique Persons, Father, Son, & Holy Spirit.

People too often tolerate uncertainty prior to taking action; worse, some people believe that omniscience or infallibility are prerequisites for being certain, so they conclude that certainty (and therefore knowledge) is never possible. To any person who proclaims that "you can never be certain of anything", ask them: "are you sure?" and watch what happens.

I never thought of myself as a person who is able to proclaim and idea which others would take as an example. I always do everything for myself, I am a self-centered egoist.

The most tragic error into which older people can fall is one that is common among educators and politicians. It is to use youth as scapegoats for the sins of their elders. Is the nation wasting its young men and its honor in an unjust war? Never mind — direct your frustration at the long-haired young people who are shouting in the streets that the war must end. Curse them as hippies and immoral, dirty fanatics; after all, we older Americans could not have been wrong about anything important, because our hearts are all in the right place and God is always on our side, so anyone who opposes us must be insane, and probably in the pay of the godless Communists. Youth is in the process of being classed with the dark- skinned minorities as the object of popular scorn and hatred. It    is   as  if  Americans  have  to  have  a  "nigger,"  a  target                             for its hidden frustrations and guilt. Without someone to blame, like the Communists abroad and the young and black at home, middle America would be forced to consider whether all the problems of our time were in any way its own fault. That is the one thing it could never stand to do. Hence, it finds scapegoats. Few adults, I am afraid, will ever break free of the crippling attitudes that have been programmed into their personalities – racism, self-righteousness, lack of concern for the losers of the world, and an excessive regard for property. One reason, as I have noted, is that they do not know they are like this, and that they proclaim ideals that are the reverse of many of their actions. Such hypocrisy, even if it is unconscious, is the real barrier between them and their children.

Self-proclaimed artists limit themselves to ink on canvas or to the keys on a piano, but only a true artist will understand what art and real freedom really is – self-exploration without any limits which is a translation of said person's personal philosophy and way of life.

The lion is king of the beasts. When he leaves his den, he stretches and gazes out over all the directions. Before seeking his prey, he lets forth a mighty roar that causes the other creatures to tremble and flee. - Birds fly high, crocodiles dive beneath the water, foxes slip into their holes. Even village elephants, decked in fancy belts and ornaments and shaded by golden parasols, run away at the sound of that roar. -Community, the proclamation of the Way of Enlightenment is like that lion’s roar! …..False doctrines fear and tremble. When Impermanence, Non-self, and Dependent Co-arising are proclaimed, all those who have long sought false security in ignorance and forgetfulness must awaken, celestial beings as well as human beings. When a person sees the dazzling truth, he exclaims, ‘We embraced dangerous views for so long, taking the impermanent to be permanent, and believing in the existence of a separate self. We took suffering to be pleasure and look at the temporary as if it were eternal. We mistook the false for the true. Now the time has come to tear down all the walls of forgetfulness and false views.

Many readers are familiar with the spirit and the letter of the definition of “prayer”, as given by Ambrose Bierce in his Devil’s Dictionary. It runs like this, and is extremely easy to comprehend: Prayer: A petition that the laws of nature be suspended in favor of the petitioner; himself confessedly unworthy. Everybody can see the joke that is lodged within this entry: The man who prays is the one who thinks that god has arranged matters all wrong, but who also thinks that he can instruct god how to put them right. Half–buried in the contradiction is the distressing idea that nobody is in charge, or nobody with any moral authority. The call to prayer is self–cancelling. Those of us who don’t take part in it will justify our abstention on the grounds that we do not need, or care, to undergo the futile process of continuous reinforcement. Either our convictions are enough in themselves or they are not: At any rate they do require standing in a crowd and uttering constant and uniform incantations. This is ordered by one religion to take place five times a day, and by other monotheists for almost that number, while all of them set aside at least one whole day for the exclusive praise of the Lord, and Judaism seems to consist in its original constitution of a huge list of prohibitions that must be followed before all else. The tone of the prayers replicates the silliness of the mandate, in that god is enjoined or thanked to do what he was going to do anyway. Thus the Jewish male begins each day by thanking god for not making him into a woman (or a Gentile), while the Jewish woman contents herself with thanking the almighty for creating her “as she is.” Presumably the almighty is pleased to receive this tribute to his power and the approval of those he created. It’s just that, if he is truly almighty, the achievement would seem rather a slight one. Much the same applies to the idea that prayer, instead of making Christianity look foolish, makes it appear convincing. Now, it can be asserted with some confidence, first, that its deity is all–wise and all–powerful and, second, that its congregants stand in desperate need of that deity’s infinite wisdom and power. Just to give some elementary quotations, it is stated in the book of Philippians, 4:6, “Be careful for nothing; but in everything by prayer and supplication and thanksgiving, let your requests be known to God.” Deuteronomy 32:4 proclaims that “he is the rock, his work is perfect,” and Isaiah 64:8 tells us, “Now O Lord, thou art our father; we art clay and thou our potter; and we are all the work of thy hand.” Note, then, that Christianity insists on the absolute dependence of its flock, and then only on the offering of undiluted praise and thanks. A person using prayer time to ask for the world to be set to rights, or to beseech god to bestow a favor upon himself, would in effect be guilty of a profound blasphemy or, at the very least, a pathetic misunderstanding. It is not for the mere human to be presuming that he or she can advise the divine. And this, sad to say, opens religion to the additional charge of corruption. The leaders of the church know perfectly well that prayer is not intended to gratify the devout. So that, every time they accept a donation in return for some petition, they are accepting a gross negation of their faith: a faith that depends on the passive acceptance of the devout and not on their making demands for betterment. Eventually, and after a bitter and schismatic quarrel, practices like the notorious “sale of indulgences” were abandoned. But many a fine basilica or chantry would not be standing today if this awful violation had not turned such a spectacularly good profit. And today it is easy enough to see, at the revival meetings of Protestant fundamentalists, the counting of the checks and bills before the laying on of hands by the preacher has even been completed. Again, the spectacle is a shameless one.

From my own personal experience I have consistently witness self-proclaimed Christians, get angry over insignificant issues, be unforgiving, and judgmental all while never looking in the mirror and proclaiming to the world their love for the lord. If I were not already a Christian I would have questioned the faith due to the representatives.

Every action is a losing, a letting go, a passing away from oneself of some bit of one’s own reality into the existence of others and of the world. In Jesus Christ, this character of action is not resisted, by trying to use our action to assert ourselves, extend ourselves, to impose our will and being upon situations. In Jesus Christ, this self-expending character of action is joyfully affirmed. I receive myself constantly from God’s Parenting love. But so far as some aspects of myself are at my disposal, these I receive to give away. Those who would live as Jesus did—who would act and purpose themselves as Jesus did—mean to love, i.e., they mean to expend themselves for others unto death. Their being is meant to pass away from them to others, and they make that meaning the conscious direction of their existence. Too often the love which is proclaimed in the churches suppresses this element of loss and need and death in activity. As a Christian, I often speak of love as helping others, but I ignore what this does to the person who loves. I ignore the fact that love is self-expenditure, a real expending and losing and deterioration of the self. I speak of love as if the person loving had no problems, no needs, no limits. In other words, I speak of love as if the affluent dream were true. This kind of proclamation is heard everywhere. We hear it said: 'Since you have no unanswered needs, why don’t you go out and help those other people who are in need?' But we never hear people go on and add: 'If you do this, you too will be driven into need.' And by not stating this conclusion, people give the childish impression that Christian love is some kind of cornucopia, where we can reach to everybody’s needs and problems and still have everything we need for ourselves. Believe me, there are grown-up persons who speak this kind of nonsense. And when people try to live out this illusory love, they become terrified when the self-expending begins to take its toll. Terror of relationship is [that] we eat each other. But note this very carefully: like Jesus, we too can only live to give our received selves away freely because we know our being is not thereby ended, but still and always lies in the Parenting of our God.... Those who love in the name of Jesus Christ... serve the needs of others willingly, even to the point of being exposed in their own neediness.... They do not cope with their own needs. They do not anguish over how their own needs may be met by the twists and turns of their circumstances, by the whims of their society, or by the strategies of their own egos. At the center of their life—the very innermost center—they are grateful to God, because... they do not fear neediness. That is what frees them to serve the needy, to companion the needy, to become and be one of the needy.

As every close observer of the deadlocks arising from the political correctness knows, the separation of legal justice from moral Goodness –which should be relativized and historicized- ends up in an oppressive moralism brimming with resentment. Without any “organic” social substance grounding the standards of what Orwell approvingly called “common decency” (all such standards having been dismissed as subordinating individual freedoms to proto-Fascist social forms), the minimalist program of laws intended simply to prevent individuals from encroaching upon one another (annoying or “harassing” each other) turns into an explosion of legal and moral rules, an endless process (a “spurious infinity” in Hegel’s sense) of legalization and moralization, known as “the fight against all forms of discrimination.” If there are no shared mores in place to influence the law, only the basic fact of subjects “harassing other subjects, who-in the absence of mores- is to decide what counts as “harassment”? In France, there are associations of obese people demanding all the public campaigns against obesity and in favor of healthy eating be stopped, since they damage the self-esteem of obese persons. The militants of Veggie Pride condemn the speciesism” of meat-eaters (who discriminate against animals, privileging the human animal-for them, a particularly disgusting form of “fascism”) and demand that “vegeto-phobia” should be treated as a kind of xenophobia and proclaimed a crime. And we could extend the list to include those fighting for the right of incest marriage, consensual murder, cannibalism . . . The problem here is the obvious arbitrariness of the ever-new rule. Take child sexuality, for example: one could argue that its criminalization is an unwarranted discrimination, but one could also argue that children should be protected from sexual molestation by adults. And we could go on: the same people who advocate the legalization of soft drugs usually support the prohibition of smoking in public places; the same people who protest the patriarchal abuse of small children in our societies worry when someone condemns a member of certain minority cultures for doing exactly this (say, the Roma preventing their children from attending public schools), claiming that this is a case od meddling with other “ways of life”. It is thus for necessary structural reasons that the “fight against discrimination” is an endless process which interminably postpones its final point: namely a society freed from all moral prejudices which, as Michea puts it, “would be on this very account a society condemned to see crimes everywhere.

I have, however, to live in an age of Faith — the sort of thing I used to hear praised and recommended when I was a boy. It is damned unpleasant, really. It is bloody in every sense of the word. And I have to keep my end up in it. Where do I start? With personal relationships. Here is something comparatively solid in a world full of violence and cruelty. Not absolutely solid... We don’t know what other people are like. How then can we put any trust in personal relationships, or cling to them in the gathering political storm? In theory we can’t. But in practice we can and do. Though A is unchangeably A or B unchangeably B, there can still be love and loyalty between the two. For the purpose of loving one has to assume that the personality is solid, and the “self” is an entity, and to ignore all contrary evidence. And since to ignore evidence is one of the characteristics of faith, I certainly can proclaim that I believe in personal relationships.

Worship is God's gift of grace to us before it's our offering to God. We simply benefit from the perfect offering of the Son to the Father through the power of the Spirit (Ephesians 2:18). Worship is our humble, constant, appropriate, glad response to God's self-revelation and his enabling invitation. Apart from this perspective, leading worship can become self-motivated and self-exalting. We can become burdened by the responsibility to lead others and can think that we might not be able to deliver the goods. We subtly take pride in our worship, our singing, our playing, our planning, our performance, our leadership. Ultimately we separate ourselves from the God who drew us to worship him in the first place. That's why biblical worship is God-focused (God is clearly seen), God-centered (God is clearly the priority), and God-exalting (God is clearly honored). Gathering to praise God can't be a means to some "greater" end, such as church growth, evangelism, or personal ministry. God isn't a genie we summon by rubbing the bottle called "worship." He doesn't exist to help us get where we really want to go. God is where we want to go. So God's glory is the end of our worship, and not simply a means to something else. In the midst of a culture that glorifies our pitiful accomplishments in countless ways, we gather each week to proclaim God's wondrous deeds and to glory in his supreme value. He is holy, holy, holy. There is no one, and nothing, like the Lord.

The responsibility/fault fallacy allows people to pass off the responsibility for solving their problems to others. This ability to alleviate responsibility through blame gives people a temporary high and a feeling of moral righteousness. Unfortunately, one side effect of the Internet and social media is that it’s become easier than ever to push responsibility—for even the tiniest of infractions—onto some other group or person. In fact, this kind of public blame/shame game has become popular; in certain crowds it’s even seen as “cool.” The public sharing of “injustices” garners far more attention and emotional outpouring than most other events on social media, rewarding people who are able to perpetually feel victimized with ever-growing amounts of attention and sympathy. “Victimhood chic” is in style on both the right and the left today, among both the rich and the poor. In fact, this may be the first time in human history that every single demographic group has felt unfairly victimized simultaneously. And they’re all riding the highs of the moral indignation that comes along with it. Right now, anyone who is offended about anything—whether it’s the fact that a book about racism was assigned in a university class, or that Christmas trees were banned at the local mall, or the fact that taxes were raised half a percent on investment funds—feels as though they’re being oppressed in some way and therefore deserve to be outraged and to have a certain amount of attention. The current media environment both encourages and perpetuates these reactions because, after all, it’s good for business. The writer and media commentator Ryan Holiday refers to this as “outrage porn”: rather than report on real stories and real issues, the media find it much easier (and more profitable) to find something mildly offensive, broadcast it to a wide audience, generate outrage, and then broadcast that outrage back across the population in a way that outrages yet another part of the population. This triggers a kind of echo of bullshit pinging back and forth between two imaginary sides, meanwhile distracting everyone from real societal problems. It’s no wonder we’re more politically polarized than ever before. The biggest problem with victimhood chic is that it sucks attention away from actual victims. It’s like the boy who cried wolf. The more people there are who proclaim themselves victims over tiny infractions, the harder it becomes to see who the real victims actually are. People get addicted to feeling offended all the time because it gives them a high; being self-righteous and morally superior feels good. As political cartoonist Tim Kreider put it in a New York Times op-ed: “Outrage is like a lot of other things that feel good but over time devour us from the inside out. And it’s even more insidious than most vices because we don’t even consciously acknowledge that it’s a pleasure.” But

There are many ways to become mistress (or master) of one's fate after a betrayal, but they all have things in common: conscious effort and a fighting spirit, embodied in what I call 'the Affirmative No.' The Affirmative No incorporates self-enhancing outrage, independence, and courage. It is a stance through which a traumatized person actively proclaims her will by rejecting the role of victim.... Unable to change our predicaments, we actively changed their meaning and our relationship to them, and in the process, we discovered that we could exert power when we thought we had none.

My family subscribed to this rigid belief system. They were unaware of the reality that gender, like sexuality, exists on a spectrum. By punishing me, they were performing the socially sanctioned practice of hammering the girl out of me, replacing her with tenets of gender-appropriate behavior. Though I would grow up to fit neatly into the binary, I believe in self-determination, autonomy, in people having the freedom to proclaim who they are and define gender for themselves. Our genders are as unique as we are. No one's definition is the same, and compartmentalizing a person as either a boy or a girl based entirely on the appearance of genitalia at birth undercuts our complex life experiences.

For the first time in decades … For the first time in decades, India is experiencing a Revolution. For the first time in decades, there is status quo disruption. For the first time in decades, our Soldiers are receiving the reverence they must get. For the first time in decades, national interest matters more than personal interest. For the first time in decades, the strength of WE is more than self proclaimed VIP Few. For the first time in decades, corrupt politicians are worried about people standing in queue For the first time in decades, let us try not to get brainwashed in inconvenience debate. For the first time in decades, let us not fall prey to tactics of bait. For the first time in decades, we are up in arms against dishonest coward. For the first time in decades, India is feeling empowered. For the first time in decades, we have an opportunity to rise above caste, creed and religion. For the first time in decades, we are hopeful for the bright future of next generation.

Ah, my friends, that innocent afternoon with Larry provoked me into thought in a way my own dicelife until then never had. Larry took to following the dice with such ease and joy compared to the soul-searching gloom that I often went through before following a decision, that I had to wonder what happened to every human in the two decades between seven and twenty-seven to turn a kitten into a cow. Why did children seem to be so often spontaneous, joy-filled and concentrated while adults seemed controlled, anxiety-filled and diffused? It was the Goddam sense of having a self: that sense of self which psychologists have been proclaiming we all must have. What if - at the time it seemed like an original thought - what if the development of a sense of self is normal and natural, but is neither inevitable nor desirable? What if it represents a psychological appendix: a useless, anachronistic pain in the side? - or, like the mastodon's huge tusks: a heavy, useless and ultimately self-destructive burden? What if the sense of being some-one represents an evolutionary error as disastrous to the further development of a more complex creature as was the shell for snails or turtles? He he he. What if? indeed: men must attempt to eliminate the error and develop in themselves and their children liberation from the sense of self. Man must become comfortable in flowing from one role to another, one set of values to another, one life to another. Men must be free from boundaries, patterns and consistencies in order to be free to think, feel and create in new ways. Men have admired Prometheus and Mars too long; our God must become Proteus. I became tremendously excited with my thoughts: 'Men must become comfortable in flowing from one role to another' - why aren't they? At the age of three or four, children were willing to be either good guys or bad guys, the Americans or the Commies, the students or the fuzz. As the culture molds them, however, each child comes to insist on playing only one set of roles: he must always be a good guy, or, for equally compulsive reasons, a bad guy or rebel. The capacity to play and feel both sets of roles is lost. He has begun to know who he is supposed to be. The sense of permanent self: ah, how psychologists and parents lust to lock their kids into some definable cage. Consistency, patterns, something we can label - that's what we want in our boy. 'Oh, our Johnny always does a beautiful bower movement every morning after breakfast.' 'Billy just loves to read all the time...' 'Isn't Joan sweet? She always likes to let the other person win.' 'Sylvia's so pretty and so grown up; she just loves all the time to dress up.' It seemed to me that a thousand oversimplifications a year betrayed the truths in the child's heart: he knew at one point that he didn't always feel like shitting after breakfast but it gave his Ma a thrill. Billy ached to be out splashing in mud puddles with the other boys, but... Joan wanted to chew the penis off her brother every time he won, but ... And Sylvia daydreamed of a land in which she wouldn’t have to worry about how she looked . . . Patterns are prostitution to the patter of parents. Adults rule and they reward patterns. Patterns it is. And eventual misery. What if we were to bring up our children differently? Reward them for varying their habits, tastes, roles? Reward them for being inconsistent? What then? We could discipline them to be reliably various, to be conscientiously inconsistent, determinedly habit-free - even of 'good' habits.

It's evident that with Beethoven the Romantic Revolution had already begun, bringing with it the new Artist, the artist as Priest and Prophet. This new creator had a new self-image: he felt himself possessed of divine rights, of almost Napoleonic powers and liberties — especially the liberty to break rules and make new ones, to invent new forms and concepts, all in the name of greater expressivity. His mission was to lead the way to a new aesthetic world, confident that history would follow his inspirational leadership. And so there exploded onto the scene Byron, Jean Paul, Delacroix, Victor Hugo, E. T. A. Hoffmann, Schumann, Chopin, Berlioz — all proclaiming new freedoms. Where music was concerned, the new freedoms affected formal structures, harmonic procedures, instrumental color, melody, rhythm — all of these were part of a new expanding universe, at the center of which lay the artist's personal passions. From the purely phonological point of view, the most striking of these freedoms was the new chromaticism, now employing a vastly enriched palette, and bringing with it the concomitant enrichment of ambiguity. The air was now filled with volcanic, chromatic sparks. More and more the upper partials of the harmonic series were taking on an independence of their own, playing hide-and-seek with their sober diatonic elders, like defiant youngsters in the heyday of revolt.

It is precisely when their interior worlds change shape that Bezukhov and Bolkonsky are confirmed as individuals; that they surprise; that they make themselves different; that their freedom catches fire, and with it the identity of their selves; these are moments of poetry: they experience them with such intensity that the whole world rushes forward to meet them with an intoxicating parade of wondrous details. In Tolstoy, man is the more himself, the more an individual, when he has the strength, the imagination, the intelligence, to transform himself. By contrast, the people I see changing their attitude toward Lenin, Europe, and so on expose their nonindividuality. This change is neither their own creation nor their own invention, not caprice or surprise or thought or madness; it has no poetry; it is nothing but a very prosaic adjustment to the changing spirit of History. That is why they don't even notice it; in the final analysis, they always stay the same: always in the right, always thinking what, in their milieu, a person is supposed to think; they change not in order to draw closer to some essential self but in order to merge with everyone else; changing lets them stay unchanged. Another way of expressing it: they change their mind in accordance with the invisible tribunal that is also changing its mind; their change is thus simply a bet on what the tribunal will proclaim to be the truth tomorrow.

Populists have sought to extricate themselves from this conundrum in two different ways. Some populist movements claim adherence to the ideals of modern science and to the traditions of skeptical empiricism. They tell people that indeed you should never trust any institutions or figures of authority—including self-proclaimed populist parties and politicians. Instead, you should “do your own research” and trust only what you can directly observe by yourself. This radical empiricist position implies that while large-scale institutions like political parties, courts, newspapers, and universities can never be trusted, individuals who make the effort can still find the truth by themselves. This approach may sound scientific and may appeal to free-spirited individuals, but it leaves open the question of how human communities can cooperate to build health-care systems or pass environmental regulations, which demand large-scale institutional organization. Is a single individual capable of doing all the necessary research to decide whether the earth’s climate is heating up and what should be done about it? How would a single person go about collecting climate data from throughout the world, not to mention obtaining reliable records from past centuries? Trusting only “my own research” may sound scientific, but in practice it amounts to believing that there is no objective truth. As we shall see in chapter 4, science is a collaborative institutional effort rather than a personal quest.

Spellbinders are characterized by pathological egotism. Such a person is forced by some internal causes to make an early choice between two possibilities: the first is forcing other people to think and experience things in a manner similar to his own; the second is a feeling of being lonely and different, a pathological misfit in social life. Sometimes the choice is either snake-charming or suicide. Triumphant repression of selfcritical or unpleasant concepts from the field of consciousness gradually gives rise to the phenomena of conversive thinking (twisted thinking), or paralogistics (twisted logic), paramoralisms (twisted morality), and the use of reversion blockades (Big Lies). They stream so profusely from the mind and mouth of the spellbinder that they flood the average person’s mind. Everything becomes subordinated to the spellbinder’s over-compensatory conviction that they are exceptional, sometimes even messianic. An ideology emerges from this conviction, true in part, whose value is supposedly superior. However, if we analyze the exact functions of such an ideology in the spellbinder’s personality, we perceive that it is nothing other than a means of self-charming, useful for repressing those tormenting selfcritical associations into the subconscious. The ideology’s instrumental role in influencing other people also serves the spellbinder’s needs. The spellbinder believes that he will always find converts to his ideology, and most often, they are right. However, they feel shock (or even paramoral indignation) when it turns out that their influence extends to only a limited minority, while most people’s attitude to their activities remains critical, pained and disturbed. The spellbinder is thus confronted with a choice: either withdraw back into his void or strengthen his position by improving the ef ectiveness of his activities. The spellbinder places on a high moral plane anyone who has succumbed to his influence and incorporated the experiential method he imposes. He showers such people with attention and property, if possible. Critics are met with “moral” outrage. It can even be proclaimed that the compliant minority is in fact the moral majority, since it professes the best ideology and honors a leader whose qualities are above average. Such activity is always necessarily characterized by the inability to foresee its final results, something obvious from the psychological point of view because its substratum contains pathological phenomena, and both spellbinding and self-charming make it impossible to perceive reality accurately enough to foresee results logically. However, spellbinders nurture great optimism and harbor visions of future triumphs similar to those they enjoyed over their own crippled souls. It is also possible for optimism to be a pathological symptom. In a healthy society, the activities of spellbinders meet with criticism effective enough to stifle them quickly. However, when they are preceded by conditions operating destructively upon common sense and social order; such as social injustice, cultural backwardness, or intellectually limited rulers sometimes manifesting pathological traits, spellbinders’ activities have led entire societies into large-scale human tragedy. Such an individual fishes an environment or society for people amenable to his influence, deepening their psychological weaknesses until they finally join together in a ponerogenic union. On the other hand, people who have maintained their healthy critical faculties intact, based upon their own common sense and moral criteria, attempt to counteract the spellbinders’ activities and their results. In the resulting polarization of social attitudes, each side justifies itself by means of moral categories. That is why such commonsense resistance is always accompanied by some feeling of helplessness and deficiency of criteria.

The dispersion of the daimonic by means of impersonality has serious and destructive effects. In New York City, it is not regarded as strange that the anonymous human beings secluded in single-room occupancies are so often connected with violent crime and drug addiction. Not that the anonymous individual in New York is alone: he sees thousands of other people every day, and he knows all the famous personalities as they come, via TV, into his single room. He knows their names, their smiles, their idiosyncrasies; they bandy about in a “we're-all-friends-together” mood on the screen which invites him to join them and subtly assumes that he does join them. He knows them all. But he himself is never known. His smile is unseen; his idiosyncrasies are important to no-body; his name is unknown. He remains a foreigner pushed on and off the subway by tens of thousands of other anonymous foreigners. There is a deeply depersonalizing tragedy involved in this. The most severe punishment Yahweh could inflict on his people was to blot out their name. “Their names,” Yahweh proclaims, “shall be wiped out of the book of the living.” This anonymous man's never being known, this aloneness, is transformed into loneliness, which may then become daimonic possession. For his self-doubts—“I don't really exist since I can't affect anyone” —eat away at his innards; he lives and breathes and walks in a loneliness which is subtle and insidious. It is not surprising that he gets a gun and trains it on some passer-by—also anonymous to him. And it is not surprising that the young men in the streets, who are only anonymous digits in their society, should gang together in violent attacks to make sure their assertion is felt. Loneliness and its stepchild, alienation, can become forms of demon possession. Surrendering ourselves to the impersonal daimonic pushes us into an anonymity which is also impersonal; we serve nature’s gross purposes on the lowest common denominator, which often means with violence.

Despite its reputation for individualism and unbridled capitalism, the United States has a history rich in cooperation and communalism. From the colonial era to the present—and among the indigenous population for millennia—local communities have engaged in self-help, democracy, and cooperation. Indeed, the “individualistic” tradition might more accurately be called the “self-help” tradition, where “self” is defined not only in terms of the individual but in terms of the community (be it family, township, religious community, etc.). Americans are traditionally hostile to overarching authorities separate from the community with which they identify, a hostility expressed in the age-old resentment towards both government and big business. The stereotype, based on fact, is that Americans would rather solve problems on their own than rely on political and economic power-structures to do so. The following brief survey of the history substantiates this claim. While my focus is on worker cooperatives, I will not ignore the many and varied experiments in other forms of cooperation and communalism. Certain themes and lessons can be gleaned from the history. The most obvious is that a profound tension has existed, constantly erupting into conflict, between the democratic, anti-authoritarian impulses of ordinary Americans and the tendency of economic and political power-structures to grow extensively and intensively, to concentrate themselves in ever-larger and more centralized units that reach as far down into society as possible. Power inherently tries to control as much as it can: it has an intrinsic tendency toward totalitarianism, ideally letting nothing, even the most trivial social interactions, escape its oversight. Bentham’s Panopticon is the perfect emblem of the logic of power. Other social forces, notably people’s strivings for freedom and democracy, typically keep this totalitarian tendency in check. In fact, the history of cooperation and communalism is a case-study in the profound truth that people are instinctively averse to the modes of cutthroat competition, crass greed, authoritarianism, hierarchy, and dehumanization that characterize modern capitalism. Far from capitalism’s being a straightforward expression of human nature, as apologists proclaim, it is more like the very antithesis of human nature, which is evidently drawn to such things as free self-expression, spontaneous “play,”131 cooperation and friendly competition, compassion, love. The work of Marxist historians like E. P. Thompson shows how people have had to be disciplined, their desires repressed, in order for the capitalist system to seem even remotely natural: centuries of indoctrination, state violence, incarceration of “undesirables,” the bureaucratization of everyday life, have been necessary to partially accustom people to the mechanical rhythms of industrial capitalism and the commodification of the human personality.132 And of course resistance continues constantly, from the early nineteenth century to the present day. “Wage-slavery,” as workers in the nineteenth century called it, is a monstrous assault on human dignity, which is why even today, after so much indoctrination, people still hate being subordinated to a “boss” and rebel against it whenever they can.

There are many who profess to be religious and speak of themselves as Christians, and, according to one such, “as accepting the scriptures only as sources of inspiration and moral truth,” and then ask in their smugness: “Do the revelations of God give us a handrail to the kingdom of God, as the Lord’s messenger told Lehi, or merely a compass?” Unfortunately, some are among us who claim to be Church members but are somewhat like the scoffers in Lehi’s vision—standing aloof and seemingly inclined to hold in derision the faithful who choose to accept Church authorities as God’s special witnesses of the gospel and his agents in directing the affairs of the Church. There are those in the Church who speak of themselves as liberals who, as one of our former presidents has said, “read by the lamp of their own conceit.” (Joseph F. Smith, Gospel Doctrine [Deseret Book Co., 1939], p. 373.) One time I asked one of our Church educational leaders how he would define a liberal in the Church. He answered in one sentence: “A liberal in the Church is merely one who does not have a testimony.” Dr. John A. Widtsoe, former member of the Quorum of the Twelve and an eminent educator, made a statement relative to this word liberal as it applied to those in the Church. This is what he said: “The self-called liberal [in the Church] is usually one who has broken with the fundamental principles or guiding philosophy of the group to which he belongs. . . . He claims membership in an organization but does not believe in its basic concepts; and sets out to reform it by changing its foundations. . . . “It is folly to speak of a liberal religion, if that religion claims that it rests upon unchanging truth.” And then Dr. Widtsoe concludes his statement with this: “It is well to beware of people who go about proclaiming that they are or their churches are liberal. The probabilities are that the structure of their faith is built on sand and will not withstand the storms of truth.” (“Evidences and Reconciliations,” Improvement Era, vol. 44 [1941], p. 609.) Here again, to use the figure of speech in Lehi’s vision, they are those who are blinded by the mists of darkness and as yet have not a firm grasp on the “iron rod.” Wouldn’t it be wonderful if, when there are questions which are unanswered because the Lord hasn’t seen fit to reveal the answers as yet, all such could say, as Abraham Lincoln is alleged to have said, “I accept all I read in the Bible that I can understand, and accept the rest on faith.” . . . Wouldn’t it be a great thing if all who are well schooled in secular learning could hold fast to the “iron rod,” or the word of God, which could lead them, through faith, to an understanding, rather than to have them stray away into strange paths of man-made theories and be plunged into the murky waters of disbelief and apostasy? . . . Cyprian, a defender of the faith in the Apostolic Period, testified, and I quote, “Into my heart, purified of all sin, there entered a light which came from on high, and then suddenly and in a marvelous manner, I saw certainty succeed doubt.” . . . The Lord issued a warning to those who would seek to destroy the faith of an individual or lead him away from the word of God or cause him to lose his grasp on the “iron rod,” wherein was safety by faith in a Divine Redeemer and his purposes concerning this earth and its peoples. The Master warned: “But whoso shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better … that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea.” (Matt. 18:6.) The Master was impressing the fact that rather than ruin the soul of a true believer, it were better for a person to suffer an earthly death than to incur the penalty of jeopardizing his own eternal destiny.

Your grandpa said already that propaganda is a governmental function. It has nothing to do with business. Furthermore, the government needs to bring its ideas across to the public and needs to resort to effective methods. Therefore, it encourages gifted speakers to explain the government plans. Besides that, the government is most certainly allowed to stick signs on billboards. Since the signs reflect the doctrine of the government it is not against the law.” “Harold, think about it. Are you saying that the government can proclaim whatever it wants because it makes the laws and therefore is able to get away with outright lies?” Karl’s grandpa wanted to be sure that he understood what Harold had been taught. “I don’t know about outright lies, but yes, our government is allowed to make the laws. Therefore, it is able to proclaim or to deny without coming into conflict with the laws.” Harold was unyielding. The old man Veth nodded in agreement. “Alright, Harold, now think before you answer. Considering your previous point about advertising would you now come to the conclusion that the propaganda of our government is self-serving?” Harold did not miss a beat. “Of course our government is self-serving. I don’t think that there is any difference between our government and other governments. They are always self-serving.” “Then you don’t even think about the fact that Herr Hitler can say what he wants, but that we citizens are in jeopardy if we don’t agree with him.” Herr Veth wanted to turn this conversation into a lesson. Harold showed that he was indeed already too long in the rain. “No Herr Veth, Herr Hitler does not say what he wants. He is only taking measures to assure that we are building an eternal empire. It will last at least a 1,000 years because we will eradicate the mentally ill by not permitting them to reproduce and also by sterilizing their roots. We will also abolish any vagrants and quacks, regardless of their faith, by sending them to labor camps. If any nonproductive person does not like our restraints they are free to migrate to other countries, which will suffer by this fact and therefore will never be of any competition to our disciplined nation.” Karl was stunned by Harold’s outpouring. “Harold, what is the matter with you? Don’t you realize that you are sounding like a member of the Nazi party?” Harold turned to face his friend. “No, Karl, I don’t sound like a Nazi. Discipline and productivity are the hallmarks of our Prussian culture and upbringing. There is nothing wrong with it.” Herr Veth intertwined. “There is something wrong with using the Prussian discipline to control young minds. Herr Hitler is using the very core of our

On the other hand, children who are truly loved, although they may consciously feel or proclaim that they are being neglected, unconsciously know themselves to be valued. This knowledge is worth more than any gold. For when children know they are valued, when they truly feel valued in the deepest parts of themselves, then they feel valuable. The feeling of being valuable -"I am a valuable person"- is essential to mental health and is a cornerstone of self-discipline. It is a direct product of parental love. Such a conviction must be gained in childhood; it is extremely difficult to acquire it during adulthood. Conversely, when children have learned through the love of their parents to feel valuable, it is almost impossible for the vicissitudes of adulthood to destroy their spirit. This feeling of being valuable is a cornerstone of self-discipline because when one considers oneself valuable one will take care of oneself in all ways that are necessary. Self-discipline is self-caring.

Self-proclaimed artists limit themselves to ink on canvas or to the keys on a piano, but only a true artist will understand what art and real freedom really is – self-exploration without any limits. This may translate into a person's personal philosophy and way of life which is viewed as a way of testing oneself and abilities to handle situations.

One does not proclaim oneself an artist simply by crafting an object or by putting ink or paint onto a canvas. To be an artist is to work towards total freedom, a freedom without limits within one's feeling, thought and movement. It is a ceaseless journey of self-exploration and discovery; of contraction and retraction; pull and push; and negation. It is working towards the personal expression of one's philosophy and character, within and without. Success is form from formlessness. Knowledge from ignorance. Beauty from truth.

We are not to regress to pure id, as if paradise were a social psychosis. We are also not to export responsibility onto the plane of the Symbolic, as if fidelity requires the enslavement of the obsessive neurotic. We are not to evade the big questions so as to postpone our confrontation with the pure truth that we tend to repeat what is not working, as if security can be found in hysteria. We can only offer a caution: who is asking us to see the world this way? And why are we so eager to submit to the Other’s self-proclaimed representative, whether in the form of a person or an ideology?

There are two. In the first, three years ago, a self-proclaimed grizzly expert was killed. I’d personally rule that a suicide.

sinners . . . I was angry with God . . . I drove myself mad with a desperate disturbed conscience.”4 It is not insignificant that Luther’s own father and mother were both harsh disciplinarians, but regardless of the cause, Luther had clearly internalized a crippling image of God as judge that tormented him until he discovered grace. This message of grace and forgiveness has been a life-changing one to many people over the ages since Luther rediscovered it, but it has often been tragically accompanied by a message of fear and condemnation itself. Luther, for example, preached that one must face the horrors of wrath before one could come to grace. In other words, he believed that everyone needed to be forced to go through the horrible struggle he did before they could hear about grace. Ever since then, there has been a long history of revival preachers who have proclaimed this “pre-gospel” of fear, threat, and condemnation—telling people the bad news so they could then receive the good news, wounding people first, so they could then heal those wounds. The philosophy behind this strategy is that people need to be shaken out of their complacency and made ready to respond to the gospel. This may indeed be true for some, but for others it amounts to little more than abuse, and has resulted in a hurtful image of God being hammered into their heads that has estranged them from God, and driven them away from faith. For a person struggling with moral failure, facing up to their brokenness and realizing that God loves them and died for them despite it is a crucial step towards life. But to tell a person whose sin is self-hatred that they need to face how bad and worthless they are is like making them swallow the wrong prescription medicine—what was healing to the first person,

Our sexually selected instincts for displaying sympathy tend to affect our belief systems, not just our charity and courtship behavior. When individuals espouse ideological positions, we typically interpret their beliefs as signs of good or bad moral character. Individuals feel social pressure to adopt the beliefs that are conventionally accepted as indicating a "good heart," even when those beliefs are not rational. We may even find ourselves saying, "His ideas may be right, but his heart is clearly not in the right place." Political correctness is one outcome of such attributions. For example, if a scientist says, "I have evidence that human intelligence is genetically heritable," that is usually misinterpreted as proclaiming, "I am a disagreeable psychopath unworthy of love." The arbiters of ideological correctness can create the impression that belief A must indicate personality trait X. If X is considered sexually and socially repulsive, then belief A becomes taboo. In this way our sexually selected instincts for moralistic self-advertisement become subverted into ideological dogmas. I think that human rationality consists largely of separating intellectual argument from personality attributions about moral character. Our difficulty in making this separation suggests that political, religious, and pseudo-scientific ideologies have been part of moralistic self-display for a very long time.

Žižek's argument here is twofold. Firstly, founding itself upon classical biology, contemporary cognitive science presupposes that every organism is a self-contained system in harmony with itself seeking homeostasis and self-preservation, which prevents it from coming to terms with the psychoanalytical concept of Todestrieb. Representing a malfunction in biology, whereby a person no more strives for pleasure and satisfaction, for the minimal possible level of distress and affliction, but rather for pain and even self-destruction, psychoanalysis identifies this apparently negative moment of short circuit within the biological machine with one of the defining traits of human subjectivity and thus of culture itself. Instead of being a mere haphazard disorder or a contingent feature of a sick mind, Todestrieb comes to represent a necessary feature of the singularity of our being: the condition of the possibility of psychopathological self-destruction is ultimately linked to our very freedom because the two are structurally homologous. Secondly, what Žižek adds to this argument for the supremacy of psychoanalysis over reductionist biology is the following insight: if there were nothing but the self-contained, deterministic system of the neuronal interface of the brain, then why is there (self-)experience at all? Why is there not just blind existence, a mere mechanism that auto-develops according to its own laws? Why does the nonconscious trembling of brute matter in its dynamic pulsations need to be aware of itself? Since the category of subjective experience is superfluous, unnecessary, to the materialism displayed by science, the mere fact of experience proclaims that neurobiological activity is not-all—that there is a gap, a series of interstices, which arise within its logical fold as a kind of unpredictable short circuit to which, perhaps, phenomenal reality arises as a response. Naming the place of this rupture the subject itself, Žižek's own work on cognitive science consequently tries to underline the inherent difficulty that the discipline has (for this very reason) to explain the emergence of consciousness, insofar as it points to a limit-situation within which the discourse itself breaks down.

Escape was always possible; in every Indian town there was a corner of comparative order and cleanliness in which one could recover and cherish one's self-respect. In India the easiest and most necessary thing to ignore was the most obvious. The colonial mimicry is a special mimicry of an old country without a native aristocracy for a thousand years who has learned to make room for outsiders, but only at the top. The mimicry changes, the inner world remains constant: this is the secret of survival. Yesterday the mimicry was Mogul; tomorrow it might be Russian or American; today it is English. The Indian lavatory and the Indian kitchen are the visitor's nightmare. The attitude of the foreigner who does not understand the function of the beggar in India and is judging India by the standards of Europe. Physical effort is to be avoided as a degradation. Every man is an island; each man to his function, his private contract with God. This is the realization of the Gita's selfless action. An eastern conception of dignity and function, reposing on symbolic action: this is the dangerous, decayed pragmatism of caste. Symbolic dress, symbolic food, symbolic worship. India deals in symbols, inaction. Inaction arising out of proclaimed function, function out of caste. India, it was said, brought our concealed elements of the personality. It is well that Indians are unable to look at their country directly, for the distress they would see would drive them mad. And it is well that they have no sense of history, for how then would they be able to continue to squat amid their ruins and which Indian would be able to read the history of his country for the last thousand years without anger and pain? It is better to retreat into fantasy and fatalism, to trust to the stars in which the fortunes of all are written. Respect for the past is new in Europe and it was Europe that revealed India's past to India and made its veneration part of Indian nationalism. It is still through European eyes that India looks at her ruins and her art. The virtues of R.K. Narayan are Indian failing magically transmuted. Out of all its squalor and human decay, its eruptions of butchery, India produced so many people of grace and beauty, ruled by elaborate courtesy. Producing too much life, it denied the value of life, yet it permitted a unique human development to so many.

Being nonreligious involves more than intelligence, knowledge, practicality, and method. It calls for virtue, heroism, and greatness of soul. It takes an exceptional personal asceticism to be nonreligious. All of us have known great atheists, genuinely strict ones, who didn't deceive themselves about a god. For them, atheism was an honor, the highest form of human courage. They maintained those heights only by a constantly renewed act of the will, stretched to the limit against every suffering, and finally death. This is no easier today. So where do we get the idea that modem man, the average man, he whom we adjudge to be atheistic, indifferent, and irreligious, has achieved those heights? In the routines of a society of comfort, of moral flabbiness, of an absence of willpower, of debasement, what is there to prepare a person for lifting himself to the heights of atheism's rigorous virtue? What readies him for that merciless clarity about himself and about the world, which irreligion always involves? Where do we see the spiritual greatness, the morale, the quality of exactitude, the rigor on which criticism of myth and the rejection of the sacred are always based? The scientific method and a smug materialism are not enough! It takes men who are hardheaded with their feet on the ground. I do not see them. Everything points to the opposite. We see people on a bed of ease, and wishing no other happiness for others. They whimper at the slightest danger, the slightest suffering (look at the leftists ! ). Flabby skepticism and exuberant disdain are not enough to produce an adult man and an irreligious society. We can rest assured, to the contrary, that in the current psychological tendencies, in the absence of any character preparation for facing up to great progress and great tests, in the transfer of human energies to the exclusively cerebral, in the collapse of the will in favor of the imagination, in the rejection of all self discipline, the only way of escape is into the social and the religious. Everybody since Bergson has proclaimed the need for a soul-supplement. All right, we have it in the new religions.

if the market system had not arisen naturally, it would have been proclaimed the greatest invention in human history. For market competition leads a self-interested person to wake up in the morning, look outside at the earth and produce from its raw materials, not what he wants, but what others want. Not in the quantities he prefers, but in the quantities his neighbors prefer. Not at the price he dreams of charging, but at a price reflecting how much his neighbors value what he has done.

It may be true that every prophet is a pain in the neck, but it is not true that every pain in the neck is a prophet. There is a no more firmly entrenched expression of the false self than the self-proclaimed prophet. He is one who does not die to self but affirms himself in his prophetic criticisms. He is a world unto himself and rare is the person that can measure up to his standards.

Some populist movements claim adherence to the ideals of modern science and to the traditions of skeptical empiricism. They tell people that indeed you should never trust any institutions or figures of authority—including self-proclaimed populist parties and politicians. Instead, you should “do your own research” and trust only what you can directly observe by yourself. This radical empiricist position implies that while large-scale institutions like political parties, courts, newspapers, and universities can never be trusted, individuals who make the effort can still find the truth by themselves. This approach may sound scientific and may appeal to free-spirited individuals, but it leaves open the question of how human communities can cooperate to build health-care systems or pass environmental regulations, which demand large-scale institutional organization. Is a single individual capable of doing all the necessary research to decide whether the earth’s climate is heating up and what should be done about it? How would a single person go about collecting climate data from throughout the world, not to mention obtaining reliable records from past centuries? Trusting only “my own research” may sound scientific, but in practice it amounts to believing that there is no objective truth. As we shall see in chapter 4, science is a collaborative institutional effort rather than a personal quest.

The emphasis on choice, freedom and responsibility is one of the most distinctive features of Jewish thought. It is proclaimed in the first chapter of Genesis in the most subtle way. We are all familiar with its statement that God created man “in His image, after His likeness.” Seldom do we pause to reflect on the paradox. If there is one thing emphasized time and again in the Torah, it is that God has no image. Hence the prohibition against making images of God. For God is beyond all representation, all categorization. “I will be what I will be,” He says to Moses when Moses asks Him His name. All images, forms, concepts and categories are attempts to delimit and define. God cannot be delimited or defined; the attempt to do so is a form of idolatry. “Image,” then, must refer to something quite different than the possession of a specific form. The fundamental point of Genesis 1 is that God transcends nature. Therefore, He is free, unbounded by nature’s laws. By creating human beings “in His image,” God gave us a similar freedom, thus creating the one being capable itself of being creative. The unprecedented account of God in the Torah’s opening chapter leads to an equally unprecedented view of the human person and the capacity for self-transformation. [...] Everything else in creation is what it is, neither good nor evil, bound by nature and nature’s laws. The human person alone has the possibility of self-transcendence. We may be a handful of dust but we have immortal longings.

What ultimately got me through was my single-minded determination, voiced aloud to myself and recorded in my diary, to discover the causes of my blindness and never to repeat them. Fearlessly pursuing insight was my badge of honor, my route back to self-respect. […] There are many ways to become mistress (or master) of one’s fate after a betrayal, but they all have things in common: conscious effort and a fighting spirit, embodied in what I call ‘the Affirmative No.’ The Affirmative No incorporates self-enhancing outrage, independence, and courage. It is a stance through which a traumatized person actively proclaims her will by rejecting the role of victim. This is not an act of negation or rebellion; it is an act of self-assertion, subjectively defined. […] Unable to change our predicaments, we actively changed their meaning and our relationship to them, and in the process, we discovered that we could exert power when we thought we had none.

Even in the gay spots around town, he could walk in and suddenly realize he was the only person of color in the room. He faced questions in all the eyes he greeted. What’s he doing here? Does he think he’s one of us? How ironic that even here in the nation’s self-proclaimed “gay summer capital” he should feel unwanted, excluded.

March 13 The Abandonment of God God so loved the world, that He gave. . . . John 3:16 Salvation is not merely deliverance from sin, nor the experience of personal holiness; the salvation of God is deliverance out of self entirely into union with Himself. My experimental knowledge of salvation will be along the line of deliverance from sin and of personal holiness; but salvation means that the Spirit of God has brought me into touch with God’s personality, and I am thrilled with something infinitely greater than myself; I am caught up into the abandonment of God. To say that we are called to preach holiness or sanctification, is to get into a side-eddy. We are called to proclaim Jesus Christ. The fact that He saves from sin and makes us holy is part of the effect of the wonderful abandonment of God. Abandonment never produces the consciousness of its own effort, because the whole life is taken up with the One to Whom we abandon. Beware of talking about abandonment if you know nothing about it, and you will never know anything about it until you have realised what John 3:16 means, that God gave Himself absolutely. In our abandonment we give ourselves over to God just as God gave Himself for us, without any calculation. The consequence of abandonment never enters into our outlook because our life is taken up with Him.

Suppose someone says, it’s possible to jump off a 200 feet cliff without any aid and survive. 99 percent of those that try end up dying. But by some miracle, this guy survives, while doing the exact same thing with the exact method that killed 99 percent of the people. He later, proudly proclaims, “See! it’s possible to jump off a 200 feet high cliff and survive! Never mind the fact that I spent 6 months in a Coma and am now paralyzed FOR LIFE, but I survived! Anyone can do it as long as you believe in yourself! In business, the most common synonym for this is –” Work 18-hour days! Take no days off! No pain, no gain! Don’t change even if the entire world tells you that you are wrong! Sleep only when you are dead!” Other entrepreneurs listen to that and try to replicate it sincerely. But most fail anyway while also ruining their health, finances and personal life. What they don’t realize is that just because a tiny minority survived or even thrived using this approach, doesn’t mean it is the right approach, because if it was, it would work for most people who followed it sincerely, but it doesn’t.

When is a person more free than when a person seeks to be free? A person who does not seek is drowning in the morbidity of his meaningless existence. A person who fancies himself to have become absolutely free becomes enslaved to the delusion of a self-proclaimed divinity.

Thiel has also contributed to a reactionary turn in our politics and society that has left the United States in a much more uncertain place than he found it in when he went into business for himself in the mid-1990s. He is a critic of big tech who has done more to increase the dominance of big tech than perhaps any living person. He is a self-proclaimed privacy advocate who founded one of the world’s largest surveillance companies. He is a champion of meritocracy and intellectual diversity who has surrounded himself with a self-proclaimed mafia of loyalists. And he is a champion of free speech who secretly killed a major U.S. media outlet. “He’s a nihilist, a really smart nihilist,” said Matt Stoller, the anti-monopoly activist and author of Goliath: The 100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy. “He’s entirely about power—it’s the law of the jungle. ‘I’m a predator and the predators win.’ ” That, more than anything, may be the lesson that Thiel’s followers have learned—the real meaning of “move fast and break things.

I’ve ravaged countless lands, terrorized the common folk to no end, and captured thousands of maidens to add to my harem! The name Reece Grimsor is feared by every person in Oberon!” Vere stabbed his sword into the ground and leaned against the hilt. “Why are you confessing all of your crimes?” he asked. “Are you trying to get hit? There’s no need to work so hard. I already planned to kill you.

But although external ties between the Eleatics and first Cynics are scanty, the conceptual resemblances are striking. Again, one must not read literally, and must bear in mind that the tenets of Eleaticism were so compelling that they essentially created the philosophical atmosphere breathed by the Cynics: these tenets determined a general orientation that the Cynics unconsciously adopted, despite the fact that their explicit rhetoric was to reject the convoluted "wisdom" of Eleatics, Academics, Peripatetics, and other schools. In order to trace the intellectual asceticism of the Cynics back to Eleatic ontology, we will first describe Parmenides' vision of the One and the attributes of reality itself. These attributes had immense influence especially over subsequent physics and epistemology. Moreover, they give the Greek praise of poverty a philosophical aspect: the truth is so beautiful and absorbing that to glimpse it transforms a person, turns him in a different direction, and wrenches him away from his previous devotion to conventional goods. Philosophy is a solitary activity that pulls the thinker away from work, marriage, family, citizenship, away even from sensual pleasure and the distractions of sense-experience. Indeed, the physical world as a whole loses its hold over the "wise;' who knows something far more real and compelling. That is, the Eleatic elevation of the absolute over the relative - of the singular, eternal, and unchanging over the heterogeneous, temporal, and shifting - introduces a lasting dualism into much Greek thought. This dualism culminates eventually in a variety of types of philosophical poverty. The Platonic philosopher becomes an intellectual and even religious ascetic who devotes himself to the pursuit of divine Ideas. The Cynic, on the other hand, dismisses such talk of eternity simply to contrast mundane Fortune and the self. While the external world is filled with "smoke" ( tuphos), and is as undesirable as it is unintelligible, the Cynic unconsciously emulates the attributes of the Eleatic One, and so proclaims his self-sufficiency, unity, consistency, and inner purity from contaminating desires and relations.

Is life meaninglessness, without a fundamental purpose? Alternatively, must each of us proclaim a distinctive purposefulness for living? Is happiness a desired goal, and if so, what is personal happiness? Does happiness coincide with truthfulness? People intuitively seek happiness. How does a person haunted by memories of failure attain happiness? Should a person strive to realize an enviable social status and becoming fabulously wealthy (i.e. achieving fame and fortune)? Is happiness a mental state that instigates from a person leading a life that gives them maximize pleasure derived from their personal efforts? Does each person have the tools to achieve personal happiness? Is personal happiness a matter of making the right choices in life, of living a good life? Is the key to enjoying a happy life striving to obtain physical comfort, mental stimulation, and emotional wellbeing? Does a person achieve happiness by making choices in life that will enhance their degree of pleasure, lessen their degree of pain, and reduce their amount of personal sacrifice? Alternatively, does achieving a happy life require living virtuously by demonstrating honest work and helping other people? Can eradicating self-deception lead me to discovering a unique purpose in life that heretofore eluded me? Perhaps a creative course of constructive achievement will provide a glimmering moment of happiness.

The English term “martyr” comes from the Greek martys, “witness.” Søren Kierkegaard defines witness as “someone who directly demonstrates the truth of the doctrine he proclaims—directly, yes, partly by its being the truth within him, … partly by his volunteering his personal self and saying: See, now, if you can force me to deny this doctrine.

It proclaimed a new nation, the first in history established on the principle that every person is entitled to pursue his own values: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights; that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.

Everyone has the right to be as mad as you, as long as he or she is not forcing their madness upon you or anyone else in that matter. If you on the other hand, feel and have that burning spark of gnosis inside you—and you think you don't have anything to do with these types of things and people—maybe the entire magical rite doesn't affect you at all. You have performed a sort of a “self-exorcism” and you have the strong feeling that you own your shit. Because of these things, all that knowledge is paramount and it is of vital importance for anyone's personal quest towards enlightenment. In many cases it is an energetic independence and any self-proclaimed Wizard or a genuine Witch wants a few minutes alone under that thick shade near the oak tree—where he or she can gather their thoughts and invoke the crucial hacks toward unlocking the secret passwords of the universe. Think about it; you deeply feel and know that you have it in you. Be the Wizard or the Witch and not the Court Jester.

the worldview of the Socialist International enunciated at its 1962 conference in Oslo, Norway: “We democratic Socialists proclaim our conviction that the ultimate aim of political activity is the fullest development of every human personality, that liberty and democratic self-government are precious rights which must not be surrendered; that every individual is entitled to equal status, consideration and opportunity; that discrimination on grounds of race, color, nationality, creed or sex must be opposed; that the community must ensure that material resources are used for the common good rather than the enrichment of the few; above all, that freedom and equality and prosperity are not alternatives between which the people must choose but ideals which can be achieved and enjoyed together.

British businessman Cecil Rhodes, “who founded the Round Table groups, a precursor of the Council on Foreign Relations and its offshoot, The Trilateral Commission.” Members of the Frankfurt School sought to develop a theory of society based on Marxism. They, along with the Tavistock Institute, were instrumental in aligning America and the EU with their Marxist vision of state control and management of the economy. These organizations have worked to create new forms of state-run capitalism—a euphemism for socialism, which became wildly popular among youth during the presidential campaign of Vermont senator Bernie Sanders, a self-proclaimed socialist. Marxism, socialism, communism, and progressivism are designed to destroy the individuality of men and women created in God’s image. The goal is to create a hive mind where everyone thinks the same. In Marxism and its variants, the infinite, personal, living God of the universe is replaced by the state or the “collective.” This permits totalitarianism under a godless state. The Frankfurt School, whose representatives later occupied key positions in important American universities like Harvard University and the University of California, Berkeley, understood the importance of controlling the media in producing “massification.” Ultimately, ideas like massification, collectivism, conformity, and the New Age movement were designed by a secretive occult elite to control the masses. All these concepts contradict God’s plan for humanity.

He might be the only person, other than his family and my sister, who knows I’m not the bad guy that the media makes me out to be. But my image has its perks, one being that women throw themselves at the self-proclaimed “unlovable bad-boy,” and our contrasting personas make us both a ton of money.