Theme: Agency

MESSIANIC MISSIONS AND HUMAN USURY

(diary)(very personal)

Working on my personal reformation still, and I think I have found the issue, and it’s much more obvious in retrospect than I thought.

The problem with heroic (messianic) missions, and in general, missions beyond what is comprehensible to others, or programs in which others may play some partial role without understanding that the greater purpose is beyond their grasp, is that it is increasingly easy to ‘use’ people if for no other reason than it is not possible to engage in reciprocal information nor intent.

Now, not only have I been on this messianic mission since my first blushes with self-agency at the age of twelve, but I also lack many social fears, and I lack a great deal of ordinary empathy. Not because I lack feelings – just the opposite. I am overwhelmed by them.

My mission has consumed my life – and framed my thinking so much so that I have lost sight of the alternatives normal people follow.

Prior to my divorce, one of the women I worked with called me a sociopath – which I took as feminist psychologism and shaming. The modern equivalent of calling people sinful if they do not conform to dogma. But when we got divorced – and my cancer had returned – my wife accused me of the same. Which seemed very odd to me, so I started seeing a therapist to discover if it was true – divorces are disoriented for most of us and for me it was especially so. And of course, I have none of the markers of sociopath, just the opposite. Which is possible to see in my philosophical work quite clearly. I love people, and I hate disapproval or suffering.

But it was not until this period of introspection that I understood that for almost all my adult life, and certainly since my first bout of cancer in 2001 increased my sense of urgency so dramatically, I have treated people as little more than resources that are necessary for the fulfillment of what I see as my mission – and a mission that I see as of profound importance for my people.

The second bout with cancer in ’09 dramatically accelerated my feeling of pressure – that I must act – and by October of 2012 when I came to Kiev, after another hospitalization in August, I felt the weight on my subconscious so heavily I am not sure there was much of my identity left beyond it. I remember feeling like an automaton. And it was not long after that I took the ‘early’ strategy of attacking libertarianism in order to accelerate my learning, and raise awareness of my work, so that I could start to build a body of people able to use these ideas in argument in favor of the western tradition.

Now, a good enough psychologist – or me as the Propertarian equivalent – might say that as a young person with mild Asperger’s growing up in a violent and chaotic home, experiencing the tragedy of the 1960s, while at the same time digesting encyclopedias in the western tradition, that I chose this mission as a means of making life tolerable, and under my control, rather than the control of, or opinion of others. And I would agree. But that causal connection doesn’t change the fact my work is pretty revolutionary and that I have succeeded in producing the missing philosophy of the west that so many authors have struggled to codify in the post-mystical era we call the enlightenment.

Now, to some degree, the number of people I can treat as fully informed peers is very limited. I am in a position in life that many prior revolutionary thinkers have been in – feeling somewhat alone. And I have this entirely ingrained paternalism wherein I consider almost everyone childlike, but love them all anyway.

But, just as when you look to your parents and realize that you have outgrown them, and are confronted with the fear of it, or your teachers, or your mentors, or your career peers, or all your friends – one feels the weight of having no one to turn to but books – and thankfully, in our era, the internet. So I cannot hope to treat people as peers.

In my work on ethics, I have described this gray area, wherein I try to illustrate that if there are moral and legal norms, you can adhere to them while still taking advantage of people. This is one of my criticisms of parasitic groups.

But there is also the inverse gray area, wherein a man with greater knowledge may choose not to act according to moral and legal norms, with full belief that he acts morally anyway because the circumstance is sufficiently under his control that the benefit for the group mandates that he act unconventionally. And if he succeeds, then he is a genius of profound character, and if he fails he is a fool and a scoundrel. Whereas, had he obeyed moral norms, even if that meant dramatically increasing the chance of failure, whether he succeeded or failed would have produced the same positive judgment of him either way.

Now to use people doesn’t mean to harm them. It means the external value that they associate with the relationship differs from normative expectations. In reality, if you live entirely for a mission, then what value do most people have other than to the mission? So if the mission changes, or we are no longer in pursuit of it, then the value of people changes as well. Because one can have people who add value to the mission when that mission that is not shared, or we can have a mission that adds value to the people which is shared.

So. I use people. I used people. I have used everyone and everything at my disposal for many years – most of my life. Most of which helped buy me time to work on my mission. I have built companies for no other purpose than to provide me funding to work on my mission, sought work where I had the headspace to work on my mission, associated with people for the sole purpose of advancing my mission. And in practical terms, that seems like all I have done.

And after my spate of illnesses, I developed a sense of urgency that took me to near total disregard of others, outside of normal human friendship.

And that appears to be why I am here and now in this here and now.

So that was a much harder discovery process than I expected, and I am not sure that I understand what it means fully yet, but at least, by focusing on getting rest, I understand my actions in retrospect.

Minds are interesting things.

I feel much more a rider on the elephant the older I get, and the more I udnerstand that our agency is much more limited than our egos can admit.