Theme: Agency

UPDATE ON FINDINGS

1) I find fighting envigorating – it’s an addiction. Seriously. I might need to work with a psychologist to figure out why I fking love being in the arena. It’s probably attention? Learning? Using attention to learn quickly? I dunno. I just know that fighting and learning makes me high. And the argument is my preferred ‘sport’. I just love it so much it’s a fking addiction.

2) attention is a valuable scarcity, so one must use it when one gets it. By fighting, and maintaining attention, I learned so much from this and it was priceless. I think I can finally empathize with where the right is coming from: Purity in self-worth.

3) I’m emotionally (cognitively) a conservative-libertarian. I have the conservative disgust response to physical things (including gene pools). But Purity in Mind doesn’t matter to me. It’s just utilitarian. And that difference produces a difference in self-measurement. I get my self worth from my brain, confidence, relentlessness, and ability to achieve. I don’t get it from the belief I’m a good person (I don’t think I am) or moral righteousness (I don’t think I am) like devout chrsitians and conservatives, or approval of others (last thing I care about) – Purity is an internal and defensive strategy for maintaining one’s self-image, so that one has the confidence to endure the fact that this universe is not friendly to man. It doesn’t require actions that produce results, only one’s rejection of that which one finds impure by association. So you just need to disapprove, you don’t need to act. Whereas I have to produce results for anything to matter to me.

4) This is why men need the company of men, they need to play team sports, and they need European military service best emphasized by the training by the marines: take it, make do, get it done. This turns these potential defects from personal means of measurement of one’s inaction to social means of measurement of the result one’s actions – especially for the team. So again. “European Civilization Begins With The Militia” and “our civilization is an army, an army that produces commons” and that’s such a beautiful thing. but men must be trained into mindfulness and action by military service just as women must be trained into mindfulness and action by raising a sufficient number of children to overwhelm their selfishness.

5) It’s probably also why P is action-oriented and I get so much resistance from people who want ‘inaction oriented’ or ‘self-oriented’ (Christians, NS), and more action from the WN community. WN is more a disgust response (I have it) and Xian, NS more of a purity response). Because one’s agency is lacking. Doubling down on purity is a demonstration of lacking of agency on one hand (lower end), or preference for inaction – cost savings (on the higher end). We are all bots running a very simple operating system, that processes infinite categories of data, and develops software (habits) from doing so. We have to work very hard to develop agency in the world, but even harder to develop agency so that we write our own software.

6) So now instead of just being frustrated with these people, I understand them, have a language for discussing them, and have a language they can use to understand themselves and each other.

7) IMO most of success in life is working hard, tolerating emotional, mental, and physical stress, being relentless, seizing every opportunity, and continuing to move your goalpost out ahead of you so that you have many victories but never stop. In other words, you have to love DOING (Producing) something more than Experiencing ( consuming) something. Or in other words, you can’t be lazy. The problem with that philosophy is it’s dependent upon your agency. it only works if you develop agency within a field of achievement that you can succeed in. And emotional religion and rational philosophy are means by which you abandon success by action because of the cost of action, and spend your efforts on consumption, and enjoying the ride.