Caring is an action with a focus on control.

Caring is not a thought alone. Caring is an action we perform. We do not think of things unless we care about them. We do not make ourselves think of things in order to care. Thoughts come about repetitively when we happen to care. We do not seem to have control of what we care about. We can only control our proximity to them when conscious of the fact we care about them. Caring is an action because when we care in our thoughts we take physical actions due to the fact we care in our minds. If we are in denial about what we care about we may take actions based on artificial representations we make up in place of the things we really care about. Either way we are acting on something. Sometimes we may care about something, but feel powerless to overcome the challenge to acquire it. In these cases we tend to take on actions that reflect stress like drinking more or overeating. These habits of self-degradation only exist because we have not found the power in ourselves to overcome our fears and grasp our true desires. No matter how we look at it, caring is an action we perform, even when we perform actions that do not get us what we really desire. Sometimes it takes a little time and pain of avoiding someone or something that we cannot have to detach ourselves from them. We may take actions that are not in our favor in the short run in these times of stress, but if we act properly in our favor these times will pass in the long run.

Conscious struggle is key to grasping a denial and gaining power over our weaknesses. The reason we stay unconscious in many cases is because it is a control mechanism. I know a long time back I wrote on concepts of control and lack of control, and the conclusion was that there is no such thing as lack of control or disorder in the world. There are merely new forms of order and control that might not be in our favor or conscious to us. The constant changing of orders rapidly can seem like chaos, but in most cases the changes are stable whether we realize it or not. This is why we make ourselves unconscious sometimes. We do not want to see the order of how things really are in the world or ought to be in our lives. This is a control mechanism we create to avoid painful feelings and remain weak. Control mechanisms we create over ourselves exist in everyone. We are much less able to see the ones we have ourselves due to the way our emotions shape them in our lives. This is why a community is important. This actually a divide I see in method when looking at groups like Satanists that they themselves in many cases are not aware of. The divide I am talking about is Epicurean versus Nietzschean approaches to living a life in our favor. The Nietzschean approach is more focused on the individual priority and the willing of oneself to power. I do not prefer this approach because it is flawed to me. The reason is because the emotions we tie to ideas can keep us from seeing our own denial. The Epicurean seeks to strengthen the self through a community of friends. This is the idea of ethical egoism where we want to maximize ourselves for our own benefit, but the only way to best accomplish this is by benefiting those we know will treat us well back. We should all belong to a small community of friends who can be more objective to our weaknesses, and point them out for us in order to better us, and make the whole community better off. This is similar to a market system where we each seek to maximize our own utility, but the actions of all others will let us know if our actions are flawed or not working in reality.

There are some cases where even the community may lack the power to make some individuals see their denials. I can think of a few examples that come to mind when I think of this. One involved a father who was cooking hamburgers and asked the mother and son if anyone wanted a hamburger. The son said he did not want a hamburger. The father asked again just to make sure and the mother was sitting in the room the whole time. Once again the son makes it clear does not want one. When the father comes in the room eating a hamburger the mother asks why he did not make her one. He tells her that he asked if anyone wanted one and told her she did not respond. Her response was “I make dinner all the time”. This is a control method. She may or may not be conscious she is exerting this control method. The point is that she is not willing to admit she is flawed or wrong. If she can never admit this to herself, she can never work toward correcting her own actions. She wants to be in denial to her own actions, because it is painful for her to look at them and easier not to correct them. This allows her to keep acting as she chooses and take advantage of others. It is only the actions of the others who can change the way she acts in these situations by changing their actions towards her. In some cases the group may never cause them to become conscious of their actions. Some people just will not ever be able to look at the fears in themselves and overcome them, and it is because of some of these cases we must abandon them to make ourselves live better.

Another example I have experienced personally and have counseled many others on are situations where people will blow you off and act like it is not a big deal. These people do not really care about us. They only care what we can do for them on the surface and nothing beneath that. One instance is a friend I would call and ask to hang out. He in many cases would not call back for many days when he happened to be bored. He would make the excuse that he was busy that day doing something else, but never managed to call later that day to make plans for another time. By continually taking advantage of me by only calling at his convenience, the only choice I had was to stop calling him. The step beyond this of course is if he continued to call me and make pseudo plans I would have no choice but to advance further and say do not call at all anymore. The best method I found to deal with these people is to tell them not to call unless they are actually calling to hang out that moment. This confines them to only calling at your convenience and water is at its own level.

One more example has to do with something I have experienced and recently had to talk someone else through who was experiencing something similar to myself in the past. This had to do with a person they liked who would continually ignore their calls and would only call back at their own convenience. The pattern you start to see in these examples is that denial of others feelings is a method to keep these people from looking at their own issues. By projecting their personal issues onto others they can take advantage of them by assuming that their actions are completely proper and never seek to change themselves. This situation is very similar to the last one where she would continually call and when she would ask why he did not call back to at least say he would not be able to keep plans, his response was “I’m sorry if I hurt you in any way”. By saying this he was erasing the guilt from his actions and she would let him off the hook, only to do it to her again. Once again this is a control mechanism. As long as he could apologize whenever he took advantage of her and she would turn the other check, he would keep on taking advantage of her. It is only when she takes actions over herself to change what she is doing that he will stop taking advantage of her.

This is all in a sense a will to power, but you will notice that people have trouble accomplishing this on their own, and need someone from within their community of friends to give them strength to the see the situation for what it really is. Sometimes people will ask for advice or help and never act on it. They may become conscious of the desire to act and seem interested in talking about it, but afterward they will continue taking old actions anyway. We cannot be accountable for the actions of others. We can only seek to become conscious of our own and change the things we are doing. We should only go out of our way to understand the actions of others in our direct community, because understanding these actions and trying to better them will actually better our lives. It is true that in some cases we may not be able to better these people, but we should try if we have to deal with them in our everyday lives. Control is something we should only seek to get over ourselves, and we should always be ready to blame ourselves when something happens out of our favor so we can correct ourselves afterward. We cannot know better about the future without having some understanding of the past through experience, but a little superstition never hurts when seeking to try new things we may not have experienced personally.

What it means to care - The utilitarian flaw.

When looking at the definitions of happiness between the classics and the present you will notice the former sees happiness as a way of life, and the latter sees it as a temporary psychological state. Happiness for the ancients was not as we see it now, which a state that comes and goes in life, but happiness is a way we acquire when we live the right way. I believe it is possible to have a happy life by investing in actions that produce long-term rewards we can keep building on. Maybe there is no such thing as the happy life when it comes to the ability to feel good all the time, but a happy life can be one where if we look at the greater scheme of things we find a constant progression of the self. Happiness I believe is not something we get just by going through the motions. People who go through the motions of pragmatism at their job that has always brought them food on the table may be completely miserable even though they found something that works.

It seems happiness has three parts to it. One is finding pragmatic things that work. The second part is to work at new things that cause us to struggle while we subconsciously drill away at old mastered skills. It is odd to think that part of the happiness equation would require struggle. Even peaceful moments where we can be complacent only come about after we have struggled to reach them…and even then they are only temporary. Even if we relaxed all the time we would eventually become bored, depressed, and desire to struggle at something again. Struggle can only be done consciously, and those who struggle the most with success seem to find the most happiness. That is why the skills we have already mastered are like a monkey turning a crank unconsciously. They are no longer a struggle when we have mastered them. They become unconscious like chewing food while we consciously struggle at other things like thinking or working on something. When we are with friends we play, and sometimes the line between work and play is very thin. When we are in a conversation with friends there are many points where we are confronting each other’s beliefs and values. When we are playing active games like sports we struggle over who wins and who has control just as a conversation. Even in play we are working at winning or a goal consciously, and only in these conscious struggles can we improve ourselves. The funny thing is we all think everyday about things, and in many cases we all have thoughts of struggle with something in our lives. Most of these thoughts are struggles we may not be able to overcome. We just like having the ability to dream of overcoming them. The third part to happiness seems to be the ability to understand our true desires as well as knowing how to get those desires. It is getting to taste victory over and over again as a way of life that brings happiness after each struggle while never abstaining from a constant new struggle. Perhaps it is only those who manage to think of pragmatic ways to solve the riddles to some of these dreams in their real lives that actualize and conquer, while the rest just struggle in their thoughts and become depressed with their unchanging situations. They dwell on the past or things that they wish could be, but never seem to think of how to connect the “knowing that” of an idea to a “knowing how” of completing the dream. Happiness can only be found when we see a desire we want, find a pragmatic method to encounter it with, and conquer the desire through struggle to take it for our own. People who can keep achieving this continually throughout life by investing in things they know they can keep struggling and winning at are the ones who find happiness in the classical sense. They find happiness as a way of life. Struggle that is not happy is the kind that never brings a reward like a couple that never finds resolution in conflict or a dream that remains a dream while our real lives remain stagnant.

If we could now superimpose the concept of happiness as a way of life onto caring as a way of understanding we might be able to reach an actualization of our actions and true desires. It is only by understanding our true desires we can understand what we truly care about. If we act on things we do not really care about because we lie to ourselves we only find pragmatic means of struggle over a false desire. Under this method we project our energy and power into an artificial construction of comfort. This is because I believe we are utilitarian creatures by nature. We naturally run from pain and towards pleasure. The flaw in utilitarianism on the personal level is it allows us to lie to ourselves about our true desires. This is because true desire lies behind pain and fear. When we deny the true pleasures we desire and project our energy into the artificial we become insecure and fear fearful covertly. This is the man who puts himself through torture just to be someone’s boyfriend and finds that the relationship is horrible, but lives in denial of the horror just to maintain the label of boyfriend and claims he is a happy man when his struggle brings no rewards. By projecting the energy to care into a label with a particular person that bears no fruit he has given up the desire to be in a happy relationship somewhere else or even be alone happy. Being pragmatic and struggling over broken things that do not bring about our true desires leads to a life of misery. This is just learning how to make broken things work well instead of fixing them. I am sure we could all get good at walking on crutches, but why not get good at walking with a fixed foot? To overcome this utilitarian flaw we have to face fear and conquer it. Some fears are natural for a good reason like running from a hungry lion, but perhaps a lion in a particular situation must be conquered to achieve happiness in our lives. We can only conquer a fear if we care to. The problem is we tend to care about the artificial denial we created in place of the obvious fear that only others can see in us more often than we can. Sometimes it takes dialect with others to point out our fears, but even in these situations we tend to get defensive if we are not ready to see our flaws. Caring is not the ability to look at a problem and acknowledge it alone. Caring is an action we do upon the thing we acknowledge and not just an understanding of it. When we take action to struggle over a problem in a pragmatic manner to solve it we truly care, but this can be fatal if we are acting something that cannot be fixed or if it is an artificial construction we care about. Performing the same action again and again with no reward or result would be insanity. Insanity is a dream we never conquer. True desires exist beneath a series of layers we may never get to the bottom of, but the closer we get the better, and we can only do this when those close to us can see these denials on our surface and help us overcome them. It is only by placing ourselves in environments with people that are conducive to our true desires that we can actually accomplish our true desires. People who are opposed to our desires are only artificial friends we constructed to find pleasure in, in order to avoid the pain covering our true desire that they help us deny we have to achieve them. They will convince us that we do not want to become what we truly desire so we can be dragged down to their level of less accomplishment. This environment is not in our favor and it is only by going to one with friends that support, or an environment where we are alone we can achieve what we desire, but an environment with friends is always more desirable if we can find those that fit our desires.

Maximizing utility and how true power is gained.

In liberal-democracy we are afforded the benefit of security for the surrender of some of our freedom. The more freedom we give up the more security we have, and the more security we give up the more freedom we have. In liberal-democracy in the West, rights are emphasized on the individual’s freedom to maximize their self-interest, where in the East there is a focus more on collective or state interest. It could be said that the West has more focus on the deontology of life, where the ability for the individual to have the right to make choices regardless of the outcome is the right thing to have exist. In the East there is a focus on utility, where some people may get hurt in the process, but overall the community is better off.

Since I live in the West and the state has allowed me enough security to exercise certain amounts of my will, the question then becomes, what is the maximized utility of the individual who has the right to act as they please? Going back to the last couple writings, I would argue the best way to maximize the self is to know the self the best possible. We can never fully know the self or we would be gods of the self. We can never know all other intentions of other individuals or this too would make us similarly godlike. We can obviously know the self better than we know anyone else. Who then, should we take the time to get to understand if we cannot possibly understand the intentions of everyone? Should it not only matter that as long as people are giving me the thing I want from them, that this is all I need to know? I would say yes for most people. We do not have time to understand why the man who sells us ice cream is driven to sell it beyond the benefit we get from it. We may only care to inquire further if we thought the ice cream may harm us, or the man selling it could offer us more in life than just ice cream. This all comes down to caring. If we care, then there is enough incentive to dig deeper into something. The thing we care about however may be a compensation for what we truly desire. This is obviously our problem and not someone else’s unless helping us dig deeper in ourselves is of some benefit to them. This means those who are willing to benefit us on a level where they will be regularly integrated in our lives are worth getting to know more deeply than those we have basic trades with, and these same people we gain a lot from are the ones we want to understand the most, because helping them understand themselves more, will lead to them maximizing their utility, and if they are integrated into our lives, that means it will help us maximize our utility better in the process of helping them toward knowing ourselves.

Going a step further into this game of utility we may come to a situation where we are playing a game of maximizing ourselves, and in the process of doing so, someone else steps on our game without meaning it and we make them conscious of the fact. Who is wrong? I would argue it depends who we are in society. If I was the president of an authoritarian country who was stepped on then they are wrong. If I as an authoritarian dictator step on them, then they are wrong for being in the way of where I was playing. What it really comes down to is whoever has the power to do harm or damage to another is right. Does this mean if we have this power we should always do as we please without taking others feelings into account? I would argue no to an extent. No, because if you keep stepping on people smaller than you, it is only a matter of time before they come together and revolt against you. If you cannot crush them as an entire community, then it is in a greater interest to our utility to seek cooperation with them wherever we can find it. Besides, it is very difficult to crush entire communities, because some will always escape and rebuild new communities that are similar and more extreme. This then goes back to the prior paragraph of seeking to benefit ourselves and any others who seem to have similar interests. It is not wise to benefit others without getting benefited, or benefit ourselves without benefiting others most of the time. To truly maximize a utility of self is to benefit ourselves in as many ways possible as well benefit others in the process. The problem with going out of our way to benefit others is they may not get the benefit we seek to give them, or we may help them hoping to get a reward and then do not. If I were a professor and taught things I thought would help improve students lives, the fact is only a small portion of those students may take what I said and apply it the way I intended or even in a way that benefits their desires. Why then should I go out of my way to teach? I would say it benefits the teacher in seeing how well they are at their skill and improving themselves more than the student, but because students can benefit in the process we should continue teaching. At the same time we never went out of our way to teach these particular people. They chose to come into our classroom. The people who are going to get the lessons and use it in a way that is beneficial to them are the ones who get it, and not everyone will get what we try to teach them. At the same time, many people in a class may not know why they are even in a class, or took the class because it was the only thing available for an elective. The point being made is we should not go out of our way help people become conscious of the things they will not become conscious of in life with or without our help. People who are going to get certain things in life will get them, and certain people will not. It is not our job to teach them lessons unless they seek them, and even in seeking them, they may still only learn through their own experience. We should not try to pull people up to our level of consciousness on an issue unless we can benefit from doing so in the process.


This goes back again to playing a game to maximize utility and who is right or wrong in a situation. In a liberal-democracy where the emphasis is on the individual freedom, people for the most part are equals under the law. We know that even though this may be true under the law, we still have hierarchies and power structures within such a liberal-democracy. Lets say I am a prominent figure within a subculture and someone starts dating a girl I used to have a good time with. When I was playing with the girl, I was playing game X. The new man is playing game Y. Game X and Y are similar in certain respects, but regardless are different games. Since there are some similarities in the games there is an area where similar partials overlap, and my toes are stepped on, because I am uncomfortable, but the player of game Y is not conscious till I notify them. Game Y had no intention in making me uncomfortable. They were simply going after happiness and my toes happen to be standing beneath where they are stepping. Who is wrong? It should not be game Y’s concern if my feelings are hurt or I am uncomfortable. In what situation should they care then? It should only be their concern if I had been integrated in their life long enough and deep enough that I brought more utility to their life than this new person. If I am more prominent than he is however within our subculture, I have the power to make his life hard on him by making others dislike him till he leaves and my zone of comfort has returned. Morals are decided by whom we care about and who benefits us. Therefore, right and wrong are only relative to those we have emotional empathy built toward. We have no obligation to make other people’s lives better for them unless they have the power to harm us. Even as a prominent figure however, we may perform an action that is seen as disgraceful to the community and this may lower our prominence within the community or even cause us to have to leave. The example is that, even though I have the prominence to make the player of game Y’s life harder on them by trying to make others dislike them forcing them to leave the community, I may be seen as dishonorable for doing so in my self interest to the community and fail in my plot to harm others intentionally that meant me no harm in the pursuit of happiness.

If we look at the life of Jesus, we would not see a peaceful man according to an account like the book of John, but when looking at the Dead Sea Scrolls, the account of a man who wanted to change power structure of the status quo. Jesus preached of the coming of a kingdom that would liberate the Jews and replace the Roman kingdom. He not only wanted to abolish the Roman Empire, which he believed it would take place in the form of a holy war from forces above, but he also was likely an Essene, which was an extreme sect of Judaism that wanted to radicalize and take precedent over the other Jewish beliefs at the time. Jesus drove everyone from the temple, and was then put to death. His followers afterward sought to spread his message, and this message of a holy war against the Empire was seen as a threat. Eventually, the Jews all assembled at Jerusalem for what they thought would be the final apocalyptic battle to be crushed by the Roman army and had their city burned down. What is to be learned from this is that even though we believe having our own beliefs are important, if they come in conflict with those more powerful than us we should compromise our beliefs in the areas that are in conflict. If we seek to do harm on them for being more powerful and are treating us well, we are actually practicing weakness due to our insecurity. What you find later is that Christianity fuses with pagan beliefs due to its persistence not to die in opposition to the Empire, and then is eventually fused with the Caesar as the new monotheistic being that rules over everyone. Nothing really changed in the structure. The only thing that changed was the titles of the existence of the same things. Strength is something gained through the building of the self. It is not a building of the self in opposition to others, but should only be to define ourselves relative to others. To seek infliction of damage unto others is a sign of weakness for fear of them overshadowing us. To run from things that make us insecure or fearful of being in their shadows is also a sign a weakness. Strength is having the power to treat people well. It is not the giving kind in the Christian sense where we give for the sake of giving, because people who give just to be liked really do not have anymore to give than this, and this too is a sign of weakness. It is not giving to those less benefited than us just because we have the power too, because this then makes them reliant on us. It is having the power to make people’s lives better, because we see something in them that can help make our lives better too. If they have nothing that can make our lives better, or are making us unhappy, we should only exist relative to the weaker as the stronger, and in the shadow of those stronger than us as their weaker. To overcome those who are stronger than us, we must not fear them or seek to harm them, but seek to build ourselves up to their level from within through cooperation with them or others at our level till we reach them. This is justice created through peace, and peace created through justice by exercising power properly.

What this really comes down to is no matter how much power we have, the only real power is the kind we gain through cooperation with those who benefit us emotionally and tangibly the way we desire. Going out of our way to harm others for our own benefit will eventually make our lives worse, the same as going out of our way to help people who do not benefit us. This means we should do what ever is in our benefit where others can benefit too, but if people step on out toes on accident, it seems to be wiser to know ourselves better, so in the future we do not stand where our toes can get stepped on again instead of seeking to stop people from playing in a way that is maximizing themselves and might accidentally harm us. If we consciously seek to harm these people back for accidentally causing us pain or damage, they may not understand why we are harming them for trying to be happy, because once again, some people will get it and some people will not. If we try to educate them, they may still not get it. They will only learn pain by experiencing it in the same way they dealt it, and that is not for us to teach them. If we just learn to understand ourselves, we can know how to avoid being in the way of others and still find ways to better ourselves that are not beneath their feet when playing. Nobody likes a weak person. A weak person is one who seeks to harm others on purpose to advance themselves, the same as a weak person is always giving with their heart on their sleeve, because they have nothing to offer but just that. A strong person builds themselves up so they have things people want, and when they find discomfort, loss, or pain, they do not seek to change or harm others to benefit themselves. They seek to change themselves to benefit themselves and others in the process. This person will do what is best for themselves and the community.

The Noble Lie I can lie no more.

A motive is driven by a desire, but a desire may be driven by another desire. A desire we lie to ourselves about will never solve our dilemma. The only way to solve a dilemma is to hit the proper nail on the head. In many cases we hit the wrong nail on the surface of the wood and not the one ingrained beneath the surface. Going back to the thinking of those like Plato or Descartes we come to the school of rationalism and reductive logic. In contrast to this were Aristotle and people like Locke or Hume with empiricist, or deductive logic. The difference is the former believes we can reduce an issue rationally through deep thought, by thinking of all the things that are not possible until we are only left with what is possible, and can build possible options of these possibilities. The latter believes in a similar idea of reducing all possibilities down to what is possible, but also believes the process of knowledge can only be achieved by examining what is true outside of the body, rather than reducing possibilities in the mind alone. The difference in approaches comes down to inductive versus deductive at a certain point. Is knowledge gained from within the mind of one who thinks well, or is it gained from examining the world around us?

I would argue a combination of the two is the only way to have some knowledge of the world. All reality is relative to our experiences, but is knowledge gained from outside or inside of us? It is rather circular and going back to superstition and pragmatism we can see a dichotomy of rationalism and empiricism, because to rationalize properly is the theorize what may be possible, and to empirically examine is to be pragmatic, and to be too much of one or another is flawed. If we want to hit the right nail, we must first find if the nail is something to be discovered outside or inside of us. Is the surface nail in front of us outside our bodies to examine and behind it is the latent nail waiting to be hit, or is it surface conscience and the subconscious is waiting to be brought forward? The problem is we cannot separate facts from values. Facts exist in the physical world. We first gain values, beliefs, motives and desires from our interactions with the world. What about the innate motives and desires we are born with? I would argue those were put there by the experiences of our ancestors. At some point humanity was not conscious enough to understand our experiences and built unconscious emotional reflexes to pleasure and pain. Those experiences are passed onto us in the future and become the innate and a priori drives of desire we carry for survival. These survival traits are pragmatics given to us, but sometimes the emotional reflexes make mistakes when a past experience does not account well for a present experience, because environments change from life to life and even in our own lives, and if we do not create flexible habits for new environments, we may keep hitting old nails without overcoming them. These old nails are old values and beliefs that drive current motives. We attach them to current facts subconsciously through the lens of our minds. This prejudice is what causes us to never be completely objective. It is only through the lenses of many minds that we can have a slightly better or intersubjective meaning of the world.

The problem of not being able to separate the facts from the values exists because we cannot separate empiricist pragmatism and rationalist superstition. The difference in how much you want of either of these depends on situation. It is good to be more pragmatic is learning a skill that involves objects. This is what scientific study is for. It is good to be more pragmatic in hard science, because we are less likely to look at objects with the prejudice we do toward other people. When trying to discover the functions of an object, we ask ourselves, what can it do for us? We would never examine an object in the sciences if we did not think it would advance mankind or just ourselves. If we belief it will help mankind in the future, we will examine all the features of objects that we see as useful. When it comes to people, we should be a little more superstitious. The deductive model of scientific method works best on the world outside of our bodies, but it does not give survival reflexes the way rationalism will. You can know all you want about how the world works in books, but you can only learn how to fight or flight through interaction with others. We want rationalism in philosophy, law, and relationships with people. It is the tooth and nail struggle of interactions that build up our reflexes, the way we tooth and nail our way logically in an experiment till we get the answer. It is the innate desires and desires gained through action that are embedded in us. The process of interacting with others should be as inductive as possible. The problem with deductive logic in interactions is a scientific model does not fit everyone. We use something similar to scientific models called labels. A label is like a model in that a model is already set up like directions to the assembly of a car. If we follow the directions right, we can reach the proper end of the a functioning machine. Interactions with people on the other hand are more organic, and if we walk in with a label, we tend to do the same thing we do with other objects to human objects. We look at someone and think, what can they do for me? If we see an attractive person and we are single, we think, maybe they can be my boyfriend or girlfriend. We already impose the label on them based on our desires, beliefs, and motives. The process of interaction becomes one of trying to make them fit the label of what we thought they would best suit in our lives. This puts expectations up at a high level and makes us too superstitious, and when expectations are too high, we tend to get let down a lot.

Rationalizing is not about thinking of the best way to think our way out of desires that might be bad. I would argue that rationality is a slave to our desires instead. Rationality only exists as a mode to help us find the most pragmatic method of achieving emotional wants. The mistake of over rationalizing in most cases is we naturally tend to lie about true desire and emotion, and compensate for by creating an alternative for emotions to go into (surface nails). Plato would have us think that the rational part of the soul should rule the other parts of courage and appetite, but what if rationality is a slave of appetite? If the rulers of a city have no money, the moneymakers could revolt by withholding resources. The same goes for us. The rational part of us is at the mercy of the appetite. By compensating for the true appetite and telling ourselves the noble lie, we divert desires to places they do not really want to be. Sometimes those who rule over us do not know what is best, because some experiences must come directly from those in a situation. This means the ability to rationalize should only exist to let the appetite get the thing it desires most with the least difficulty. We do not want to tell ourselves the noble lie in life. Telling the noble lie makes us run from pain and toward pleasure when true pleasure is overcoming the pain we would naturally run from. Running toward pleasure is a surface nail of compensation. It would make more sense to punch the thing hurting us in the face than to hit a punching bag to make up for the life we do not really want. The reason we do the things we do each day without thinking about it, is because we are unconsciously compensating for a life we would really like to be living. It is only when we consciously struggle we are achieving something better than we are now. Rationalism of something that makes us uncomfortable is best grappled by asking why we are uncomfortable. We have to ask what is it I am trying to prove, what is the motive behind wanting to prove it, and what is the solution to the end desire? When we stop lying to ourselves about the true end desire we want from a situation, we can stop compensating for it with alternative desires and run at pain head on. The conscious struggle with pain will give us peace and we can start living the way we really desire to live in that department. If we know we cannot have what we really want in a situation after thinking it through and confronting it, we should just leave and look elsewhere for things we do really want that we can have.

We cannot escape the process of labeling. This I believe is a survival mechanism created through language in order to describe what was harmful and not harmful in the wilderness humanity used to live, and even today to point out groups of people we see as threatening. We naturally walk into an interaction seeking people to fulfill our desires, but it is only through time we learn to trust certain people manage to fit these labels. If you think about it however, the people who managed to fit those labels the best, were in fact the ones we never expected them from. When we think of our best friends, and look back to when we met them, we never thought they would be our best friends upon meeting them. They ended up becoming the label even though we did not label them till later on when it was obvious. This was an inductive process where we learned what something was from a bottom up process, instead of a top down process of putting them in a model or label. Induction and reflex seem to work best with little thought applied. Since most of our desires and motives are unconscious in our interactions, the less we try to think about them, and the more we try to just do what feels good, seems to bring about results in our favor. However, just doing what feels good only works most of the time. There is one element of reductionism that needs to be accounted for, and that is the reductionism of the self. If we think too hard about our interactions we will drive ourselves insane. On the other hand we cannot escape the ability to dream about what others can be in our lives due to the fact we naturally seek to make them fit labels. The most we can do is make the expectations of the labels lower upon the urge to rationalize them. When we see the person that looks like a good boyfriend or girlfriend, we need to stop and think, maybe they will never be that, and the best we can hope for is a friend. If we remind ourselves that friends is the best it may be, we can stop trying to impress the way we would a potential mate. This is looking for a solution on the outside, by changing the values of the facts around us to something of a slightly lower expectation. The second part of the equation is to use reductive logic on our inner desires. If there is a desire behind another desire, then going purely on what feels good is a utilitarian pleasure and pain approach that can be flawed in some cases when new environments do not fit old habits and we hit the wrong nails. The only way to know thyself, is to trace back a desire in our mind through dialect with others who will see it for what it is beneath the surface. We need to talk to friends and ask, what is the real reason I sought out this interaction, and how is seeking out this desire valuable? What will be valuable in the long term? Once we trace back our surface desires to our true desires, we then readjust our values to ones that we think will benefit us the most. The mistake a lot of people make is they lie to themselves about their true desires and use the surface motives to make decisions that are not in their interest long term. It is the constant process of making sure the outer label is realistic and the inner desire is compatible with it that will lead us to desires we favor most often. Pleasure and pain reflexes are not enough when we do not understand the source of our pleasure and pain. It is only by knowing ourselves we can see our true pain and attack it. If we attack our insecurities and fears, we will gain more power over the desired meanings we want from life, which will lead to the true desired actions, and self-actualization.

One more point to add is how to keep people from taking advantage of our desires and asserting that we will get the desires we want. We have to acknowledge that people are selfish, and it is this selfishness we let take advantage of us sometimes when we do not use it properly to our advantage. What we are taught in many cases is to treat others, as we would like to be treated, but the only purpose of doing this is so others do not do bad things to us. What we really want are people to do the things we want. If we do this through force, we usually just make them resent us, but if we can do this through persuasion, it is in our favor. To put it another way, we should never help anyone unless they are giving us what we want back right away. If the situation exists where they could possibly not give us what we want at the same time we are helping them, then we should not compromise. The action of helping others now for a favor later should only be reserved for people who have earned our trust over time, and have proven they will return a favor later after many trades on the spot have passed. Helping people out for no favor but the favor of feeling good is not in our interest. This only makes us feel good a short time and makes them complacent as well as take us for granted. Getting people to help us in a way that will not help them in the long run will only cause resentment from them and sometimes revenge. The proper way to help people is to first make sure we are getting helped, and second find ways to make it so they get helped in the process too. This allows everyone to benefit, and most important of all, it keeps us from getting screwed. This is self actualized selfishness, because anyone who acts to only benefit themselves cannot get very far in rewards, the same as one person building house will not have as big a house as five people using each other for a better end. Acting in this way keeps us in control of our desires. The greatest mistake most people make is doing acts for others in hopes of later reparations, and this happens most often because we impose a label we think they will fill if we give them what they want now, instead of making sure we get what we want now. Building a dream is like building a house. If we dream a little closer to us, and do not have our head in the clouds, we are more likely to achieve a dream pragmatically, and slower build another small one on top of it. We can keep readjusting our aim with each shot we take without firing into the clouds and come out knowing how we end up where we did. If we understand how we did something intentionally, we can do it again and keep doing it better, compared to firing in the clouds on accident and never getting it right again if ever.

Overcoming fear and the route to self-progression.

Pragmatism and superstition play a key role in self-progression. We tend to generalize our experiences onto the world around us in the form of projections. When we have experienced the success or failure of particular actions in life, based on what has worked and has not worked, we project this into our superstitions of what will work in the future. To be completely pragmatic would be to go through the actions we know work without questioning them, but never questioning the actions beyond knowing they work will likely not lead to better actions or improvements of actions. If we do not know why something works, we will never get to the root of experience. To be completely superstitious would be to base the future on things other than primary physical experiences, only on secondary experiences, or those further removed than secondary experience. To be this superstitious is to base reality on what friends tell us about the world from their own experience (secondarily removed from primary experience) or what someone tells us they heard about someone else (more than twice removed from primary experience). The overly pragmatic person is a slave to the grind. The overly superstitious are lazy and talk about their dreams with little action.

Going back to experience of the particular in the first paragraph, the point to be made is if we base the most likely future on our experience alone, we are being too pragmatic, and if we base what is possible on secondary experience or more alone, we are being too superstitious. We need a combination of our own experiences and secondary experiences. The problem with some is they claim that their way works so they should never try anything other than what they know works. The problem with others is they speak of what works based on what they hear, but they have nothing to show for it in their own life. The solution is obviously, to try as many things as possible, but always question the motivation behind the action, and ask others their motivations behind the same or opposite action; especially the opposite action, because the opposition of our actions being brought into question will either strengthen our motive, or it will cause us to take on new and better motives. This would of course be a form of virtue ethics that we come to an understanding of through dialectic with others, but not dialectic in speech alone, but also with application afterward.

The true root of action is motivation and desire. The problem many of us run into is we do not understand our true motivations and may be in denial of our desires. Many religions preach a message of denying or desire because it is bad. This only causes us to compensate for desire with a lower grade desire. All motivations are driven by desires. If we can be honest with ourselves about our true desires, we will not have to compensate for them. Another reason people may compensate for a desire is because, to accept we cannot have a particular desire is painful, so we tend to lie to ourselves about what that desire is to us in our lives, and compensate for it as well by performing actions around the desire instead of engaging the issue we have with it.

Nobody can have a holistic understanding of reality. We all have fragments of it based on primary and secondary experience or more. What we have not experienced in the primary, we fill in with information from the secondary about the world. Once we have experienced something, we tend to claim we know better than the secondary, but how do we know our experience was the best way to experience, or if it was a bad experience, how do we know it cannot be better? We do not know unless we can be superstitious enough to question if another action is possible, and it is an action we can actually attempt in the future.

The only way to overcome a particular experience is to stop living in insecurity and fear. Nobody is insecure or fearful as a whole. We are insecure and fearful about particular experiences we have had. For example, we may be fearful of marriage, because we always had bad relationships, and everyone we know has been divorced. This is pure pragmatism, and any superstition is filled in with the emotional bias of cognitive dissonance. We want to believe that the thing we would really like (marriage) is a bad thing or thing that does not work, because we fear being hurt again, and we look at any other secondary experiences we can use to support our fear. This is an example of lying to ourselves about our desire, which changes our surface motive, but not the true latent motive. Motives and desires are tied together. What happens instead is we deny our true motive to ourselves, and then replace it with a lower grade desire of being alone, and we preach the greatness of independence and the fallacy of marriage. It is the particular fear that causes insecurity and the ability to lie to ourselves, and this creates discomfort, depression, and anxiety, because we are changing our lives to be something other than we would like it to be by changing the meaning of what is desired.

The only way to overcome fear and insecurity is to first know thyself. Some people will preach the understanding of others, or your enemy, but we really do not need to understand others beyond what they state their desires are. If we know ourselves, we will be willing to admit our true desires to ourselves, and from there decide what actions need to be taken in order to be happier. It is not till we deconstruct the meaning of a desire to its simplest component that we can build the framework to best achieve that motive. Once we know ourselves when it comes to a particular desire, we can stop living in insecurity and fear. Building off the last example we can say, yes I have been hurt a lot by people, and I deny wanting to marry, because I fear getting hurt, so I convince myself marriage is bad, because I believe people will only hurt me. With understanding of the self, we need enough superstition to think of people who do have good marriages, and then pragmatically seek out people who are successful in marriage and ask what they do to make it work well. To understand a desire is to understand the meaning of that desire. If we understand the true meaning we desire in an action, we can stand by the meaning of how we would like the world to work in a particular situation. When confronted with a situation of a boy or girl that does not exist in our lives the way we want them to, we cannot give up our meaning of how we would like them, and surrender it to their meaning, or they have power over our actions. We need to put our foot down where we desire and tell them, you will be these things in my life, or you will not exist in my life, because this puts us in the position of power. It gives us power because we are not giving up wanting more than they do from us, and are now offering them more than they want or nothing. Nothing is less than the less they wanted to give us, and as long as we stand by our meaning people cannot take advantage of us, because it is they who want less that have power in an interaction, but the underdog can take power back if they find the will to declare putting them at a lesser desire than something not good enough.

Desire is inescapable, but desire can be put in the right place to satisfy us. If desire is put where long-term rewards are believed to be instead of short-term rewards, it means we need to put work into them, and hard work will pay off for long-term benefits where they will not for short-term happiness. It is pushing the rock up the hill over and over that brings satisfaction, and not quick rewards followed by stagnation. It is overcoming the fear of pushing the real rock and not the pseudo rock to compensate for the real rock that gives us the life we really want. We cannot overcome the fear of a particular till we blame ourselves for all the things that go wrong in our actions. Someone might argue that they did not know any better when they made a decision. None of us act against our interest on purpose when we make a decision, but if we deny ourselves the blame we will never correct ourselves if similar situations come up in the future. This is knowing thyself. If we always blame others for the situations we found ourselves in we did not like, we will continue to find ourselves in those situations. It is not, they took advantage of me, but I let them take advantage of me, and understanding how we can correct the action of others doing the same to us in the future is the only way to get past fear of a similar event in the particular past. Once we confront desire and motivation, we can put our foot down by action and meaning without fear, and what does not meet our expectations is not for us, and we need to move on till only the things that fit in the frame of our desire are present without lying to ourselves. Overcoming insecurity and fear is the only route to self-progression. If we cannot overcome these, it is because we live too pragmatic or superstitious, and without dialogue to share with others we can put into practice in, we will never gain the consciousness of our own actions the same.