There are two meanings to the term “honor” as used in modern society.

One is the summation of all the traditionally male virtues. A man (or woman) of honor holds true to a very strict code of conduct that accepts no excuses. They do the right thing in every situation no matter what and accept whatever consequences fate chooses to deal out rather than violate that code.

A person of honor is courageous. They step up to the plate every single time duty calls. They define courage as the ability to do what is right no matter how you feel, and it is a definition they live out every single day of their lives.

A person of honor is honest. They mean what they say and live what they believe. Their word is sacred to them and they will not break it except in the direst of circumstances. And even then, they will regret it, and seek to make amends.

A person of honor is courteous. An honorable person strives never to hurt another unintentionally. They are polite and considerate in all public discourse, and are meticulous in their dealings with others.

A person of honor is noble. They do not allow petty personal concerns keep them from doing what is right. The greatest good is always on their minds, and part of the strictness of their code of conduct is the upright and forthright way they keep their heads above the fray, always striving to uphold the highest of ideals.

This version of honor is all about maintaining personal integrity. What motivates the honorable person is the desire to live their lives in a morally correct way. They know that there is nobody out there keeping score on what they do and do not, and they do not expect to be rewarded for their virtue.

It is the desire to be able to look oneself in the mirror and respect the person looking back at you that motivates the person of honor to live each day in as upright, noble, and honorable way as they possibly can.

Then, there is the other sense of the word honor, which is basically just an excuse for men to respond with violence when they get their feelings hurt.

I am serious about this. This is the mis-use of the word “honor” that used to lead to duels, and still does to this day, just in a far less official and regulated way. It is the perversion of the concept of honor that leads to the unthinkable madness of so-called “honor killings”, where a father will kill his own child just to keep the other men from making fun of him. It is the mutation of the word “honor” that leads to blood feuds, saber-rattling, and even war… just to keep men from getting their feelings hurt when they lose face in front of other men.

Think about it. Say a man is in a bar when some no-good sidewinder comes up to him and makes a string of highly vulgar speculations as to the breadth of our hero’s wife’s tastes in sexual partners, including various local lowlifes and the local wildlife and, of course, the sidewinder himself.

Now obviously, what our hero wants to do is attack. That’s basic caveman human nature. When someone makes us angry, we want to thump them with our club. Our hero wants to beat the sidewinder up for saying something that hurt the hero’s feelings, but he knows that civilized human beings are not actually supposed to do that. So he needs an excuse.

Enter the terrible miscasting of “honor”. The sidewinder has not actually injured anything but the hero’s feelings. It’s not like anyone is likely to take the sidewinder’s word on his wife’s broadly accessible virtues. Once you pull back the testosterone veil of pseudo-respectability from this farce of “honor”, you realize that all that is at stake is our hero’s feelings.

Under this bullshit idea of honor, a man has to beat up (or even kill) anyone who says something that hurts their feelings so that everybody will be too scared to hurt the man’s feelings in the future. This is honestly how men deal with their emotions, women and girls.

The problem is that, deep down, men want to fight. There is a drive deep within the male psyche to butt heads with other men and find (or challenge) our place in the hierarchy. We know we are not supposed to fight, and so we keep it in check or redirect it into other forms of competition. But it is always there.

The very flimsiness of this grotesque misuse of the idea of “honor” demonstrates how deep this desire goes. We will take nearly any excuse to drop civilization (symbolically enacted by taking off your jacket) and enter a primal world of brutality.

That is why action movies are structured as they are. It is all to support a male violence fantasy. The villains are a genuine threat to the safety of the innocent specifically because that makes the hero’s acts of violence justified. The girlfriend has to die or get captured so that the hero both has a personal reason to take down the bad guys and is free to do so, without any messy personal involvements holding them back. The enemies the hero fights have to get stronger as he goes, because the violence thrill has to get stronger to have the same effect.

The only righteous use of violence for any honorable person is to protect people. Anything else is just a paper thin justification for acting like any old caveman by using violence to resolve disputes instead of reason.

Remember this the next time some man (and it will be a man) said he was defending someone’s “honor”.

Bullshit. All they really did was try to beat someone up for making them angry. That is not civilized behaviour, and therefore it is the exact opposite of truly honorable behaviour.

And if anyone disagrees with me, I’ll beat the crap out of them.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Yup. I’m talking about whistleblowers again.

But more than just them. I am talking about all the ethical traitors out there. The people who, through the power of their convictions and the sense that something terribly wrong is going on and they are the only ones who can stop it, have the courage to sacrifice all they know in their day to day lives, break with their tribe or sub-tribe, and reveal the truth to the world.

It is not surprising that this is so rare, and the reasons are not merely practical. Sure, a lot of people have a pretty good idea of what would happen to them if they broke from their group and took the truth to the outside. And not a lot of people are willing to sacrifice that much when they can do nothing and have nothing bad happen to them personally.

But it runs deeper than that. For most human beings, their social group is their universe. Their workplace, their home life, maybe a few social commitments, their friends…. this is the whole world to them. Everything else is just a pale mural on a distant wall. To go outside that world is to go past the edge of infinity into the universal unknown.

This is, incidentally, one of the reasons why people stay in bad relationships when they could easily just walk away. Our personal universes are made of relationships. TO leave a relationship is to face the darkness.

And then there is the issue of loyalty. Make no mistake, loyalty is one of the most powerful social instincts we have. It is fundamental glue that holds all our tribes, big and small, together. There is always Us, and Them. And to do something that benefits Them and hurts Us is, for many people, literally unthinkable. Unthinkable like performing surgery on oneself.

That is why we can never truly accept these ethical traitors, no matter how much we applaud what they did and why they did it. We can support a whistleblower one hundred percent and still not want to associate with them. Because how can you trust someone who turned his or her back on everyone they knew?

Part of the problem is that loyalty is part of our primal ethics. It is one of the moral universals. There has never been and will never be a society that does not value loyalty and punish disloyalty. You will never find a people who consider it just fine for people to be out only for themselves and to turn traitor any time it suits them.

As one of our primal ethics, loyalty operates on a deeper level than the more abstract ethics that are usually what drives the ethical traitor to his or her act of disloyalty. The desire to protect a number of total strangers from a theoretical harm, as one would be revealing some bit of corporate corner cutting on safety, will never have enough gut-level appeal to completely overcome our revulsion at any act of betrayal, no matter how noble.

Even very intelligent people who are completely capable of grasping and agreeing with the whistleblower’s motives and actions might find their revulsion overcoming their reason, especially if they are in the group betrayed, or identify with it. A professor at one university might find his or herself trembling with rage at the news of another professor betraying his employers to reveal some dastardly goings-on, even if in the abstract they completely agree that not only was the individual act justified, but that indeed there needs to be more of that kind of thing.

And there truly does. The world needs whistleblowers. We need all the ethical traitors we can get. Evil requires darkness in which to operate and whistleblowers are the only ones in the position to yank the cloak of darkness away from acts of evil and expose them to the cleansing light of day.

But the demand for these brave people will always far outstrip the supply. The barriers against it are simply too high. Even the most famous one of the moment, Edward Snowden, was only a sub-contractor and thus not part of the group he betrayed. People still treat him as a disgusting and horrible traitor because he betrayed the amazingly large and potent in-group known as the military, but he did not, in fact, betray people he knew and worked with.

Becoming an ethical traitor is simply too wrenching and unnatural to most people. Human beings, as a group, will always be more loyal to their in-groups than their high ideals. Often, the only people willing to become ethical traitors are the people who never fit in with their group in the first place. And that creates an entirely different set of problems of the “bitter, disgruntled worker with an axe to grind” variety.

So how can we encourage more people to go out in the cold and reveal what desperately needs to be revealed? I think the most important thing is to immediately take them into the warmth of a new group : the group of noble whistleblowers.

And I mean that in more than just the abstract sense, like Abraham Lincoln is part of the group of American presidents. I mean this has to be a group that meets, socializes, and forms a common identity. We would find people far more willing to turn against their current group if there was another, possibly even more glamorous group to take them in.

That’s why I think that the only way to truly make this work is to have it backed by a few wealthy concerned citizens who are rich and powerful enough not to give a shit whose toes they step on and who can afford to create this special group and use their wealth and power to make it well known and high status.

Sure, you might get people wanting in for the wrong reasons, but that’s what background checks and private detectives are for.

So raise a glass to the ethical traitor, folks. Those few who do it face unbelievable hardship from those for whom disloyalty is the absolute worst crime imaginable.

I will talk to all of you nice people again tomorrow.

I have a few idea in my notes that aren’t quite big enough for a whole article, so I thought I would deal with them tonight.

The Emotional Roots of Heroism

People often wonder what makes a person into a hero. What causes a perfectly normal human being to spring into action when danger knocks on their door and do the sort of things that we normally only see in movies? What motivates these ordinary citizens?

And while what pulls the hero forward is things like courage and compassion, I think the wind that pushes them from the back is something a lot more like terror : the terror of being witness to a tragedy, and all the harm it would do to said witness.

Call it empathic horror. We know deep down that seeing something horrible happen to someone will be extremely damaging to us. That alone would be a large enough trauma to seem unthinkable. The sort of trauma that destroys people.

But then add in the possibility of feeling like you could have prevented it, and you can see how an ordinary (but caring) person would be willing to take all kinds of heroic risks in order to prevent their own psychological annihilation.

That’s why, in tales of real life heroism, the hero or heroine often replies to questions about the dangers they faced with something like “I wasn’t thinking about that. ” The real danger, in their minds, was failure. If they failed to save the person or people, that would have been a trauma so large that it might as well have been death.

Note that this is an inherently empathic operation. Not only does the fear of empathic death drive the hero, but it is the hero’s empathic nature that makes them feel “involved” in the situation and act as though he was saving someone they knew and loved, even though they are actually saving total strangers.

When danger threatens one of us, we are all of the same tribe.

The Nature Of Faith

Faith is, at its heart, chosen belief. It is belief chosen completely independent of evidence or reason. Its origin is in emotional need, not careful examination of the evidence. It is born of unmet human needs and takes the form of whatever will fulfill those needs. Like a child’s imaginary friend (the prototype of all faith), the chosen belief(s) will fill the gaps in the human soul, and when something does that for a person, they become ferociously attached to it even if the outside world does not agree. They will defend this belief till their dying breath because said belief fixed them when they were broken and, in the case of religious faith, filled a whole host of emotional needs all at once.

There is no point in trying to argue with someone whose chosen beliefs have become such a fundamental part of their psyche that they could not function without it. These people know what it was like before the faith came to restore them, and they will never, ever go back to that state. You might as well be trying to talk them out of their arms and legs.

To clarify, this is true of all forms of faith, most of which are not, in fact, religious. Most people have their own set of things they will keep believing till the day they die because these things have become part of them. It might be belief in a person, a news channel, a political movement, a religious practice, or even a television show.

But we are born to believe.

Hence the resistance to science. Science does not concern itself with the emotional need for belief. It finds the objective truth, without concern with people’s subjective realities. Hence, to some, it seems cold, and even cruel. And by extension, those who practice it and promote it are cold and cruel as well.

It’s easy for us rational science types to say “Well then, don’t emotionally invest in things that can be disproven”, but are we so sure of our own innocence in that matter that we are willing to throw that stone?

The Value of Diversity

Modern democratic societies have, as one of their strongest cultural values, the treasuring of diversity. From cradle to grave, society tells us how important it is to embrace diversity and eschew divisiveness, bigotry, and intolerance.

And most people have a basic, gut-level understanding of why this is a good thing. You mind your business, and I will mind mine. My freedom to be who I want to be requires others to show tolerance to me, and in return, I show tolerance to them. We all benefit from a diversity rich system that practices tolerance and respect for all.

But this sometimes seems to fly in the face of our judgment. Surely we can’t tolerate everything. Some things are just plain wrong, and should be stopped and/or punished. Right?

This arises because we have lost sight of the roots of diversity, which lay deep in the foundations of the humanism that founded all of our great democracies. At the heart of this humanism is the understanding that, as diverse as the human race is, below the surface we have far, far more in common with one another than we have in difference.

This is the counter-argument to the seeming anarchy of total tolerance. We embrace all the wonderful ways in which people are different from one another because we know that, deep down, we are all the same, and all those differences are merely ripples on the surface of a very deep pond.

It is also wise to understand that a tolerant society does not judge the contents of someone’s skull. In a tolerant society, what is between your ears is your own business. That is the ultimate privacy and it is vitally important.

Only your actions are judged. So yes, it’s fine to be a criminal, or evil, or a pervert, or even a racist, as long as you do not break the law.

That is hard for some to believe, paradoxically especially amongst the supposed “law and order” crowd. Human beings inherently want to judge one another’s characters, and the short-sighted think this judgement should, at least in some ways, be reflected by society and its laws.

But you are free to be whatever you want to be, and the law is and should be completely indifferent to your character, your beliefs, and your personality. Only actions matter.

And when we lose sight of that, we lose our grasp on democracy and freedom themselves.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Society today is riddled with destructive compulsions. There are just so many ways in which people feel helpless to stop doing something they do not want to do. Whether it’s overeating, yelling at your kids, mercilessly driving for success, or caving in to anyone with a loud voice, or even those darn Sudoku you don’t really enjoy but can’t seem to stop buying and doing, billions of people in the world today are living with the inanity of feeling compelled to do something they do not really want to do.

I would go as far as saying that through the lives of everyone reading these words runs at least one compulsive behaviour that they would love to do without. And so often, we are left asking ourselves “Why do I keep DOING that?”

In this article, I will tell you why. But first, we need to set the stage with some facts.

First amongst these facts is the fact that human beings, like all other animals, need pleasure. They need reward. This is far from being a weakness. It is, in fact, the engine that fuels all behaviours. Nature equips us with this drive for pleasure and reward because that is what drives any animal to follow their other drives. Mating feels good. Eating feels good. Defecation and urination feel good. It is this desire for pleasure that makes us go seek all the pleasurable sensations we know of, and to seek ones we do not.

But what happens when a complex animal like our complicated selves doesn’t get enough pleasure? The answer should come as no surprise to anyone but bears underlining : our biological urges override our conscious mind and drive us to seek enough pleasure to restore balance by the most efficient means available regardless of any long-term considerations.

That is why you feel helpless against these compulsions. In a very real sense, you are. The conscious you, the sentient you, is having its control usurped by a more ancient animal part of the mind, and seeing as as modern thinking humans we invariably identify with our full robust conscious selves, it feels like we are enslaved to an alien force against which we are helpless.

But we are not helpless. Once we realize that this short-sighted animal force can override our conscious will only when we let it get hungry enough, we know that is truly we who are in control, and it is up to us to make sure that beast never gets hungry enough to rebel.

Whatever your compulsion is, it is serving a purpose in this emotional ecology. Maybe it’s a simple, reliable pleasure that is easy to get whenever you are feeling low ^[1] and so it is what your starving beast goes for when it is in charge. Maybe it is how you release emotional pressures that you otherwise, for whatever reason, are unable to release. Maybe it is the way you avoid facing something it feels like you would die if you faced it.

Whatever role it plays, you will not succeed in ceasing the behaviour unless you learn what need the behaviour fills and find another, less destructive way to fill that need. Merely stopping the behaviour is worse than useless. You are just setting yourself up for the beast to get hungry enough to take over. Unless you replace the now missing pleasure, the compulsion will continue and will in fact grow stronger each time you try to fight it by sheer force of will and lose.

Why? Because force of will is always in very short supply in any human’s mind. It is a very limited resource meant only to be used in dire emergencies when it is vitally important that the conscious mind be able to override the beast for short periods of time, in matters of life or death or similar importance.

It is not, I repeat, not a long term solution for anything. If someone is able to rid themselves of a destructive compulsion, it is not because they have more “willpower” than those who do not.

It simply means that they had enough other sources of pleasure in their lives that it was not that big a deal to shift the pleasure burden on to other things for long enough for the compulsion to essentially starve. Your beast mind eventually gives up on the compulsion as a way to solve the pleasure equation, and moves on to something else.

That is the only way to kill your compulsion : starve it to death. That is why it tries to convince you that if you do not satiate it soon you will die. That’s not true, of course, but the compulsion will use any and all tricks to stay alive and in control, and that includes lying to manipulate your emotions.

I think this principle of replacement is what is missing from most of the approaches people take to all the various compulsions. It is the easiest thing in the world to tell someone who keeps doing something to just stop doing it. And it is good for the ego to imagine that people with compulsions are just weaklings lacking willpower, unlike you. And that is where a lot of approaches stop as well, no matter how sophisticated they seem on the surface.

But, depending how you look at it, willpower either does not exist or does exist but does not come out of nowhere as some permanent aspect of character, but is a fluctuating and transient thing that depends on many factors to feed it and the people who have it are simply the people who happen to have a healthy emotional ecology right now.

I am not saying replacement is easy. If your compulsion is advanced, it will be very tricky to convince your beast that anything else can every replace the compulsion it serves like an acolyte of a dark religion.

But given this new approach, you are better armed to go find new, wonderful pleasures, and let the old compulsion(s) rot on the vine and die.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

The question before us is this : what, exactly, is the sexuality of a child? What does the prepubescent sexuality look like? How much of what we think of as adult sexuality is in fact present our entire lives? What does puberty add?

First, let’s deal with the physical equipment. There can be no doubt that children are born with fully functional sexual organs. All the requisite plumbing, glands, and nerve endings are present and children are capable of sexual pleasure from the day they are born. Indeed, in vitro imaging has revealed that some babies beg to masturbate even in the womb.

This should come as no surprise to most people. Very few of us have absolutely no sexual responses before puberty. They might be transitory and the child may not be able to understand them or fit them into a context, but erection and vaginal lubrication both happen well before puberty kicks in.

And then there is masturbation. Data on childhood masturbation is understandably scarce, but what is known clearly shows that, while not necessarily leading to orgasm, most children indulge in some form of solitary sexual exploration on their own. Such a rich source of sensation and mystery will not go unexplored. This may or may not lead to actual masturbation, in other words activity specifically in search of pleasant sensations, and that in turn might lead to orgasm, but rarely does.

The one exception is children who have become sexually precocious due to sexual abuse.

There is also childhood sexual play. Children are naturally curious about what is going on down there, both on themselves and others. The extraordinary amount of sensations that come from our sexual regions are alone enough reason to be fascinated, as well as their intimate relationship with our eliminatory functions.

Add in the very peculiar way adults behave around the topic, the utter mysteriousness of what they see of sexuality as it is hinted at on television or online, and the very clear message that this is something that is Not To Be Talked About (and therefore very exciting to find out about), and the stage is set for “I’ll show you mine if you show me yours”.

So clearly there is something there before puberty. We are not born unsexed, a sexual tabula rasa until day 1 of puberty. There is something very like sexuality before puberty. But is it a true sexuality?

I have given this some thought, and my answer is a qualified no. While the equipment is intact and the interest is there and the desire for pleasure, the one missing ingredient that only adolescence can bring is lust.

Without the hormonal changes of puberty, there is no sex drive, no desire for a mate, no falling in love, no driving force that pulls people together. The sexual nature of a child is a mere intellectual interest compared to the emotional firestorm that puberty triggers and that stays with us, dimming over time but never going out. The machinery is all there, but there is no energy source to make it all go.

It is a qualified no, however, because case history after case history has shown that while the child might not have a sexuality per se, the sex-related things that happen in our childhood can lie dormant until puberty and then suddenly become integrated into the newly formed sexuality.

It could be something as simple as a sense-memory of some very pleasant sensations created by a particular piece of clothing, or something as complex as a deep and crippling paraphilia that renders the individual incapable of enjoying sexual intimacy because they have so strongly sexually fixated on something outside the realm of the more usual sexual relations.

Sexual imprinting in human beings is not well understood, and obviously a little tricky to study directly.

So now that we have a rough picture of childhood sexuality, what do we do with it?

My main purpose in creating this accurate and unfiltered picture of childhood sexuality was to use it as a starting point for fighting against the sexual repression of children that has sneaked back into the culture after the Sexual Revolution under the auspices of the fight against child sexual abuse.

As I said in the article preceding this one, most of the progress made during the Sexual Revolution had been retained. We don’t freak out about masturbation or sex play any more. We don’t pretend children are somehow sexless innocents. Most parenting manuals have the same sex-positive advice about not traumatizing your poor child when you find them doing perfectly natural things. Parents know that all children do the same things, and so their children are not abnormal for doing them. They also know that, at some point, they will have to navigate one of our strongest taboos when they have The Talk about where babies come from.

But now we teach them that their sexual potential makes them the target of predators, and that is not good either. It is yet another way of teaching children to fear and repress their own sexuality, and we think we are doing it for their own good, but it is just the same old taboo coming back again.

Because the child/sex taboo is so strong, we don’t want to deal with our children’s sexuality at all. The subject makes us incredibly uncomfortable even from several steps removed, and the rampant fear/hate of pedophiles and the resultant climate of suspicion and paranoia it brings, has only made this issue exponentially worse.

So it is very easy for parents to give in to the temptation to simply suppress the subject wholly. Shut down all discussion of the subject, make it very clear that it is Not To Be Talked About, and the problem seemingly goes away.

But that’s your problem…. not your child’s. If you truly love your child and are willing to sacrifice your own wellbeing for theirs, what gets suppressed will be your issues and you will deal openly and honestly with your children about the subject, answering all their questions as best as you can, and keep your issues to yourself.

That is the only way these pointless taboos will be destroyed.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

We intellectuals are a strange breed, and one of our foremost peculiarities is a tendency for neurotic self-doubt. Our restlessly inquisitive minds lead us to vistas unknown and give us wizard-like powers in the mental realm, but the other edge on that blade is that it leads us to doubt things that nobody else would even think of doubting.

One of those is whether or not we really are smart. The lack of relationship between intelligence and effectiveness in the world often leads us to question how smart we can be when we seem to have the damnedest time actually getting anything done, and the commonest solution to this conflict is to doubt whether we really are all that bright after all.

Smart is as smart does, after all.

In order to aid my fellow eggheads in their efforts to solve this problem by providing a more satisfactory way to measure one’s fitness for membership in the worldwide league of intellectuals, below you will find a list of some of the common characteristics I have observed while traveling in above-average IQ circles, and if you truly are one of us, I hope that you will find them comforting and reassuring.

As long as the following apply to you, you are an intellectual.

1. Intellectuals have a great deal of mental energy

Of all the common traits of intellectuals, the most defining is their abundance of mental energy. This surplus of mental energy is at the core of what it means to be an intellectual, and drives the rest of the characteristics that we will be discussing today. Deep inside the psyche of every intellectual, it is as if a switch had been thrown that diverts the lion’s share of bodily energies to the mental as opposed to the physical processes of the human body. This inherent prioritization automatically leads to a great deal of mental energy being produced, and whether it is expresses as a manic mental running and leaping about, or something more like a vast and stately mansion of the mind, it is this abundance that underlies it all.

This leads directly to our next observation :

2. Intellectuals are easily bored.

The vast surplus of mental energy with which an intellectual must deal on a day to day basis leads them to have an enormous appetite for mental stimulation, and when, as often is the case, this need is unmet, the result is often boredom. This boredom is particularly difficult to endure for the younger intellectuals, as they are both filled with youthful energy and as yet have not found their particular ways of satisfying their mental needs.

This mental restlessness leads to our next point :

3. Intellectuals are very curious.

Curiosity is, in a sense, the opposite of boredom. It causes intellectuals to explore, whether in their physical environment or the world of the mind. Curiosity takes passive boredom and turns it into an active search for that all important mental stimulation that absorbs that overflowing mental energy and keeps it from spilling over into boredom.

This curiosity leads to things like this :

4. Intellectuals love to learn for its own sake.

Learning new things is inherently pleasurable to intellectuals, and therefore requires no other goal or end. The subject matter has to be of interest to the intellectual, but otherwise the simple act of adding to their sum of knowledge about the subject and about the world is very enjoyable to an intellectual.

Similar to that :

5. Intellectuals love to think about things.

Processing all that learned information in order to integrate it into a larger picture of the subject or even the world is another thing that intellectuals enjoy. Their mental muscle allows them to process information on a deeper level, and this process itself leads to a specific kind of new knowledge, derived knowledge, so in effect it also provides the aforementioned pleasure of learning as well.

It is hardly surprising, then, that :

6. Intellectuals love to apply their minds

The richest and most rewarding form of mental stimulation for intellectuals is to apply their mental muscle to a problem, whether that is a head researcher trying to cure cancer or a high school teacher relaxing with a crossword puzzle. Puzzles and games are quite popular with intellectuals precisely because they can absorb all that thinking energy and give the intellectual something to keep the wild horses of their intellectual minds fully occupied, leaving the rest of their consciousness time to rest.

Intellectuals are as human as anyone else, though, and they don’t operate in a social vacuum, so :

7. Intellectuals like to show off and be praised for their mental abilities.

Even the most bookish and mild-mannered intellectual still seeks a spotlight under which they can shine. Nearly every intellectual got praised for their intellect for at least part of their school life, and that leaves a strong impression on intellectuals during some highly formative years. So whether or not they are conscious of it, all intellectuals crave that experience of being valued and rewarded purely for showing of how bright they were again.

And finally, as we are dealing with social issues :

8. Intellectuals, as a group, tend to have a lower than average social IQ

The thing about intellectuals is that whatever their specialty, their talents, or their interests, all of their abilities come from a core set of extremely powerful abstract reasoning tools. Complex recall, pattern recognition, anomaly detection, symbolic logic, and so forth all allow for an amazing ability to do a wide variety of things.

But they are all based on the same circuit of the brain, the cold and calculating one. And there is another circuit, the warm empathetic one, and that is the one all social skills are derived from.

So by strongly emphasizing the calculation circuit, an intellectual diverts resources from the social circuit, and this makes it hard for them to understand the nuances of social reality.

I hope this little guide has given you some kind of understanding of all that you share in common with your fellow intellectuals, and given you some peace of mind about your place among them.

I will talk to all you nice people later.

Today, I am going to teach you all how to be magic. That is, how to seem like a wizard to those around you, with otherworldly abilities beyond the comprehension of the merely mortal.

But this has nothing to do with marked cards, sleight of hand, and doing uncomfortable things to doves in hats. Nor, as you might have guessed due to my strict materialism, does it involve eldritch incantations, magical formulae, bizarre alchemies, or dead people talking to dipshits on television.

Indeed, all that is needed for this technique is a certain amount of native wit (sorry, this isn’t Magic for Dummies) and a deep understanding of the subtler implications of Clarke’s Law.

Clarke’s Law, that is to say Arthur C. Clarke’s Law, is this :

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Seems obvious enough, once stated. It takes little imagination to imagine that our level of technology would seem like astounding wizardry to someone from the Middle Ages, just like the technology of some vastly advanced alien race might well seem like something out of Harry Potter to us.

But the law is actually far deeper than that. It need not be limited to being measured solely from the point of view of entire civilizations and from a fixed point in time, generally the present.

It is a fully relative measure, and works just as well between individuals as it does between civilizations. It is, in fact, an ample definition of the entire subjective experience of “magic” in human beings.

In fact, the law might be better restated as this :

All knowledge and technology is magic to those who do not understand it.

From this we can see that everyone has it within them to be magical to somebody.

Take our pets. To them, all humans above the age of three years old are wizards. They have no idea how we do most of what we do, or what any of it all means.

They don’t know how we produce food for them. They don’t understand what we are doing when we watch TV or vacuum the rug. And they certainly have no idea why we take them to the vet.

To them, it must seem like pure sadism.

So to our animals, we are all magical. Their world is one in which they are cared for by slow-moving giant wizards who do many things beyond their comprehension and who for some reason have decided that they want a pet around.

Taken from that point of view, it’s a wonder they ever trust us at all.

From our pets we go to our children. To children, all adults are wizards. Adults understand and know about things that the child is not merely ignorant of, but cannot understand how it is even knowable.

This is a vital clue as to the true nature of seeming magical. It is not enough to have knowledge others don’t. That might make you look smart, but it won’t make you seem magical. They understand fully well how you might know what you know.

From children, we then move on to adults, which you might think is where this particular bus would stop. After all, as adults we all understand how the world works, more or less, and within modern society we are all at roughly the same technology level, so there can be no wizards. Right?

Wrong. First, there is specialization. We passed the point where one person could know everything shortly after Gutenberg, and so nearly everyone has areas of specialized knowledge and understanding that can make them seem at least a little magical under the right circumstances.

This is especially true in any of the applied knowledge trades. Whether your specialty is medicine, carpentry, or air conditioning repair, there are times when you can be the wizard who is the only one who can fix the problems of people who would be helpless without you.

But there is another, more sensitive realm in which Clarke’s Law separates individuals into wizards and muggles, and that’s intelligence.

Just as sentience is a qualitative as well as quantitative degree above mere consciousness, there is a level of intelligence above which, to people of average intelligence, one appears to be able to do things they cannot imagine how anyone can do it.

This leads to those gifted with a high degree of intelligence to be viewed with both awe and suspicion by those of normal intelligence. It is as though we are aliens walking amongst them, which is why we often feel like one.

I have actually had someone say to me, “You can’t know that. Nobody is that smart.”

What can you say to that except “Nobody but me, I guess… ”

So as you can see, all you need in order to seem like a magician is to be a certain degree smarter than those around you. Then, as a child seems magical to a pet and an adult seems magical to a child, you will seem at least somewhat magical to the people around you.

One last observation on magic. Because no one of us can possibly understand how absolutely everything works, the modern human lives in a semi-magical world. We are constantly interacting with technologies whose functions we simply accept without wanting or needing to know how they really work.

It is only semi-magical, because we all understand that the knowledge of how these things work is out there if we cared to learn it and that there are competent wizards who understand it all so we don’t have to.

But it’s still magical because, in a very real sense, it operates on faith, subjectively speaking. You turn the key in the ignition of your car and have faith that it will start up, and when it doesn’t, you have to take it to a wizard who is versed in the magic of auto repair to fix it.

So if faith can be defined as “belief in things unseen and unknown”, then most of us operate on faith when we trust any technology at all that we could not fix ourselves if it broke down.

We live in an era of magic and wonder, and the fact that these wonders are normal and commonplace does not make them any less magical to most of us.

We have just forgotten how to see it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Mysticism mystifies me.

Having been raised without religion, I have no direct experience of it. I have no faith, in the classical sense of the world. I have beliefs based on chains of reasoning I find satisfactory. Faith is another matter.

And being a sensible rational pragmatist, that is all I have.

Oh, I am not claiming to be free of irrationality. You would have to be a lunatic to think that. I am as much a grunting naked beach ape as everyone else.

I know for a fact, in fact, that I believe certain things by choice, not because I have reasoned them out to be concurrent with the facts. Even the most logical of people will find that the roots of their beliefs are not rational.

For instance, the belief that what happens to humans matters.

But when I speak of mysticism, I am speaking of an entirely different mode of thinking. One that looks for answers inside the world of emotion, rating connections not by logical rigor but by emotional continuity, and which is perfectly willing to abandon rationality in order to find answers that satisfy a need within the seeker, a personal truth, inaccessible by rational means.

That’s all well and good, of course. Self-reflection is good for everyone, and whatever helps us solve the puzzle of ourselves and free us from the burdens of the past is fine by me. Psychotherapy would be impossible by strictly rational means.

The problem comes, as I see it, when these personal truths are mistaken for discoveries about the universe or life in general.

This is not done with malice. People are naturally eager to share the revelations that have healed them. And the ability to separate these mystic truths from the sort of truths that lead to a greater understanding of the universe under those circumstances is a very high level brain function indeed.

This is also what leads to the ages old struggle about whether or not a given religion is “true” or not. If a religion has brought great things to a person and answered their questions in a way that makes sense to them and makes them feel better about the world, then its truth is indisputable.

But this is not the sort of truth one can share. It is a personal truth, a key that was especially made for locks within your individual soul, and so while it is extremely true to you the believer, it is not applicable to anyone else’s locks.

Perhaps we all would be better off if religious believers learned to say “it’s true to me” when questioned. But people insist their religions must be literally, objectively true, and that is a recipe for failure.

From the point of view of a rationalist pragmatic utilitarian like myself, this all seems like madness. I have always held to the belief that the only route to truth s the rational examination and evaluation of evidence. Looking for objective truth by subjective and individual self-examination seems to me like trying to stay dry by going for a swim.

And yet that is exactly how truth was sought throughout the ages. Whether by prayer, meditation, psychedelics, fasting, or any other way to achieve a mystical state, people have delved into their own psyches in a dream-like state, and then emerged from the mystic state thinking they have learned something about the world.

I don’t quite buy it.

But I am far more open-minded about it than I used to be. It has occurred to me that, despite mysticism being useless (or worse) for finding objective truth, it can be damned effective at reaching the kind of personal truth that comes from the resolution of unresolved emotions that have accumulated in the psyche.

Taking a journey into one’s own mind in a dream-like (but more conscious) state in search of answers to one’s questions about oneself seems like it could be a very good idea to me, if done properly.

The mystic state owes much of its power in its ability to suspend rationality long enough for your unresolved issues to resolve themselves without the constant interference of our meddlesome minds.

This requires what is commonly known as “visions” precisely because this dream-like but conscious state needs to create a very vivid and hyper-real experience in order to resolve what might be decades of repression in a relatively short period of time. The only release for repressed emotion is through your conscious mind. You must finish feeling them in order to let them go.

So I ask myself, is it possible to partake of mysticism without abandoning rationality? Are the two compatible? Would be dogged pragmatism and demanding intellect bar me from reaping the benefits of this mystic state, however it is that you achieve it?

I think not, at least in my case, because while I am a rationalist, I am also quite comfortable dealing with intuition. I would not be very creative without it. Things pop into my mind all the time. They are then evaluated by the rational mind, but if what is in question is a creative issue, the rational mind only conducts the interview. It is my artistic intuition that makes the decisions.

So it is possible, at least for the likes of me, to rationally enter the mystic state. We simply do it knowing that we are not discovering anything about the world outside our own minds, but rather the truths of our own souls.

This kind of secular mysticism seems like a fairly slender and marginal thing to me. I have no idea whether it would even work for anyone else. Perhaps this entire exercise is my attempt to convince others that my keys will work in their locks.

But it is also possible that secular mysticism, as bare and weak as it seems now, could be the seed of a new kind of religious consciousness that, because it is grounded firmly in the knowledge of what is matter and what is mind, can unlock much of the pain that modern society simply cannot address.

I pray that the latter turns out to be true.

And I will write for you nice people again tomorrow.

I belong to a very special, very small category of people : being unable to work, I am dependent on the province of British Columbia, where I live, to support me.

From the point of view of someone ground down by the workaday world, my life might seem like paradise. I have no job to go to, no mortgage to worry about, no boss, no drudgery, no hierarchic humiliations, and no commute.

It is easy, for those for whom each leisure moment is a jealously guarded gem, to imagine that there could be nothing better than an unlimited supply.

But I am here to tell you that, from my experience, there is no such thing as unlimited leisure. I am not living a life of unhindered bliss. And that has very little to do with the fact that I live on around $950/month.

It has to do with endless days to fill. It has to do with have no center, no structure in your life. It has to do with a feeling of utter worthlessness because you feel like you are nothing but a burden on society no matter how badly you wish you could contribute.

Because one of the hidden truths of our narrowly hedonistic modern lives is that people need to work. Specifically, they need to contribute their labour to the society in which they live in a meaningful way that is recognized by proximate authority and valued by the people they work with and, in a subtler but more profound way, by society itself.

And this applies equally to disabled people like me, the transitionally unemployed on unemployment insurance, people on welfare, and people living in areas with extremely high rates of unemployment.

So what becomes of us who are, for whatever reason, destined to live our lives outside the world of work? What happens to people when society does not need them? What does the world look like from that far down on society’s totem pole?

In short, not very good. To be unable to work is to be unable to enter adulthood, and traps people in a kind of bitter juvenile state where they know damned well what society thinks of the dependent poor and yet they are powerless to escape this life at the bottom of society’s valuation.

This is particularly acute in the case of high unemployment. To have generations of young people grow up with no realistic hope of a job does terrible things to them. They end up in a stage of ingrown adolescence, unable to truly grow up and yet feeling the pain of their purposeless existences every moment of every day.

That is why, where there is high unemployment, you also find high levels of alcoholism, child abuse, domestic abuse, drug abuse, teen pregnancy, and all the other ills that plague this forgotten strata of society.

These people are desperately trying to fill the endless pointless days with a kind of low-level decadent lifestyle of parties, sex, booze, drugs, anything that fills up their time and lends some sense of direction and purpose to their lives.

And the true tragedy is that they don’t know why they have to party and drink and fuck all the time. They have no name for the pain they are in, no way to address what is wrong with their situation. Society, with unintentional cruelty, tells them that their lives are great and nothing in their environment or their education gives them a clue as to why they are in such pain and what they could possibly do about it if they knew.

I think that if we, as a society, truly understood what long term unemployment with little hope of relief does to people and the societies they live in, we would understand why having a job is a right, not a privilege, and that it is in society’s best interest, as well as the moral thing to do for these people, to invest in finding meaningful labour for all its citizens.

As for people like me, people who have made it through forty years of life without ever having a full time job that could support them, we suffer invisibly in our apartments, our basements, or even in the same room we have had since we were kids because we still live with our parents.

Nobody stops to think about what it is like to live in such suspended animation. It’s like your entire life is that period at the end of summer where kids are bored of being out of school and can’t wait for it to start again and give them structure and something to do.

Except for people like me, summer never ends, and the very thing that keeps me out of the job market – depression – is made worse every day by this lack of function.

I dread my days a lot of the time because I am keenly aware of how purposeless my life is and the vast black void this lack of purpose or contribution leaves within the very center of my soul.

I, too, have failed to grow up. People act like it’s something that just happens given time, but I am here to tell you that this is just not true. Without the proper stimulation from environment and situation, the end of summer never comes and you are left with endless days of futile diversions.

If it wasn’t for this blog, and the videos I have recently resumed making, my life would collapse completely and I would dread each day and the constant burden of continuous diversion and desperately trying to stuff your life with as much play as possible in order to fill the work-shaped void in your heart with something that, no matter how hard you push, will never truly fit.

And society is on the hook for all my living expenses and medical costs for quite possibly the rest of my life.

So no. This is not a life of leisurely bliss.

It’s a very special kind of hell.

I will talk to you again tomorrow, dear friends.