It is an interesting thing, watching myself playing these games, how some internal emotional process interferes with me, makes me guess wrong, hides answers from my mind. That process was simply muted today. It is likely still in bed.
And I am increasingly persuaded that the first task for most people, the very first, the sine qua non, of goal achievement, is learning to accept the idea of success. This is quite impossible for most people. They are quite unable to conceive being unusually good at anything that did not come naturally in childhood.
I suspect not one person in 100 comes even remotely close to utilizing their full talents, what they might have been, could have been, if they had been able to love themselves enough to honestly seek out the fulfillment of their potential.
Most of us have been hypnotized to stop at a certain point, to succeed up to THERE, and then to stop. To go farther is to invite jealousy, the attention of others, the responsibility that often goes with talent, the encounter with the unknown. It is to let loose hidden fountains of creative energy that you cannot fully direct or predict.
I was watching an interesting interview with Gabor Mate where he was talking about “the myth of normal”.
It is a human tragedy that our society values conformity to an economic system over personal growth. What do most of our “human development” “experts” talk about? Making more money. Becoming better at your job. This is our mainstream culture. Most people are focused on more money. If they are not focused on their career, they are buying lottery tickets, and dreaming of what they would do if they won.
This is stupidity. As is no doubt obvious, I am an ardent supporter of that combination of free markets and property law that gets called “Capitalism”, but as I have said many times, Capitalism, so called (again, I will note this was Marx’s term for a system he detested, which he did not describe accurately, and which does exist today in the form supposed by most) is merely an economic system within which moral narratives operate. You can be Capitalist and live in an old bus, sweep floors for a meager living, and spend your ample free time meditating in nature. We could all choose to do this. We could all choose much lower standards of living in exchange for a richer culture, richer connections with others, and richer connections, more fulfilling connections, with ourselves and our true inner natures.
What we need to make this happen is to liberate time. And that cannot happen until people recognize that wealth is being systematically siphoned away from the producers to the bankers. This is not a flaw in “Capitalism”, and the solution is not an idiotic assault on “corporations”. The problem is precise, and the solution is precise.
I have decided to start giving public talks. You can choose the topic, but to my mind the most important one is the nature of our monetary system, its defects, and how to correct it. Many billionaires benefit from this system. Some of them are no doubt psychopaths. But perhaps some of them have deluded themselves that they are working to create a more just world, without having any moral tools other than coerced conformity–which they call the justice of equality–to do so.
I wonder if I will be shot if I get to a certain point, but that could only happen if I am relevant, and achieving relevance would be a good life outcome. This is not my first time here, not your first time here, and we all get as many chances as we need.
If you would like to host a talk, please email [email protected]. Depending on where you are, I may need some travel money, but I don’t plan to charge for the talks themselves.