Simmel argues in philosophy of money that means have been separated from ends. That we have lost any hope of some divine goal, and since any longterm goal requires money, our focus becomes the practical issues of how to get wealth. Simmel says competition is not just social darwinism since it is also about winning the third party. He says the only parallel to the market is love, in which you become aware of your lover’s needs and desires before she even realizes it. He also says money turns people into a more metaphysical people. All fuzzy emotions are stripped away, and we must judge and value everything. The dream of Pythagoras comes true and everything has a number.
How did my means get so divorced from the ends? In the end, the ends killed the means. Since I became so fanatical and then despairing, that I could not even advance my pure ends.
I had a pretty miserable childhood. Although that is largely objective, and not subjective. I hated 1st grade, when basically the entire class picked on me. But after that I was basically just ignored. I used to think that everything just went wrong in 1st grade, bad luck. And that if it wasn’t for that, I’d be “normal”. But I looked back on my Kindergarten report card, and the teacher suggested I learn how to make friends over the summer. Its true that I’m naturally introverted but when I finally did make a friend in 2nd-4th grade, I learned I could be a naturally funny guy. So while its not just bad luck, I don’t think my childhood had to be as isolated as it was. On the other hand I never really had a friendship as intense and strong as the one I had 2nd-4th grade. Even during my most phony “popular” days of high school I never had a friend like him.
So I was naturally drawn to adventures and superheroes. And as I grew older Barney, Disney, and Superman were replaced by General Patton. Was becoming a military buff a bad thing? Well it gave me a grand goal in life. It made academics something I wanted to do for me, not my parents, for the first time got me interested in physical strength and it encourage an ultra-machismo. Patton can’t be blamed if the trait of his I most absorbed was love of military history.
So in some ways I messed up in 6th grade when I made my big splash as the mysterious new kid. I was waay over the top. Basically my act was paranoid schizophrenic. One time I slicked my hair back and brought in a picture of Ronald Reagan for comparison I was wild. And it worked. I had the whole lunch table listening to my stories. I organized the guys on an expedition where I was going to “harass” the popular girl. It sounds awful now. But I only did it because I still saw the world like a Superhero, she was a bully because she biatch slapped people, and I was a hero for standing up to her. So I went from a total loser, to having popular girls literally chasing me. It was a highpoint, but to a large degree an illusion.
I can’t speak for certain, since so much of my memory is just myth. But from a few objective moments, I say I probably could have turned this delusional popularity, into real friendships. Part of the problem is that I actually wanted to remain this detached mystery man. And part of the problem was my new military mission in life. In this my military buff played a decidedly negative impact.
What was my grand ambition? That I would become totally self-disciplined and driven. A New Patton. I would go to West Point. If I didn’t rise high in the ranks, I would still enjoy a life of unity and adventure that the modern world missed out on. But the ambition was that I would rise fast. Russia would go Fascist as the new Weimar Republic fell. And then the Russian Hitler would make a bid for world domination. I would be a young mid-level officer in some backwater front, but my Napoleonic genius would turn the tide. By the end of the war, I would be the Captain in Chief, of the entire United Nations Army. Like MacArthur I would be assigned administration over defeated Russia. I would turn my private kingdom into a bright citadel of Athenian democracy. This New England town meeting writ-large would spread throughout the world. And a new world government based on puritanism, gun ownership citizen militas, New England town meetings, globalization, civic virtue, and economic corporate-republicanism.
Quite a grand ambition indeed. Delusions of grandeur. I had went through all of middle school and high school playing the character of a man who had already lived that dream. And so the pain I felt when I fell to earth.
Well at least then my goal was very clear and thought out. I knew exactly what my biography was going to be. I had a few replacement biographies in college, but none of them drew the same divine inspiration.
In the past incorruptible men were attacked for hypocrisy. Now it is precisely their purity that makes them dangerous and fanatical. They are attacked precisely because they are not hypocritical. They SHOULD enjoy wine, women and song.
Well if I knew what my goal was then it would be easier to find the practical steps to attain them. A world utopia seems impossible to take the first step outside of the military. American politics is a waste of time if for you its about ideas and not making sure garbage collection is on time. While I don’t really bond that concept of government the Founding Fathers deserve credit for creating a system which has lasted 250 years where government politics has been just about making sure the garbage gets picked up. While I may not agree with that goal, I have to admit they’ve been pretty successful in achieving it.
For a time I considered a law career. I read a bunch of mystery novels and watched law & order, to try to brainwash myself that a lawyer was really a private detective and I’d be fulfilling my childhood dream Batman. And law is the natural road to politics in USa. But I was too smart or too dumb to fail for it. IT just didn’t inspire the same iron discipline in me. Although for a few months, I was very driven to work out and fast a lot. Although its hard to see how thats connected to law, unless you take the Batman metaphor too literally.
You could just reduce all my “virtue” to a bad investment. While the MTV generation wanted immediate consumption, I invested and ended up losing everything. In that sense evil didn’t win, short-term consumption just beat out long-term abstinence.
The American dream of the house and white picket fence, 2 cars, and a wife and kids, just never appealed to me. Although at this point I wonder if I could get it if I wanted to. Perhaps since my blue collar parents had achieved it, I looked down on it and took it for granted.
In some ways EO Wilson’s R-K reproductive strategy helps to de-moralize everything, and put it in biological perspective. Basically everything I, and for the most part Western and Oriental Civilizations valued could basically be associated with the K strategy. While everything considered sinful could be considered R. Or in economic terms Nassau W. Senior’s abstinence theory of interest. In this sense morality means abstaining from pleasure and the Karma for this is profit. So all the bad guys are doing is articulating the R theory. Now for the most part they concede the values of K and even betatude, and credit the success of western civilization as being the most beta. But they say feminism has ruined everything. Feminism is the result of two things the labor market and birth control. These two things make the R less effective than ever. The R strategy has always been around, while sexual intercourse may have been lower for R before birth control, genetic success was far higher. The GOAL of R is actually stated by Roissy and Co as genetic failure.
I used to have a theory of attractiveness based on Adam Smith’s objectivist theory of value. I said that weight for both males and females is the absolute determinant of attractiveness, with other factors, primarily money, only acting as market distortions.
Which is more important in 2010 USA money or sex? I would argue money, since Roissy is in finance, and Tucker Max lives off his dad’s restaurant chain. It is true that there are low income Roissys in the ghetto, and while pop culture does praise them, they are not the rulers. Does this mean money should replace weight? I would still say weight is the natural equilibrium the market would drift to but the outside influence of money has no parallel in economics. I would rather believe that physical attractiveness and money are the sole determinants of attraction, than live in a hell where cruelty, sadism, and domination are “sexy”. And perhaps I do since IDK any ugly, poor, cruel dominating alpha males who have had any success. In life there are always exceptions, but they prove the rule.
From personal experiance in middle and high school I could fairly definitively say the Roissy worldview is false, the world isn’t as horrible as that, and girls are not that masochistic. It is true from my college experiance I’m ready to say Tucker Max rules the world. But I had no objectivity whatsoever in college. And basically considered any guy holding hands, Tucker Max.
So if life is better now for women than it has ever been in history even with Tucker Max breathing, does this mean my anger is just herd resentment? Well first-off its an insult to genuine nice guys to call me beta. I’ve never done anything nice for a girl in my life. Alphas have done more nice things than me as the tactic for getting into a girls pants. Well isn’t that Mises’ glory of the free market? Even the most evil men have to at least fake niceness, in this Neil Strauss is more accurate than most of the harder PUAs. You are providing a service, and no not being a caveman, if anything the PUA trend is towards metrosexuals. Like the entrepeneur who only wants cash, the PUA has to at least fake a service, and if its a good enough fake its real. So while in my inner-life I may be one of the nicest people alive, since I’m not in the market their is no pressure on me to do anything nice for girls, and I never have. And so the sexual free market, forces men far crueler than me to behave at least on the surface far nicer than me. And the appearance is reality.
Of course as Adam Smith pointed out market morality only develops when there is continued transaction, so that reputation matters. In the anonymous world of big-city clubbing, there isn’t visible Ebay feedback. But you can’t completely escape it. And I guess I ought to give girls the benefit of the doubt that they are not as stupid as PUAs make them out to be. That they are little miss Ayn Rands, pursuing their own interests, and they know what they want, and every bad transaction is just market information.
IDK if everything I just wrote is true. This an on-going argument between me and myself. This is point/counterpoint.
I guess part of this is I was so afraid of being a beta nice guy, I became an omega jerk.
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