Today, I want to make a case for the reluctant hero. The person who doesn’t seek glory, but is nonetheless dragged into a conflict by circumstance. This is someone who wasn’t looking to get involved, but whose conscience will not permit him or her to walk away.
In other words, a person motivated by principle, by a sense of duty, rather than their passions.
I’d like to clarify exactly what I mean by this by first making a distinction:
This is not exactly the same thing Kant meant by saying an action has to go against inclination for it to have moral worth.
That statement, found in his Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, meant that moral worth requires conscience triumph over instincts to the contrary, in the same way that bravery requires, by definition, the overcoming of fear.
When you overcome your prejudices to give someone your full attention and a fair shot,
When you hold yourself back from temptation, knowing you’d likely get away with it,
When you stay up late or get up early to take care of something important, fighting the urge to blow it off all the while –
These are examples of conscience winning over inclination: acts of moral worth.
And what I’m going to advocate for today is something five degrees off from that:
Doing something despite having a lack of interest in the outcome.
Maybe a better term for what I’m talking about isn’t actually “the reluctant hero” but the disinterested hero.
If you’re wondering why I didn’t just say that in the beginning, some ideas are discussed so rarely that you need to explain what you don’t mean before you can say what you do mean.
The concept of the disinterested hero is summarized perfectly in chapter 68 of the Tao Te Ching, the foundational text of Taoism, a school of Chinese philosophy that started roughly 2500 years ago.
I’ll reprint Gia-Fu Feng’s iconic 1972 translation below, and then proceed to expound upon it –
You could very well just take the 55 words of this chapter and meditate upon them daily or hourly for a year or so, and I’m sure you would come up with all kinds of deep insights. I’m sure because that’s what I did, and I want to tell you what came to mind for me, and how I applied it to my life.
SIXTY-EIGHT
A good soldier is not violent. A good fighter is not angry. A good winner is not vengeful. A good employer is humble. This is known as the Virtue of not striving. This is known as the ability to deal with people. This since ancient times has been known as the ultimate unity with heaven.
“The virtue of not striving.”
That sums it up, and yet I know it only raises more questions than it answers. As a first step in answering those obvious questions, read it again, and see how quickly your mind starts to clear up like a stuffy room once the windows are open.
What do these repetitive stanzas reduce to?
A good person is unemotional.
The skills of warfare do not require or benefit from the anger of the soldier.
The fighter is not better at fighting because he is angry with his opponent.
The person who triumphs is not enhanced by feelings of antipathy toward the person who lost.
The person who is in charge does not become a better boss by gloating over his or her authority.
Striving, then, is equated with the extra emotions: angry, violent, vengeful, proud or arrogant.
Lao Tzu says there is a virtue in not striving, a virtue in lacking the animating force of intense emotions.
In the very next line, he says something that sheds some light on exactly what he means by all this:
This is known as the ability to deal with people.
Again, his answers are puzzling, but they are answers.
In the absence of striving, in the absence of strong emotions that take us over, we have the ability to deal with people.
Well, I have to say I find that very interesting. What is implied here is that emotions make us forget that we are dealing with other humans. Emotions blind us by making us unthinking, lacking in sympathy, and myopic.
Let’s keep paraphrasing the lines until they become even less cryptic:
A good soldier/fighter/winner/landlord has the ability to deal with people.
Are you shocked yet? Because this is nothing short of shocking if you have truly grasped it.
Being good is less about having to be better than other people, and more about being good with people. With them! This can only mean that these sorts of strong emotions actually disconnect you from others, and turn you into someone trying to get something from others.
The angry soldier needs to kill the enemy, the violent fighter is trying to do as much damage to the other as he can, and the vengeful winner doesn’t want to win as much as he wants the other to lose, and the arrogant employer loves that his employees are dependent on him for their livelihoods.
All of these asymmetrical dynamics are actually quite unfortunate: wars, fights, stressful contests of skill, and the mutual interdependence of the fortunate and the unfortunate.
But for people animated by these violent emotions, they relish in the destruction, denigration, and subordination of the lesser, the loser, the weaker, the poorer of the two parties.
This is not virtue, because this is not how you deal with people.
The implication here is that, yes, life drags us into conflicts all the time, but something is wrong with you if you are happy about that. You have your duty to produce results, and that very fact stratifies the world into winners and losers, masters and slaves, those who eat and those who are eaten.
But are we required to be sad about it? Nothing to that effect is said here. It is enough to emphasize the fact that an enthusiasm for life’s inevitable moments of destruction is pathological and by definition antisocial, and that something of profound importance is lost when you are so excitable by the prospect of gain at another’s expense.
The ultimate unity with heaven is what comes to those who do what must be done, to the best of their ability, because anything that must be done must be done as well as possible, if it truly must be done at all. Unity with heaven is what you get when you understand that the best you can do is not the most you can do, the farthest you can go.
To do the best you can also means you must not do any more than is necessary: this is known as the virtue of not striving. It goes without saying that an angry, violent, vengeful person does not know when to stop, and this requires no elaboration on my part at all.
How did I apply this to my life?
To put it simply, the 68th chapter of Tao Te Ching taught me to focus on the person I’m dealing with, instead of trying to be true to the emotions aroused in me by the situation at hand.
I never questioned the emotions, and I never thought seriously about what it was I was trying to accomplish: I would capitulate to my feelings, thinking that this was “authenticity,” and that there was something noble in refusing to betray my feelings for the sake of superficial social conventions.
What I gradually came to understand is that my intense emotions were born of immaturity, even petulance, not “authenticity.” I saw that I was dramatizing my own emotions because I lacked the ability to deal with people. The moment I began to focus on creating the best possible outcome between myself and the other party, and therefore began to cultivate the skill of dealing with people, the emotions began to disappear altogether.
I still have emotions, of course, but they are speaking in their inside voices, so to speak – they are not shouting, feigning urgency, and attempting to hijack the conversation. They inform, rather than insist, because I no longer believe that emotions excuse anything, and because I now understand that emotions can function as a smokescreen that conceal the inability or simply the refusal to analyze.
Does that make me, as I implied before, disinterested?
I think that when you start to see your life as an aggregate of relationships, there is both so much more to be done and almost nothing to react to: you are action itself, and nothing is happening to you as much as you are the activity that is happening, the conduit through which moments of contact and exchange occur.
I think the examples of soldiers, fighters, winners, and employers are used to make the point clearly: often enough, we are called upon to enter into dynamics where not everyone can come out feeling like the winner, and there needn’t be any emotion involved at all.
In that moment, there is something that needs to be done. Our purpose, yours and mine, is to be calm and clear enough to perceive it, participate in it, and fulfill it.
The virtue of not striving means the virtue of not being on a crusade – some goal above and beyond the actual humans you share your life with. There simply is no life without others, in the most basic sense.
For this reason, nothing that comes between you and the continuity of your relationships with others can be called virtue: the only way forward is together, and this must inform and temper the moments when, yes, we must fight and militate against and dominate each other.
I cannot stress enough that these asymmetrical dynamics cannot be avoided, and, when I say that a communitarian ethos should temper our behaviors, I mean they should cleanse us of stupid, unthinking brutishness.
In no way am I saying, as a general principle, to become a pushover, without a spine and without boundaries. I am actually saying something quite opposite: become perfectly capable of delivering on what is demanded by life, unclouded by trite ideas of both pacifism and heroism.
What is there to strive for? Life has placed an entire life, an entire world, right in front of you: simply fulfill the roles you have been granted. This, since ancient times, is known as the ultimate unity with heaven.
Welcome back. Today, I’m going to discuss the not-so-secret secret sauce that everybody needs, but very few can explain how to get:
Self confidence.
It opens doors. It makes you respectable and attractive. It picks you back up when you hit the ground. It gives you a forcefield against negative emotions.
I can remember when I didn’t have it, and all the ways I tried to compensate for that (they didn’t work).
I can remember what had to change before I could truly acquire it,
And I can see and appreciate all the ways in which I now live in a different world, living a different life, on account of finally having it.
The reason the confident and the unconfident person live in different worlds is because each sees the world differently:
Different perspectives cause different observations, Different observations cause different conclusions, Different conclusions cause different actions, And different actions cause different results.
This is why I’m here to lay out the 3 distinctions that separate confident people from unconfident people:
It really is mental. Well, it begins that way. When you start enacting the new understanding I’m about to lay out, you’ll soon find everything changes, not just your thoughts.
Distinction One: preparation, not faith
Oxford Languages defines “confidence” as “the feeling of belief that one can rely on someone or something; firm trust.”
To be self confident, then, is to be convinced of oneself.
If you were going to make a significant purchase, what would convince you of your ability to do so, checking your account balance and reviewing other upcoming expenses, or quietly affirming to yourself “I am abundant, prosperous, and wealthy?”
The numbers adding up is what convinces you. This is why companies have finance and accounting departments: confidence comes from evidence, not faith.
When I lacked confidence, I would try to pantomime the behaviors of a more confident person. Sooner or later, however, I always self sabotaged. I self sabotaged because, deep down, I knew that I didn’t know what I was doing.
I was unprepared!
How did I remedy this?
There’s no shortcut for this, and that’s why it separates the committed from the merely wishful: I started putting in the time.
Let me give you some examples:
With respect to my musicianship, I began actually practicing my guitar to a metronome for a minimum of 30 minutes every day. I began reading through the sheet of music of, say, Mozart’s piano sonatas and John Coltrane’s saxophone solos.
In other words, I began to systematically learn new musical ideas, practice them to an unforgiving click that would reveal, rather than flatter, my technique, and, as a result, I began walking into my rehearsals feeling excited and intentional about getting into the material and applying what I was learning.
I wasn’t afraid to make mistakes, because I had clear targets for what I was trying to implement, and I was willing to make as many mistakes as it took before I could demonstrate a command of the material.
As a result, I take more risks, try things that push my limits, and feel pretty uninhibited about floating ideas about how my band might realize a particular song or evolve in general terms.
I don’t just have faith in myself: I have repeatedly gone through the process of introducing, developing, and mastering new ideas. Some of them work, some don’t, and I know how much practice it takes before you can really tell the difference.
I have the confidence to assert my ideas, even in an inchoate form, because I have the evidence of my previous successes and failures to lean on: I know I can do this.
It is the same with writing. Once I found templates and guidelines from credible sources, I just began implementing them, publishing short form content to X every day, and, eventually, newsletters like this one every week. Every time I hit “publish,” I’ve created more evidence that I can do this. This thing I’m doing now is a thing I have done before, and with each successive word that I write, each new word that I have to write becomes smaller and smaller in comparison to the total lifetime volume.
In the beginning, it was hard. But one article is evidence I can do it. Twenty articles is proof that I am doing it.
The same applies to weightlifting, or discussing a sensitive topic with my girlfriend: I’ve done this before, and the evidence of my past efforts both gives me the confidence to try now and the experience to avoid error. I have faith, yes, but it is faith informed by evidence.
How to generalize this and apply to your life:
Take some quiet time for yourself and write down in a doc or in a notebook about the areas where you don’t feel solid. There might be a couple, there might be several. Just pick one for now.
Write down all the “wins” you can think of for this topic. Let’s say you want to get your finances together, or feel together about them. Create a checklist of everything someone who feels confident about money would be able to say.
For example: how often do you check your balances? Do you have a place where all your recurring expenses are written down? Do you track your one-off spending? Are you saving money? Do you have a notice or a spreadsheet that’s set aside for this? Do you have a time set aside once a week for this?
When you are happy to answer all those questions, and this holds for six months, you have established some evidence that you have your finances together, and what you get in exchange for this is confidence. What you lose is anxiety.
Distinction Two: rules, not exceptions
Confidence is all about feeling solid, and that includes solid boundaries. Yes means yes, and no means no.
Do things you know you shouldn’t do, Say things you know you don’t mean, Get involved in situations you feel uneasy about, And stifle the impulse to say or do something,
And you have only confused yourself.
On the one hand, it’s your life. On the other, it doesn’t seem like you realize that.
Owning your life, really taking charge of things, is about defining the rules and sticking by them. Enforcing them.
Have you really quit, or just cut back? Have you cut back, or are you just saying that? Did you break up, but keep answering late night texts? Did you say you wouldn’t eat that, and yet you are? Are you uncomfortable with how much you’re on social media, but don’t really make changes?
All these situations undermine your sense of self confidence for two reasons:
You’re shutting out your intuitions. You’re not abiding by your decisions.
Your intuitions should be the source of your rules. Your decisions enforce them.
When I say that I live by my own rules, and I do, I don’t mean I break the rules of society, or that I care less about the consequences of my actions than others –
I mean what Socrates meant when he said he has an inner dæmon that calls bullshit when he says or does or is about to say or do something that he knows to be not quite correct and forthright but merely expedient. When you don’t know better, then you don’t know. You can’t act consistently with knowledge you don’t have. But if you do know, and here I’ll sound a bit authoritarian, you must obey. Not because someone else said so, but because you said so!
I cannot overstate how much self-confidence has followed as a result of knowing myself to be free from as many contradictions as possible. When I know I’m wrong, I admit it and correct course. When I think I might be right, I dare to speak up, find out, and abide by the results with dignity. When I know I’ve said or done something I find morally offensive, I apologize. Even more importantly, I do not apologize simply because someone else is offended: perhaps they are unreasonable, or have incomplete information. Sometimes, an explanation is needed, even if an apology is what is expected.
When I know I’ve done nothing wrong, I offer only information, courteously, but never an apology. One person’s indignance does not inspire my contrition, but my sense of right and wrong does.
This is called having some respect for yourself, having some boundaries, and having an internal locus of self worth.
I know right from wrong. I know I have impulses that fly in the face of my moral judgments, and I know that I am the best person to police my impulses in the name of my moral judgments.
Kant said that only that action that runs contrary to inclination has moral worth, and this is what he meant: an adult is a responsible parent to the eternal child within. You do not capitulate to children, but you do negotiate with them: you set clear expectations and boundaries, and you make proper behavior as appealing and richly rewarded as possible. You overcome destructive impulses with sustained corrective pressure. You do this as an investment in the realization of their potential. This is love.
And, when you do this, you are a person with moral worth, and a deep wellspring of self confidence. A child without boundaries is anxious, not comfortable, not confident.
How to adapt this to your own life:
Make a list of the promises you keep breaking for yourself. Come up with concrete strategies for finally keeping them.
If you promised yourself less screen time, buy an exciting book, and set down the phone in another room until the next day.
Buy an actual alarm clock, instead of using your phone.
Purchase your next book when you’re within 100 pages of finishing the book you’re in now.
Treat the promises you make to yourself like contracts that would incur steep fines and reputational damage were they to be broken.
Distinction Three: inner, not outer.
Confident people are confident because they address underlying issues, rather than cover them up. Let me make one caveat here, worded as an additional distinction: not necessarily permanently resolved, but resolved into a plan. Resolved into a system where the problem is managed.
Some things can be overcome with a little planning and effort: go and overcome them (this is what distinction two is all about: “I solve all the problems I possibly can” is a rule everyone should follow).
Some things, however, need ongoing management. You can manage them from one of two places: the inside or the outside.
Eating right, drinking plenty of water, and getting plenty of rest and vigorous exercise would be managing your appearance from the inside. You look good because you are healthy. The exterior is an expression of the interior.
Managing it from the outside means covering up imperfections. Outer presentation is necessary and important, but you know exactly what I mean: can you say you show care and respect to your body and its needs?
Finances are the same way: are you working to increase your productive capacity, finding ways to offer more valuable skills to the marketplace, becoming more efficient and reliable, and adventurously expanding your horizons,
Or is your courageous plan to settle for second best so you can afford to retire?
You resolve money issues by inwardly transforming your capacity to generate it. For example, I write, and invest in every opportunity to become a better writer, so that writing can one day replace my day job. That’s an example of managing it from the inside. As a result, I don’t quite feel so self conscious about where I am in those terms, and I don’t unfavorably compare myself to others: I have a plan, a goal, and a system for getting me there. It will take time, but, here I am, putting in the time.
That’s inner work. And, here’s how it’s distinct from our first distinction (evidence, not faith):
Yes, all work creates persuasive evidence, but the confidence that comes from working to resolve rather than working to conceal comes from reducing the number of loose ends, rather than adding to a pile of wins.
You don’t win the game of fitness, or career, or relationships, or creative, artistic pursuits. You don’t win the game of learning. What you do is stay in the game. And you stay in the game by accounting for and managing the entropic forces that could eventually take you out of the game:
Essentially, you stop trying, and one day you realize you’re no longer in the game of life. You’re replaying it in your head. Activity lives in memory.
The answer to this is to envelope whatever cannot be truly defeated into a system that can be run in perpetuity.
Some examples you can use?
Date night every week is a system. Reading books and studying new things is a system. Staying physically active is a system. Calling and texting to check up on people is a system. Having ongoing projects, the more difficult the better, is a system. Always having something in your life that you’re taking to the next level is a system. A newsletter every week, a handful of pithy tweets a day, is also a system.
I was born a mass of weakness, ignorance, incompetence, and selfishness: converting as much of that coal as possible into the diamonds of strength, knowledge, skill, and caring with the time I have available to me
Is a system.
And what confidence does that give me? The confidence that this will not be a wasted life.
Welcome back. This week I want to look at a theme that goes by many names, one that I’m certain you’ve discussed and read about before:
Raising your expectations for yourself, and getting better results, more frequently, in the process.
It seems reasonable enough to say that a higher standard of living is synonymous with better quality of life.
It also seems reasonable enough to say that making improvements in one’s overall quality of life is difficult for many.
The reason for this difficulty, in my view, has to do with a distinction that was touched upon in last week’s article: the exception on the one hand, and the rule on the other.
People who get swept up in new year’s resolutions, who make a sudden push in January only to find themselves right back where they started by March, have demonstrated that they see the better behaviors as exceptional, for example.
Therefore, going with this framework, a person who successfully makes changes is a person who rewrites the rules.
Today, then, I will lay out both the process and the mentality by which one rewrites their own rules for the better.
A bit of trite verbiage if you will: exceptional people are not making exceptions, but playing by the rules. They take the rules very seriously – much more seriously than those who are frustrated and underperforming. Said another way, the winners, the people we rightfully admire, have the strongest command of the fundamentals, and therefore the strongest foundations.
I want to lay out some of these fundamentals now, and I intend to do so a bit rudely. Rudely, because rudeness is necessary: people do not change unless and until they can no longer afford to remain where and as they are.
My rudeness is the rudeness in saying YOU’VE GOT TO WAKE UP as you’re sleeping through your alarm the day of the big job interview. From rudeness with love.
Rule Number One: results must be delivered
Let’s begin with an anecdote. Plutarch, famed Greek philosopher, historian, essayist, and priest (at the Temple of Apollo in Delphi, the site of the famous inscription, “know thyself”), compiled many of the famous sayings of both named and unnamed Spartans, who were notorious for their terse and acerbic wit.
For example, when asked to come and hear a singer who could perfectly mimic a nightingale, a Spartan declined by merely saying, “I’ve heard the bird.”
The particular quotation that concerns me right now, however, is attributed to Eudamidas:
When told that an old man was “a wise old man and one of those who search for virtue,” Eudamidas replied, “and when will he make use of it if he is still searching for it?”
It is easy to say one is studying something, seeking something, or working on something. These days, we hear people say that they are working on themselves, trying to learn patience, or, god help us, trying to learn humility.
Remember the piercing question of Eudamidas: when will he make use of it?
In other words, does someone who thinks of himself as a seeker also expect himself to find and utilize the thing being sought? In my experience, the answer is a resounding “no.”
To self describe as “seeking” is dangerous: it normalizes incompetence. It normalizes falling short. It’s okay to not be there yet, because you’re “working on it,” you’re “trying,” and you’re, worst of all, “doing your best.”
If searching is the rule, acquiring and utilizing is the exception. Results are the exception. This is the definition of mediocrity.
And, it is more than merely mediocre: it is ignorant. One acquires not by seeking, but by doing. Some examples, to better make this distinction:
Suppose I see someone who is remarkably strong physically. I don’t seek strength, I do things that require strength. I increase the demand for strength, by lifting weights, and the strength is supplied. I eat more, I sleep more, I drink more water, and I religiously avoid anything that diminishes the efficacy of my efforts. I don’t seek strength, I exercise the strength I have, and consume the resources necessary to produce more of it.
Suppose I listen to an interview with an author like Robert Greene, and wish I was as knowledgeable, well spoken and as well read. How would I seek those qualities? By reading more books, writing more often, and having more conversations with more people about the sorts of ideas that interested me. Where is the seeking in this? I see only the exercise of one’s capacity, and the resultant expansion of capacity.
Finally, what does being a better musician mean to me? Does it mean searching for better musical ideas and hoping to one day find and execute them? No. It means parting ways forever with this kind of mousey modesty, and being ever more assertive: writing more songs, spending more time practicing them, recording them more frequently, giving more direction in rehearsals, spending more time listening to music that exemplifies the qualities I wish to promote in my own, and applying more scrutiny to what I’m hearing, rather than merely enjoying what I’m doing.
In short, it means demanding results and delivering them, without exception. Let go of the notion of searching and hoping, and take up the way of having and using. Whatever it is you have right here and now, resolve to extract the maximum use from it on a daily basis: you will inevitably discover that this is the means by which you find whatever you were previously seeking.
Rule Number Two: have only the highest regard for yourself
I here exhort you to redraw your entire cosmology: you do not possess original sin, and you are not awaiting salvation. What you possess, rather, is tremendous potential that must be realized at any and all costs. Think of yourself less as someone trying to find his or her way in a vast world and more like a child of royalty placed prematurely on a throne: the role for you is the role before you now, and you must only grow into it.
Again, there is nothing for you to seek: you are here now, and there is a life for you to live right here and right now. Seeking negates having!
Redraw your cosmology: the sun, the sky, the steady passing of time that exposes the consequences of all actions, the people who brought you into this world and the others who educated and mentored and befriended and challenged you – all of this is an endorsement of your existence, confirmation that you are here, that you belong here, that space is made for you wherever you go. Even and especially when others disagree, resist, or reject my ideas, this only proves I am a force that must be contended with, must be answered and countered in some way by others.
Until you are prepared to grant this much, and to take it to be the normal state of affairs, you will always be wondering about and seeking to establish or convince yourself of what is actually nothing but the backdrop of all life, the simple fact of your existence.
Grant yourself some importance, some respect! Not in an egotistical sense, but in the sense that there is important work that awaits its completion by your hands, and it will not settle for another’s.
In the words of the Tao Te Ching, “why should the Lord of Ten Thousand Chariots act lightly in public?” You do so little, try so feebly, adhere so inconsistently, because you believe it doesn’t matter anyway. You matter to the extent that you treat yourself like something that matters.
As for me, I wrenched my life from the jaws of self defeating ideas and decided to claim as much meaning as I possibly could from the time that remains, and I will continue until some insurmountable force appears before me to say: this is it, there is no more knowledge, no more insight, or accomplishment, or improvement, or understanding, or maturity, or contribution, or love and companionship and friendship and cooperation and collaboration for you to partake of. There is a ceiling, and this is it.
Are you where you are because some such force has appeared before you, like Christ at the Mount of Olives, or are you simply not even trying?
The wise seeker knows, That the fruit of my endeavor Shall be commensurate With the intensity Of my own self effort, AND NO FATE NOR GOD SHALL ORDAIN IT OTHERWISE. Vasistha’s Yoga, trans. Swami Venkatesananda
Rule Number Three: embrace hatred.
We return again to my beloved Spartans, conveyed to me by the pen of Plutarch.
Before I reprint and expound on a series of pungent quotations, however, I should back up and justify what appears to be an unjustifiable, even irresponsible use of words: embrace hatred.
It’s not what you have, but how you understand and utilize it that matters. To the determined, resourceful person, anything and everything can be and is employed toward the end of perfection: of oneself, one’s life, and one’s every undertaking.
If you were short, should I tell you, “don’t bother, shorties can’t win?” Should I tell you the same if you’re a woman, an ethnic minority, or someone attracted to the same sex? Should I say that something about you disqualifies you from the contest altogether? No. I should say, learn to play by the rules, as skillfully as you possibly can, built in handicaps notwithstanding, and you’ll receive whatever marks you earn fair and square.
This extends to attributes of the psyche as well. If you are loving and kind, you can win. If you are cunning and competitive, you can win. And, I dare to say it, if you are hateful, you can win.
To reiterate: what disqualifies you is a violation of the rules, or what you do. Not who you are or how you feel.
I believe this is clear enough.
Another concept we are going to need: the yin and yang symbol as a model for a binary system. A world of black and white opposites, but not so rigorously segregated as “black and white” implies. A little bit of black in the white half, a little bit of white in the black half, creating balance within each half, rather than balance existing “on the whole.” The Yin and Yang Binary represents the appropriate integration of opposing energies at the local level, not merely at the level of abstraction.
This matters, because nobody actually lives in the average household, with the average family and income and budget and back problems: we only occupy the particular, which merely contributes to a sense of what is average. “Average” as a data point does not truly exist.
Why say all this? Because hate has a place in your life at the local level. It isn’t simply the case that all the perfect woke coastal snow angels of love and empathy have to balance out the hateful idiots in fly over states – YOU have to strike the appropriate balance between love and hate within yourself.
This is impossible if you cannot admit to being in possession of hatred.
Back, then, to the Spartans.
“When asked how one should remain a free man, [Agis, song of Archidamus] said, “by despising death.”
“Questioned as to how he gained his great reputation, [Agesilaus] said, ‘by having despised death.’”
“Certainly when somebody asked what gains the laws of Lycurgus had brought Sparta, [Agesilaus] said: ‘contempt for pleasures.’”
When someone was asking [Cleomenes son of Anaxandridas] why the Spartans do not dedicate the spoils from their enemies to the gods, he said: ‘because they come from cowards.’”
“As some Athenian was reading a funeral eulogy in praise of men killed by Spartans, [Ariston] said: ‘what, then, do you think was the quality of our men who defeated them?’”
A picture has surely emerged, by now, of the sort of hatred I am referring to, so that we might finally understand what it means to “embrace hatred.”
A love of life that is given an intimidating ferocity by the attending hatred of death. A love of strength and vitality that is inseparable from a hatred of weakness. A love of victory that is tempered by a disdain for the evident inferiority of the defeated. A deep sense that some people are simply better than others, that superiority can be proven by contest, and that better people are entitled to more, and entitled to rule.
Said another way, Aristotle wrote in The Nicomachean Ethics that “an honorable man is a disdainful man.” I believe the meaning of this statement has been made clear enough by now.
It is not enough to like the idea of one day achieving something:
You must hate the thought of failure Hate the thought of being right where you are now in another ten years, Hate the thought of your parents or spouse or children making excuses for you, Hate the thought of breaking the promises you’ve made to yourself and others, Hate the idea of squandering your potential for the sake of episodic pleasantries, Hate the idea of wasting your life.
When I start to falter on my path, an icy, humorless auditor within me rises up to scowl and cast a rigid index finger down like a punishing lightning bolt as if to say, get back up, get to work, and get it done.
I wish to close with a poetic representation of precisely this kind of wrathful contempt, embodied perfectly by Wallace Stevens in his poem Puella Parvula (Latin for “quiet little girl”). I can only say this so well, but Stevens says it perfectly:
Puella Parvula
Every thread of summer is at last unwoven. By one caterpillar is great Africa devoured And Gibraltar is dissolved like spit in the wind.
But over the wind, over the legends of its roaring, The elephant on the roof and its elephantine blaring, The bloody lion in the yard at night ready to spring
From the clouds in the midst of trembling trees Making a great gnashing, over the water wallows Of a vacant sea declaiming with wide throat,
Over all these the mighty imagination triumphs Like a trumpet and says, in this season of memory, When the leaves fall like things mournful of the past,
Keep quiet in the heart, O wild bitch, O mind Gone wild, be what he tells you to be: Puella. Write pax across the window pane. And then
Be still. The summarium in excelsis begins… Flame, sound, fury composed… Hear what he says, The dauntless master, as he starts the human tale.
In summary,
Part with excuses and demand results. Come to view results as normal, and lack of results as abnormal.
Hold yourself in the highest regard, and then ceaselessly demand that your behavior rise to meet your own standards.
Finally, you must have contempt for whatever is beneath you, that threatens you, that brings you down, that would seek to poison you and strip you of your sense of purpose, that would tell you you are unworthy of your aspirations and potential. Let that contempt become that which fuels you, like the mighty imagination that triumphs like a trumpet over the blaring elephant on the roof.
Welcome back. Today, I want to talk about the intersection of positivity and realism.
I want a model of reality that I find credible, yet also provides me with some buoyancy in the face of life’s entropic forces.
What I don’t want to do is commit suicide unto the faculty of reason, which is how Albert Camus described faith.
Allow me to elaborate: I refuse to take refuge in something I know I don’t believe, just because it sounds reassuring. I can’t pretend to be convinced when I’m not, and, if I did, the internal conflict that would ensue would be far worse than living with the honest admission of uncertainty.
If you can get on board with that, or at least take that for a test drive from now until the end of my article, I think we can have an interesting discussion.
Before proceeding, another word of clarification: the reason pretending to believe what you do not is worse than whatever alternative honesty would bring as a consequence is that pretense is unhealthy.
Begin building on a foundation of falsehood, and, with every passing day, the sense of emptiness and meaninglessness only grows in intensity. When the time comes to assert what you actually believe, to stand up for your principles, there will be no weight behind it. You will have no credibility with yourself, and what should ring true only rings hollow.
So, we can’t cling to what we don’t truly believe, and, instead, we have to admit to our true beliefs.
One of those true beliefs, one true statement I can make now, however, is that beliefs drive behavior, and I therefore want the beliefs that will drive the right behavior. I want a good life, meaning that I want to live in such a way that I can look in the mirror and see a good person.
My fundamental beliefs about life, the world, and my place in it are what determine my actions, good or bad.
This is obvious: my beliefs about the weather govern how I dress myself.
If I want positive outcomes, then, I need positive beliefs that facilitate them.
So, if dishonest positivity is not an option, but some positivity is required, then neither is cynicism an option. Cynicism could be here defined as the belief that all positivity is dishonest and therefore not to be engaged in.
I gave a good overview of Negativity Bias in a previous newsletter, which I encourage you to read, but I’ll summarize here by saying that our biases make it hard for us to adopt a positive mental attitude: negative information is seen as more important, more true, and more sophisticated.
If faith is the suicide of reason, as Camus said, then I say cynicism is death at the hands of reason: an airtight explanation that nonetheless makes life impossible.
A brave and daring person, then, should insist that life’s horizons be kept bright without giving any insult to the faculty of reason in the process. Win win or no deal.
This brings us back to what I said at the outset: I want to talk about the intersection of positivity and realism. The most believable and the most uplifting, simultaneously.
I encountered an excellent prospective model for such a belief system in chapter 39 of the Tao Te Ching, which I will now reprint in its entirety, and proceed to analyze.
These things from ancient times arise frome one: The sky is whole and clear. The earth is whole and firm. The spirit is whole and strong. The valley is whole and full. The ten thousand things are whole and alive. Kings and lords are whole, and the country is upright. All these are in virtue of wholeness.
The clarity of the sky prevents its falling. The firmness of the earth prevents its splitting. The strength of the spirit prevents its being used up. The fullness of the valley prevents its running dry. The growth of the ten thousand things prevents their dying out. The leadership of kings and lords prevents the downfall of the country.
Therefore the humble is the root of the noble. The low is the foundation of the high. Princes and lords consider themselves “orphaned,” “widowed,” and “worthless.” Do they not depend on being humble?
Too much success is not an advantage. Do not tinkle like jade Or clatter like stone chimes.
Before going through it in more detail, let me just tell you, in broad terms, what it is I believe you’ve just read: a presentation of a harmoniously interconnected world.
A world that is healthy, thriving, morally upright, and responsibly governed, where those who occupy the highest positions are humble because they are enlightened: they understand the inextricable link between what is above and what is below.
Here’s where we get to do a bit of what salesmen call “objection handling.”
It’s clear enough that the world isn’t perfect, or, at least, that kings and lords do not appear to “depend on being humble.”
It’s clear to anyone with eyes that there are plenty of problems at the level of governance, and that it is far from “whole,” as the text appears to state.
Here’s where I come to another important point about what it means to find the intersection of positivity and realism:
You have to be capable of stating and advocating for your ideal in the face of less-than-ideal circumstances.
I am certain that Lao Tzu did not believe all rulers everywhere to be whole and upright – he criticizes bad rulers frequently in other chapters.
What is being presented here, then, is the ideal that may never be realized, but toward which the real can always be nudged.
The key to being both honest and optimistic is to be in possession of a clear ideal: the 39th chapter of the Tao Te Ching presents one perfectly. Scanning all of creation from top to bottom, and praising it for its wholeness, its cohesion, its dutiful integrity. Everything performing its part perfectly because it is perfectly intact.
What is the benefit of accepting the image of the world put forth here?
I’ll answer with another question: If you saw the world and everything in it as whole and good, how would that influence your behavior?
A good world doesn’t need to be changed, only taken care of. A good person doesn’t need to be changed, only cared for.
Good people don’t always do what I want them to do, Good people make mistakes, Good people can stall out in their development, Good people can get angry and say things they don’t mean,
And still be good people.
Similarly, the world contains death, disease, malevolence, tragedy, ruin, and baffling wastefulness,
And none of this constitutes proof that the world is broken in any way. These things are real, and the world contains them.
The notion that the world could and therefore should exclude things that are undesirable is to misunderstand what the world is: the world is the arena of cause and effect, the gallery of what is real. Presence in the world is conditioned only by the presence of prerequisite conditions: if it has been caused, then it is.
Whence comes the notion of incompleteness, then? The world as I have described it is perfectly sensible, perfectly complete, and perfectly good: all causes are entitled to their corresponding effects. That is fairness, that is wholeness.
People are who they are because they are elements of a world governed by actions, not by moral judgments.
Rather than decry the world or humanity for its ugliness, then,
And here is the leap into wisdom,
Recognize what is perfectly complete and fair in its ugliness.
The existence of something, the incontrovertible fact that you have experienced something is proof only that the world admits this, too, through its gates.
Where is the fault, the brake, the lie?
You should by now see what I have done:
I began by granting that the description of a whole and upright world was merely an abstract ideal,
Only to go on to prove that it is no mere ideal, but the actual state of affairs. You would have done the same, were you in my shoes.
There is nothing wrong with the world, Nothing wrong with humanity, And nothing wrong with you.
Believing something to be wrong turns you into a kind of impotent god, equipped on the one hand with superior knowledge (you know how everything should be) and lacking any ability to bend anything to your will on the other.
To believe that something is wrong with the world, humanity, and yourself is to hold a belief that leads different people down different avenues,
But never done the avenue of knowledge, never to enlightenment.
If you think a thing to be incomplete, you leave it to go in search of what might complete it, all the while neglecting it. Were you to operate under the assumption that all the puzzle pieces had been put back in the box, however, you would simply set about putting it together straight away, as no necessary thing is missing.
By knowing the world to be complete, you are free to engage it completely.
The disparities of the world do not prove the world to be broken.
Let us look again at the chapter:
Therefore the humble is the root of the noble. The low is the foundation of the high. Princes and lords consider themselves “orphaned,” “widowed,” and “worthless.” Do they not depend on being humble?
What does this mean, the low is the foundation of the high?
Nothing can be raised up unless there is something else above which it is raised. That is what being raised means in the first place.
To have contempt for what is beneath you is like the treetops having contempt for their own trunks and roots, contempt for the soil on which it stands. The earth gave you something to stand on, gave you something over which to aggrandize yourself.
I can only say I am literate because others are illiterate. If I’m tall it’s because I’m taller than others, and their relative shortness is the basis of my status as tall: they gave it to me by creating the disparity.
This is the inextricable link between what is above and what is below. Great people only have value because of the mediocrity of others. Their greatness is owed less to their own accomplishments than to the relative lack of accomplishment of others.
This is why Princes and Lords “depend on being humble” – they are rulers because they are not subjects, the same way that night is not night as much as it is “not day.” One’s entire identity, everything you might claim for yourself, is created, even as a concept that can occupy your mind, by the reality of a disparity between one state and its opposite.
We have now revealed the meaning of the opaque closing lines, then:
“Too much success is not an advantage. Do not tinkle like jade Or clatter like stone chimes.”
Too much success is what you have when you forget that you only have success in contrast to those who are less successful, including your previous self. I cannot spurn the thought of myself as a helpless infant, because the level of change between my infantile state and my present state constitutes the sole basis for my sense of pride in how far I’ve come.
Headaches handed the billions to Advil.
Therefore do not posture and peacock, do not boast and tinkle and clatter: you only insult that which made you, which gave you everything you have.
How does any of this solve real problems for real people?
Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote that “the solution of the problem of life is seen as the vanishing of the problem” (Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 6.521).
The disappearance of the problem, not the appearance of the solution.
The Tao Te Ching is not a book that offers solutions as much as it accelerates the dissolution of problems. It offers a series of common sense perspectives that, when put together, taken deeply to heart, and applied assiduously, remove self created suffering from your life.
To be able to look around at the world, at humanity, at yourself, and see that all is as it should be – including the unceasing demands for attention placed upon you by all three – is to be at peace.
To think of the world, humanity, and yourself as broken, incomplete, and morally flawed is to live in misery: your best efforts amount to little more than putting lipstick on a pig.
When all is as it should be, nothing need be added, but the sense of moral condemnation is automatically subtracted. You live in a household that must be continually set in order. Things drift into disorder of their own accord – simply attend to disorder as and when you encounter it.
No, it does not minimize the scale of any problem to state it so plainly. What it intentionally minimizes is the self aggrandizing sense of drama that people are, evidently, eager to tack on to the problem. The drama frames the problem as exceptional: I tell you now, it is the rule.
To see the world as it is to be the exception can only mean that the alternative model for the world you hold in your imagination is, to you, the rule. The thing to which the present aberration must eventually yield.
“The humble is the root of the noble.” What is humility, but the ability to relinquish your private reality and submit to what is literally right in front of your face? Surely, this facilitates frequent and thorough attention far better than holding onto a fantasy into which you retreat in ways and at times that are not fully within your control, and are certainly detrimental.
The humility to relinquish one’s fantasies for the sake of reality. Fair enough, but, in what way is this “the root of the noble?” Because, and here I’ll be a bit cute if you don’t mind, the road to attainment is paved with engagement. Let the fantasy world wither so that the long neglected garden of the real might now flourish. The more you abandon self aggrandizing fantasy for the sake of humble toil, the more you take on the quality of nobility: skilled, accomplished, influential. Someone of substance and consequence.
To earn the respect and cooperation of others, perhaps even their admiration and deference, takes time and effort. “Therefore the humble is the root of the noble.”
It is the person who tries to circumvent this process that eagerly declares himself a success, “clattering like stone chimes.” Eager to announce and gloat in his superiority over the humble, he is a plucked flower without roots, destined only to wither. This is the fundamental distinction between fantasy and reality: the presence or absence of these humble and prosaic foundations.
See the world before you as the right one, the real one, the better one, and do what it requires of you: this is the path to nobility.
And that, I believe, is as honest as it is encouraging.
