James Baldwin was a black civil rights leader during the 1960s. His essay, “A Talk to Teachers,” discussed the white conspiracy to destroy the black man’s self-image.

Channeling Ralph Waldo Emerson, Baldwin begins:

The paradox of education is precisely this – that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated.  The purpose of education, finally, is to create in a person the ability to look at the world for himself, to make his own decisions, to say to himself this is black or this is white, to decide for himself whether there is a God in heaven or not.  To ask questions of the universe, and then learn to live with those questions, is the way he achieves his own identity.  But no society is really anxious to have that kind of person around.  What societies really, ideally, want is a citizenry which will simply obey the rules of society.

Anyone who doubts that men are oppressed in America should read his excellent essay, “A Talk to Teachers,” and substitute “men” “for Negro.”

Now if I were a teacher in this school, or any Negro school, and I was dealing with Negro children, who were in my care only a few hours of every day and would then return to their homes and to the streets, children who have an apprehension of their future which with every hour grows grimmer and darker, I would try to teach them -  I would try to make them know – that those streets, those houses, those dangers, those agonies by which they are surrounded, are criminal.  I would try to make each child know that these things are the result of a criminal conspiracy to destroy him.  I would teach him that if he intends to get to be a man, he must at once decide that his is stronger than this conspiracy and they he must never make his peace with it.  And that one of his weapons for refusing to make his peace with it and for destroying it depends on what he decides he is worth.  I would teach him that there are currently very few standards in this country which are worth a man’s respect.

Real talk.

Read more: “A Talk to Teachers.”

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Life in the modern world:

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[I recently attended a Tony Robbins Seminar. My summary of Day 1 is here and my summary of Day 2 is here.]

In behavioral economics you often encounter the concept of loss aversion. For reasons probably having to deal with evolution (losing territory means losing status, which in the wild means you’re dead meat), we experience far great pain when losing something than we feel joy when gaining something.

Listen to Unleash the Power Within.

Consider that most of us have been in horrible relationships, had crappy jobs, and maybe even had a shitty self-outlook. Why not change? Changing means you’re losing something to gain something else. Logically you should want to change your pathetic self to become a more heroic self, but the fear of losing whatever little you have leads to inaction.

In order to get a person to change, it’s usually not enough to show a person what he will gain. People only generally change when they have hit rock bottom and fear losing more of their life’s savings, their friends or their sense of self.

Tony Robbins has found a way to work around the problem of loss aversion.

Not Changing Will Cost You

Although we don’t often think of it this way, our current body is borrowed from our future body. Someday the person you are today is going to get examined by the person who is 10, 20, or 30 years older. Your old man self will want to know you didn’t save for retirement, why you didn’t take care better of your knees, and why you didn’t experience more out of life when you had the energy. (Although memories are not substation for the present, one day all any of us will have are memories.)

What negative behaviors do you have today? What are those going to cost you in 5, 10, and 20 years?

Consider someone who is fat and eats a diet of processed foods. His lifestyle is going to cost him opportunities for sex. It’s going to cost him bodily decay. It’s going to make him miss out on the ability to feel good when he is older. The fat person will have missed out on so much because of his negative behaviors. Not changing is costly.

Or maybe you’re mean to your wife (or ex-wife). That’s going to cost you intimacy. It’s also going to sour any relationship you might have had with your children. Children who grow into adults don’t love a man who mentally or physically abuses their mother.

Or maybe you won’t take any business risks. People are terrified of risk. (“What if I fail,” is loss aversion causing you to doubt yourself.) Yet what’s the alternative – working for the man like a corporate slave your whole life, having to call in sick to some superior when you’re not going to be at the office, wondering if you’re breaking some HR rule, censoring yourself for fear of losing your job?

Through visualization techniques (you need to attend the seminar to experience the concepts fully), you’re forced to be confronted with everything your negative behaviors will have cost you. Since we usually don’t respond to rewards but instead seek to avoid punishment, these techniques are a breakthrough for most.

Limiting Beliefs

“A belief is something about the world that you believe to be true.” Limiting beliefs are a way to protect ourselves from taking any risk. We accept limiting beliefs in order to avoid our own weaknesses and insecurities. They allow us to pretend we are not cowards.

How many men, when receiving obvious buying signals from a woman, will say, “Oh, she’s not looking at me?” Men tell themselves that rather than take a risk of getting reject. (That’s loss aversion, yet again.)

A short man will conclude that men under 6 foot are unable to date attractive women. By accepting this belief he is freed from doing the hard work of approaching and meeting women.

Nearly all limiting beliefs take on a certain form: ”I’m not supposed to be x.” Rather than undertake the extremely hard work most of us require in order to achieve x, we use our limiting belief as a cop out. “I’m just not designed that way.” That gives us an excuse to give up, which is easy.

If men who claim they can’t be x spent as much time working through cognitive behavioral therapy work book as they do brooding over their problems, they would find x. But that’s hard as fuck. No thanks. I’m gonna sit here and feel sorry for myself!

My own personal limiting belief is that I’m just a low energy, naturally introverted guy.

After outlining your limiting beliefs, you next need to ask what those beliefs are costing you.

Since I was 14 people told me I could start a cult. I have natural charisma. I would be much richer if instead of avoiding human interaction I embraced it. My limiting belief has cost me a lot of money and opportunities.

Most of the time our limiting beliefs are false. Am I naturally low energy or just childish? A little kid says, “I don’t want to do that,” based on nothing more than his transient feeling or mood. Isn’t it pathetic and unmanly to be a petulant child who won’t do anything he doesn’t want to do? Most of the time we just reel against the unfamiliar. It’s not that we wouldn’t enjoy the experience. It’s that we’re being bratty punks who should be smacked in the mouth.

I am not “naturally” low energy. I’m just a childish whiner who gets into moods and then lets my moods control me. That is absolutely revolting and henceforth unacceptable.

Even when a limiting belief is not false, there’s no need for it to rule you. So what if guys who are taller meet more women. That doesn’t mean no attractive women will like a guy like you. You will have to work harder than others, but if you work hard enough, you will realize that your limiting belief is actually false.

Wrapping Up

Robbins is known as a “motivational speaker” and “positive thinker.” Bullshit.  He forces you to look at the negative garbage that’s deep within your unconscious. Most people lack the courage to attend a seminar and work through their issues.

He is a positive thinker in the sense that he believes all of us have far more potential than we realize. He believes if we change our behavior and destroy our limiting beliefs, it will be possible for us to achieve great things.

Is he right? I certainly think so. Long before knowing anything about Robbins, I was able to overcome some traumatic experiences by welcoming pain.

What if instead of fearing pain like a little bitch and crying about every stupid problem you have, you told yourself, “Growth requires pain.”  That is the moral of Conan the Barbarian and is the answer to the Riddle of Steel.

Your behaviors would immediately change, wouldn’t they? Instead of being a weak loser who continued repeating the same patterns of behavior that have led to the rut you’re in, you’d change your behaviors.

After changing your behaviors, you’d notice something “magical” happening. Suddenly your very mood would change.

While a lot of guys think they are “too cool” for Tony Robbins, the truth is that most guys aren’t man enough to examine the weaknesses within themselves and to take immediate and radical action to change their lives.

In America everyone wants to be a birthday boy at his very own pity party.

My view has always been different. You are the lowest life form of a man if you live in a condition worthy of pity.. Dogs left by their owners in animal shelters are pitiable. Children who are abused are pitiable. They lack the ability to change their environments and my heart truly feels for them.

Are you a stray dog who is at the shelter after your owner’s house was foreclosed? Do you feel anxious and abandoned while you sleep on a stone concrete floor rather than on a comfortable dog bed or in a bed with your owner? Are you nothing more than a child who hides after his alcoholic father has had too much to drink? Is that really who you are?

How can you look yourself in the mirror as a man when others have pity for you? How can you actively seek out pity and then call yourself a man?

Robbins offers many useful strategies and in the future I likely won’t allow anyone to complain about anything unless they’ve gone to one of his seminars.

The irony is that most men think they are “too fucking cool” to attend a Tony Robbins seminar. Yet moping around the house is cool? Crying and screaming and having childish outbursts about stupid shit is cool?

Maybe my definition of cool differs from some, but I fail to see how wallowing in self-misery is somehow more cool than taking action to change your life.

Call me uncool if you like, but I’m a believer. Unleash the Power Within was my first Tony Robbins seminar and it won’t be my last. I was able to begin understanding how negative behavior patterns have cost me success and pleasures.

The work has just begun. I welcome the new challenge.

Whether you decide to continue feeling sorry for yourself or changing your life is, of course, up to you.

Read more: Unleash the Power Within.

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Enlightenment, unfortunately, is not all-encompassing. Although an enlightened person knows the truth, the truth is fractured.

There is, for example, a truth about making money: Don’t work for someone else if you want to get rich. Yet how many rich men have you met who had to ask his wife for permission to take a trip with the guys or even have a cigar at the lounge? A man enlightened about money is still living in Plato’s cave when it comes to women.

Most people never reach full enlightenment, as enlightenment requires critical observation and self-examination. Following the blueprint to making money does not mean you’re enlightened: It just means you were smart or lucky enough to follow someone else’s rules.

Philosophy teaches you to seek the source of knowledge and to examine arguments for cogency. You are trained to look for premises.

Most philosophers falter in the real world because they do not truly understand philosophy. Most philosophers can only repeat what they have read, forgetting that,  ”One repays a teacher badly if one always remains only a pupil.”

It took me all of 6 months to get really good at game. Because of my philosophical background, I was able to examine the arguments, observe the world, and conclude that the arguments were consistent with the world.

What are the premises of game? Although controversial to the unenlightened, these premises and their implications are undoubtedly true:

• Women are far less tolerant of weakness than men are. If a guy is struggling at the gym in earnestness, most senior gym rats will give him some pointers. Women view weakness with contempt and scorn. If you’re a guy who gets nervous around women, you will be hated because nervousness is weakness.
• Women have no desire to help men. This is almost a corollary of the above. Imagine you as a man were talking to a woman. Even if you weren’t interested in her, if she was trying to carry on a conversation you’d help her come up with some flow, right? Yet a woman will never “save” a nice guy who is making a sincere effort to get to know her or one of her friends.
• Women are uncomfortable (if not incompetent) leaders. A man who tries pleasing a woman – even on simple matters like what they should have for dinner – will be give his wife anxiety. A man must always tell (never ask) a woman what to do.
• Women want to be dominated. Whenever possible, verbally and physically control your woman. Most women enjoy being choked, tied up, and pounded hard. “You’re going to women? Don’t forget your whip!”
• Women have a stronger spirit than men do. How many dejected men do you see? Probably a lot. A man’s spirit, once broken, is dead forever. Even if you dominate your woman totally, she will occasionally challenge you. The battle for dominance never ends as her spirit is never truly broken.

After that, game simply becomes a matter of execution. Never show weakness. Even if a girl insults you, don’t blush or take offense. Crush her. Don’t view “shit tests” as something to be passed. That is weak and supplicating. View shit tests as attacks from someone who views you as a weaker being. You show your strength by ignoring her nonsense.

Always be dominant. A big guy who meets a woman just needs to get close and in her space to remind who here is boss – hence the strong silent type male archetype.  A little guy has to be more clever and verbal. Men of all sizes can be dominant. It is their styles that differ.

Had my education been poorer, my game would be weaker. But because I was able to immediately see the truth of game’s premises, game came easily. Thus if you want to become a better player you should become a better philosopher.

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“When Zarathustra was thirty years old, he left his home and the lake of his home, and went into the mountains. There he enjoyed his spirit and solitude, and for ten years did not weary of it.” – Thus Spoke Zarathustra.

A solitary retreat into the mountains is a common metaphor of enlightenment. Nietzsche, who was studying to be a theologian before becoming a philosopher, borrows his introduction to Zarathustra directly from the Bible. Exodus 24:18. “And Moses entering into the midst of the cloud, went up into the mountain: And he was there forty days and forty nights.”

Jesus, too, retreated into the wilderness where “the devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor.” Matthew 4:8. Thoreau, although avoiding the mountains, nevertheless sought solitude at Walden Pond.

Miyamoto Mushashi, the greatest samurai and perhaps the greatest warrior to ever live, retreated to the mountains before composing his Book of Five Rings. While in the mountains he – like the New England Transcendentalists would conclude hundreds of years later, noted:  ”There is nothing outside of yourself that can ever enable you to get better, stronger, richer, quicker, or smarter. Everything is within. Everything exists. Seek nothing outside of yourself.”

Nietzsche himself wrote of his own love of the mountains in Ecce Homo: “Philosophy, as I have so far understood and lived it, means living voluntarily among ice and high mountains—seeking out everything strange and questionable in existence, everything so far placed under a ban by morality.” Indeed, Beyond Good and Evil contains a poem entitled, “From High Mountains (Aftersong).”

Solitude is a requisite to enlightenment. In undoubtedly the best modern treatment on the need for solitude, William Deresiewicz explains how groupthink leads to poor management decisions and costs lives.

Perhaps in an effort to not arise fear in truth seekers, few have explained that enlightenment is painful. Man, a social animal that he is, is not designed for solitude. Yet the more you fellowship with truth, the harder it is to fellowship with your fellow man.

In ancient Greece, criminals were given the choice between banishment and death – many choose death. In prison the worst punishment a man can receive is to be forced into solitary confinement. Some studies have shown that solitary confinement is more damaging to a man’s psyche than torture.

Charles Bukowski, a misanthrope if ever there was one, had to venture out with his fellow man to the horse races before he could write. Writing is as solitary an activity as any, and yet many writers work from within a coffee shop.

Perhaps lacking self-awareness or a sense of irony, how many guys brag about being loners within the community of an Internet forum?

A man on his quest for enlightenment is destined to feel an extreme amount of pain because of his inherent social nature. In later posts I’ll explain how to deal with that pain.

Check out: Robert Green on Self-Reliance.

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While complaining about life is common and encouraged, a question to ask yourself is this: Would you play the ovarian lottery?

The rules of the ovarian lottery are simple. You have the chance to be reborn. Your soul (or essence, or whatever you want to call it) will be implanted into an entirely new body.

Consider, however, the full implications of being reborn. You don’t get to choose your parents. You don’t get to choose your race, height, medical condition, IQ, or even your gender. You don’t get to chose your country of birth. You don’t even get to choose when you’ll be born.

Playing the ovarian lottery might land you royal parents. Perhaps you’ll ball like a Saudi Arabian prince. Or maybe you’d have been born early enough to come of age during the Summer of Love.

Of course you have to consider the odds. Playing the lottery may also land you tied up to a bed as a sex slave in Moldova. (In the lottery, remember, you don’t get to pick the gender you’ll be born.)

I was born a white male in the United States of America. Despite the many challenges of living in the West, there’s not a chance I’d play the ovarian lottery.

Would you?

If you wouldn’t play the ovarian lottery, then perhaps you should stop complaining about your life and reflect on how privileged you are to be alive.

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