Virtue, Politics, and The Preparation
A conversation with Michael Farris
Michael Farris interviewed me for his Coffee and a Mike podcast recently. We discussed the election, political saviors, virtue, and we had a detailed discussion about the education program I'm developing with Doug Casey and my son
called The Preparation.For those interested in skipping to specific topics, here are some timestamps:
Education & Young People:
[00:47:00] - Detailed discussion of "The Preparation" program and how it's helping Max develop practical skills and character
[00:54:00] - Be, Do, & Have. How focusing on being and doing leads to better outcomes than focusing on having
[00:57:00] - Why asking "who do you want to be?" is more important than "what do you want to do?"
Current Events & Politics:
[00:19:00] - Discussion about the recent election and why 88 million eligible voters chose not to participate
[00:24:00] - Analysis of how formerly anti-state voters have embraced the system again
[01:13:00] - Thoughts on debt slavery and how it traps young people
Practical Philosophy:
[00:26:00] - The importance of frontier virtues and personal responsibility
[00:31:00] - Why focusing on local action matters more than national politics
[01:11:00] - Discussion about debt and why it's "stealing from your future self"
Family & Society:
[01:20:00] - Thoughts on decline in birth rates and what it really means
[01:29:00] - Discussion about raising daughters vs sons
[01:34:00] - Why family responsibility is actually the path to fulfillment
For those who enjoy Mike's work as much as I do, he accepts support through Venmo at @CoffeeandaMike. He's doing some of the most thoughtful interviews out there, and I encourage you to support his work if you find value in it. [FYI - I sent him $500 after our conversation].
A book about The Preparation is in the works - Doug is back in Uruguay next week and we'll be working on it together with Max. More updates on that soon.
As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts & feedback about these topics.
Best,
Matt
Fathers & sons & fathers-one-never-had & teachers & mothers, too … but.
This is from David Milch’s memoir, Life’s Work:
“William James was a vigorous, sweet-spirited, healthy-minded guy. He was so charming & engaging & brilliant, everybody knew he was going to be an ace. William’s problem was that he had no way to stand. His father had given him all of the data of experience & the blessing of saying, “You don’t know what it means yet, but just take it.” But to the structure of his life, he was no less an amputee than his dad was. He didn’t know what the hell to do & so he took to his bed & became afflicted with terrible headaches & backaches & so on. Everybody began to whisper about poor William James - he had such a great future & he turned out to be reclusive dick.
He had a teacher, Louis Agassiz, a great naturalist & madman who documented all of Darwin’s theories & was collecting specimens while refusing to believe in Darwin - he also insisted on being an unabashed racist. He came to the James house. William by this time was a physician who never practiced, but Agassiz came to the Jameses & he said, “William, we’re going up the Amazon, we’re collecting specimens.” William said, “I can’t get out of bed, let alone go up the Amazon.” Agassiz answered, “I didn’t ask if you can get out of bed.”
Agassiz put him on the ship & took him up the Amazon & literally threw him off the boat. And in that moment was born every aspect of William Jame’s philosophy, which is that you cannot think your way to right action, you have to act your way to right thinking. And from that came the James idea of pragmatism, that the good is what works, & that we rewire ourselves by our behavior.
This allowed William James to figure out that you don’t have to integrate the American experience into any preexisting structure, it is an unfolding. Accept it as such. Don’t try to put names on it. That was a refutation of the whole exhausted rationale of gentility. “It’s good because we’ve always done it that way. What James said was, “Who cares how you’ve always done it, just how are you doing it, how does it work?” And that brought all American behavior into the sunlight of thought. Because otherwise what you are saying is that everything is invincibly vulgar, it’s impossible & we must have nothing to do with it. There had developed in America a practice among the gentility of flinching from public life because it was so vulgar, & here was William James throwing open the goddamn doors & saying it’s all in play.
Henry [James], in his way, was standing outside, but he was hospitable to every story being available as material for rendering, to every aspect of the American story.
The example of these two men - of one or the other of these two men - has been followed by nearly every figure who has contributed to American culture ever since. Through everyone that William taught - & he taught everybody, including Gertrude Stein - & everyone who knew & read Henry.”
Plenty of applicable traction in this snip.
Including plenty of hardwired optimism, too, which should always be remembered-remembered-&-the-fifth-of-Novembered is a cognitive bias, or an imbalanced too heavy weighting of emotional bias.
It is all process.
Checkered flags are side effect. And not the point.
And if not side effect, those flags are not legitimate … which is where, for one example, everyone involved in “Flags of Our Fathers” types productions screws the pooch.
And I have not enough sympathy to go around - too many pooch-screwers - & orders of magnitude more seemingly-collaterally screwed bystanders & onlookers &, nowadays, cell phone videographers … recording Daniel Penny, for example.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mnqs3Y0eLTQ
Sympathy-suicide pacts are fundamental, tho, whether Darwin-Agassiz proved to classroom-satisfaction, or not.
Like the classroom reenactment of fundamental reality-truth scene pitched (that I sent ya’ll’s way awhile back), to a student body that mostly refused the lesson (because they had to, were pre-wired to), “What you’ve got to be before you can be William James is … William James.”
“Who are you?” is the question to be answered.
Seems that Agassiz had a pretty accurate idea of who William James was. But … if he’d been wrong, & WJ had perished … nobody keeps as much track of that side of the ledger; con/firmation book-cooking bias.
But lurking equality notions, & blank slates ready for equation-chalking, are a prominent “American” feature, whatever the ebb & flow of that Birmingham riot-firehose pressure is at any given moment.
Or, if preferred, boot camp, where youngsters are broken down & rebuilt by their $6 million dollar bootstraps … not funny how by the time Johnny Comes Marching Home all that “investment” so often has gone six-sigma LTCM kaput … because, of course, bootcamp, literal & lateral, doesn’t give a damn who you, youse, are. Dismantling, rebuilding, that dam is up to you - if you’ve got that process in you already.
“Be all you can be according to what we need you to be.”
William James’s philosophy & any of “The Stoics” that weren’t dilettantes & LARP’s have it in common that embodied configurations, personalities, mentalities can be sold-transcribed, taught, imposed, emulated & that method acting will eventually have concussed heads enough that amnesia, or dementia (which is the terrible fate that is disappearing Milch), will remove from cognition that the actor is faking it. At which time, the self-made bootstrap polishing comes into its own. “Look ma, top of the world!” Boom. (Jimmy Cagney, White Heat reference.)
The less famous brother who did this one jumped off a bridge:
“There’s trained & there’s untrained.” Boxcars on rails, or something else. Gravity is a kind of rail, too.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sh_KCoQyWwg
I’ve got some take on America-lensed “frontier” from DH Lawrence to offer up later. He makes the “unfolding” forced error, too, but upended apples aren’t the cart.
What's the most well known Gertie Stein bumper sticker? "There's no there there." Except there is almost always some there there. Identifying it’s the thing.
But if I want the Winesaps of my youth, the local hybrid hucksters don't have them.
Looking forward to your interview in a bit.
As I drink my coffee & you Coffee with Mike …:
“Triumph of hope over …”
Tragedy?
Hope does not synonym learning, may well antonym it, but it well telegraphs the near impossibility of transmitting learning from generation to generation. Can’t pass it on, so Hope in The Man From same & diamonds with lots of murky blue-grey carats in them.
I tried to get through Quigley’s tome. Had to set it aside. He recounts the same cyclonic sales funnel dynamic, over & over again; Dry/Depressing underwired cups. But The Man From Hope had high praise For Q’s de-anon’ing of the pragma/tism (rhymes magma) path to the Holy Sea.
Hope, especially, makes for reliable self-fulfilling tragedy-sales.
And contrary the myth, that hopium drug must have escaped Pandora’s box along with the rest of the evils, because that effect is massive, predating Quigley’s coverage, & postdating it, too.
“Supporters imagined … “
Hope Floats, via projectors projecting in theaters (of war) says Hollywood, in its imitations of life.
“Seventy-five million voters… “
Were only ever interested in getting that shoe, Orwell’s boot, on the other foot. No principle, or recognition, beyond that. The state is weaponized footwear & the clay-footed clog(ged)s want the putrid patent on that jaundiced steel-toed leather.
I haven’t V’d the Vendetta (voted) in a very long time. Recognizing at some point that doing so is unethical, immoral, unlawful (“albeit” legal) - I never will again, either.
It’s not that V doesn’t work, its that it is abjectly wrong, unlawful, un-virtuous if you like … & so of course does not, because cannot, work. Planned defectiveness.
Participation is enablement. Collusion. “Advance auction of stolen goods.” (Mencken) Pawns, in their little pawn shops of horrors, fencing each others’ loot that was looted from them.
People in groups are social proof stupid. Elevator pitch is vertical-steep & the gravity is strong enough to synchronize wo/menstrual cycles; Solomon Asch’s to ashes, Dostoevsky to dust:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Y0KT0ajZBw
That other V(irtue) hangs alone because when it hangs together it disappears.
(Ben Franklin & the boys were not exemplars of virtue. And/so when their gambit karambit struck lucky in that other king’s armpit, they all got together & sat down to a McDonald’s burger/fries feast. In your face, & fascia, always is a must with the fasces folks.)
Because most people don’t have a chance against what I call the congregation effect; individuals disappear, melt, into Vietcongregations & go marching off to the war of all (us - always shifting) against all (them - always shifting).
One Tin Soldier may ride away, perhaps chastened, but massed tin soldiers are nodes in a super-organism, like locust swarms, like a mumuration of starlinks satellites, bent on conquest. Bent, contorted, twisted in/to conquest … so conquered? Yes. Everything’s gotta be what it is. There is no do, there is only be/ing. ~ Yoda, or something
(Wasn’t Gregor Samsa conquered, even before he metamorphosed into a giant cockroach?)
Responsibility is not taken. It takes.
And if it, responsibility, is merely imposed, it doesn’t take (mostly). That old “you can’t legislate morality” chestnut; like the Volstead Act … which in the dis/guise of good legislated criminality.
To be driven (to responsibility, in this case) does not mean one is driving.
Too much credit (debt) is taken - “I’m the driver!”- on easy lending terms, & not nearly enough responsibility (equity) is sweated, perspired, glowed. Some like to talk up “humility.”
Expand the relations that eventuate in responsibility if you like, as much as you want to, but here, just for simplification, put the terms-freight into “conscientiousness.” That’s a trait. Not a choice.
“Choosing” to go against trait happens. But not consistently, not often, not typically. For every 4 addicts (another grooved trait) that go cold turkey & never fly again, there are at least 96 who cannot do it.
The four do not prove the ninety-six “could have” either. The four prove that cold turkeys was what they already were.
Blank slate’s a blank check to blanket party “the discipline” (remember D’Onofrio, & all his many soap-swinging teachers, in Full Metal Jacket?) that anybody can do anything … no, not true. No matter the incentives, either.
(A fun one that slams the blank slate in the audience face is The Edge. The Competent Man* character, Anthony Hopkins, who is also a billionaire, to round out proving the point, tells the incompetent man, Alec Baldwin, that he’s going to whittle a point on a stick & kill the grizzly bear with it, & teaches/projects to the incompetent man that “what one man can do another can do” but meaning that what he, the Competent Man, says he can & will do the incompetent man can simply decide to do, too. Nope.)
* https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Competent_man&redirect=no
Frontier … virtues. Sent the Ogelsby take on that. (With paragraph breaks - substack de-formatted into solid chunk, for unknown reason.)“‘Pioneering’ - never ‘conquering’ - the manifest destiny conquistadores of americano exceptionalism put it.
Conquered (not tamed, civilized, etc) - the preexisting indigenes were annihilated - by certain types of people, behind whom came certain other types of people, latter cohorts often/typically displacing the prior cohorts … until they are displaced in turn.
(The bison were annihilated. The North-South annihilation. Murder Inc/onquistadores r’us/a!, usa!, usa! …usa’ry. Too much credit-debt. Too many fiat liars.)
(And that rhyme continues: FL got colonized-conquered by people from NY; MT by CA & its satellites. AZ, CO, the Carolinas, on & on, spirochete-waves of taking turns conquistadores.)
Introverts are good people. The best. Photosynthesizers, so to speak.
Extroverts? You mentioned vampires, anti-sunlighters, & not inviting them across the threshold.
Most of what’s called “social” is actually the opposite, George (Costanza).
Or, accepting energy from the sun versus taking energy from “we are stardust, we are golden, we are billion year old carbon” … & “I am he as you are he, as you are me and we are all together” so what’s yours is mine so gimme my “social contract” due.
“Have”… legitimate having is side-effect of right how/be/do.
Again, tho, that inside-job is pre-crafted, that growing medium is already there - or its not. Educating, or even training, it in is not possible.
I’ve tried, in context of very physical & competitive domains, to clue in friendly fellow competitors & it was “no sale” every time.
The losers credo is, will continue to be, that “Winning is everything” - & how its achieved is irrelevant. The mere symbols/trappings of success are what will always matter to most, & especially to so-called “elites” that so many look up to. Cue George C. Scott’s “Patton”: “Americans love a winner & will not tolerate a loser.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PS5yfhPGaWE
But Archie Bunker’s rendition is much better (& the Mike Curb Congregation’s “Burning Bridges” works, too):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Et1SkVldiHI
James’s pragmatism is expressed by Milch a little differently, but ends justifies means utilitarianism is what it comes down to for most people, & most if not all other creatures, too; “pragmatism.” “I got mine…they got the shaft.”
Dying with toys, & for some, the most toys ~ material symbols - possession, say the possessed, is 9/10ths the law - by which they mean “the legal” ~ is the win, is the raison detre.
Sh/it’s hardwired. Biological imperative/compulsion/addiction. That should be faced & embraced by those lightly sprinkled-among that are wired differently.
But … Don Quixote, Sancho Panza & windmills are heavily selected for, too.
Day before yesterday was “Thanksgiving.” History, gerbil-wheeling in place, says the fare is cannibal pot, all the way.
Coffee is concluded. Switching to Darjeeling.
PS …. Part of the point that AJ Nock makes is that “education” is, must be preceded by educableness. The further point that flows from that pre-condition is that the educable self-educate (even in traditional settings). And from that also flows the shocking to many figure/ground that the educable are already educated, that what seems to show up from outside to inside was in fact latent, already there. “What you have to be before you can be a pole vaulter … is a pole vaulter.”
People want & need to believe (& have been inculcated to believe) they can buy (often on credit …debt) shortcut end-runs around themselves & can thereby traverse from uneducable to educated. The education “market” (racket, scam) is enormous in face of all the demand for shortcut alchemy - but that’s an impossible transformation being hope-sold.
Helen Gurley Brown, Cosmopolitan Magazine, “You can have it all.”
You can only have what you already have.
So its fun to think about people being sold what they already have, &/or what they will never have. Heads sellers “win” tails buyers lose.
Planned obsolescence plans in/for the consumer economy: whole lotta fraudiction going on. “Psst - the first one is, or few are, “free,” or cheap, or financed, kid ….
See the proper lightbulb built before the industrial revolution blightbulb went off (mass production & mass obsolescence are obverse/reverse of the same fiat coin); the consumers eat the junk & the “producers” eat the consumers:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9IMjamIX9Jk