Last week’s blog, I started with a fictional anecdote. This week, I’ll start with something real, a personal story about something deeply important in my life: philosophy. I’m serious when I say this. Philosophy saved my life.
See, from puberty to around my sophomore year of college, I took a lot of things for granted. I believed that I had no control over my life, that I was a product of my circumstances rather than my character. And I saw my worth as something determined by the approval of other people rather than the fulfillment of my own potential.
All of this reflected in the way I acted. I prioritized immediate satisfaction and spent my days napping and watching television and my nights either hitting the bars (surprising coming from Drunk Rothbard, right?) or cramming for tests that were the next day.
It was a life of procrastination and panic and even though I was trying my hardest to impress people, my relationships weren’t really developing the way I wanted them to and existing ones, such as the ones with my family, were deteriorating.
At the end of the day, I was dissatisfied. I had this feeling of emptiness. It’s hard to describe what that felt like. But I just remember believing that the feeling would just go away with time, as if it had nothing to do with the way I was thinking or the way I was acting. I didn’t see myself as having much of an influence.
Seven Habits: My Personal Turning Point
This didn’t end until the following summer when my dad forced me to read “Seven Habits of Highly Effective People” by Stephen Covey. Covey is not Aristotle, Plato, Aquinas or Kant and “Seven Habits” is generally categorized as a self-help book.
But to me, it’s really just a profound explanation of personal ethics written in layman’s terms. I could go on about each habit for pages, but they could essentially all be summed up as a refutation of what he calls the “personality ethic,” the pursuit of “quick-fix” solutions to boost your public image, rather than focusing on acting in correspondence with true and immutable moral principles.
In other words, its alternative, the “character ethic” is rooted in doing good. The “personality ethic” is only concerned with making others think you are doing good.
Covey’s insistence on promoting the character ethic is important because it stands against the tide of degeneracy that has overcome American popular culture over the last century-and-a-half.
This degeneracy has come hand-in-hand with a growing demand for instant gratification. An Austrian economist might describe this as a growing “high time preference” among individuals in our society.
As people become less willing to sacrifice lesser goods in the present for greater goods in the future, they become more inclined to the personality ethic because it promises a “quick fix,” but they fail to realize that the so-called “fix” is hardly even a “fix” at all. Rather, it temporarily soothes the ills of a deeper problem and thereby distracts from the solving of the problem itself and, in some cases, only adds to it.
Ultimately, “Seven Habits” showed me first-hand that often our dissatisfaction is a result of a faulty understanding about reality. It stems from a denial about what is true and in our nature as human beings.
I was unhappy because I was being dishonest with myself. I was making excuses for my behavior instead of doing what I reasonably knew to be in my best long-term interest. And when this unhappiness struck, I denied my ability to face it, which only perpetuated it further.
Luckily, as I gradually attempted to adopt the seven habits, I was able to grow a lot more satisfied with my life over the course of the next few years. I found myself thinking more in the long-term and gained better control over my impulses. My work ethic improved. I did better in school and my relationships, I became disciplined in my writing and I found a passion for the ideas of liberty, peace and prosperity.
The Philosophical Battleground
My next step in my philosophical journey came when I got into Jordan Peterson and Ayn Rand. Though they have their differences of opinion (and I have my differences as well), they both helped me to realize that many, if not most, of the problems we face in today’s world are not merely a matter of politics. More so, they’re matters of philosophy.
We all have a philosophy, whether we admit it or not. Philosophy, after all, is just the way we understand the world. We don’t have to read anything or take a class to have one.
Like I said, dissatisfaction can stem from faulty ideas about reality – faulty philosophy – but dissatisfaction is a mild description of what can result from widespread faulty philosophy. Bad philosophy, on a grand scale, leads to war, slavery, economic destitute and genocide. Accurately, it could be said to be the mother of all hell on Earth.
As mankind grew into the rational beings we are today, distinct from all other animals mainly in that single aspect, we naturally obtained a greater understanding of reality. That greater understanding saw the birth of civilization along with religion, the written word, mathematics and science.
Unfortunately, bad philosophy, i.e., ignorance, was the primordial condition from which we have been in a perpetual struggle to escape. That being said, bad philosophy has always existed. In most societies, it saw the rise of the State, which is founded wholly on a philosophy of war and deception.
In some civilizations, however, the good philosophy prevailed over the bad. Men, lifted above the primitive struggle for mere survival, became more likely to think long-term. Economic progress was made. Specialized labor and technology brought about a higher standard of living for a great number of people.
But as men entered the modern era, the masses began to entirely reject the foundations that progress was resting on – reason, faith and virtue. Hyper-skepticism, moral relativism and nihilism became a plague on consciousness. These ideas stood firmly against the existence of free will, the human intellect, an objective reality and a good and bad. They are a blatant rejection of knowledge.
Men took their faith away from God and reason, and they placed it in the State, who, in return, only took from them and lead them into catastrophic wars. The 20th century was beyond a doubt the bloodiest and most destructive in human history. Humans were slaughtered in mass, whether on the battlefield, in the concentration camps or in the gulag.
It takes little observation to notice the growing sentiment of dissatisfaction present in today’s America. Evidence lies in ever-rising levels of suicide, mental illness and substance abuse as well as the growing animosity, hostility and division between groups in society.
Amidst all the suffering, we refuse to return to the only thing that can save us: a sound philosophy.
We raise children not to think for themselves and to take what they learn in public school at face value.
Our universities have become indoctrination camps run by the frontline proponents of those detrimental philosophies, pushing their secular religion of irrationality, tribalism and warfare on society’s youth.
And popular culture, by appraising instant gratification, only perpetuates the degeneration further, adding to its previously stated ill effects.
Returning to Knowledge and a Hope for the Future
If we have any hope for a future, we have no choice to but to reject these trends. We must return to knowledge and trust in reason and virtue. We must pursue the character ethic and hold ourselves accountable as individuals to be honest with ourselves and strive to be the best people we can be.
Before I reached my turning point, I thought ideas like these were just boomer-talk. I discounted them because I thought that they were outdated and too stern. As a matter of fact, they do require that we hold ourselves to a higher standard. That can be discouraging, actually scary.
But the truth is, they don’t expect you to never make mistakes. Rather, they expect you to recognize and learn from your mistakes. I was wrong to think that discipline is restrictive. As I embraced knowledge and accumulated more responsibility, I realized how liberating it was instead.
I was reminded of all this recently when I talked to Douglas Rasmussen, who spoke at the Austrian Economic Research Conference just a few weeks ago. What Rasmussen told me first came off as strange and maybe a little funny if you’ve got your mind in the gutter.
“Knowledge is erotic,” he said.
No. He didn’t mean that knowledge was getting anybody going… down there… or anything (at least I hope not). Rather, he meant that the love of knowledge was a source of satisfaction, but also a never-ending pursuit. When we begin to actively expand our understanding of reality, we are embarking on a quest to know how we can become our best selves.
Of course, being that human beings are both diverse in some ways and similar in others – there are some characteristics unique to individuals and others shared among all people – some knowledge is useful to some people, and not others, but other knowledge is useful to everyone simply on account of their humanity.
Specialized knowledge about specific trades, interests and skills falls into the former group.
Philosophical knowledge – truths about the nature of reality, intelligence, morality, happiness, etc. – is part of the latter group. Philosophical knowledge is relevant to all people.
That’s because it’s the knowledge necessary to live a good life. It doesn’t require that you read fat ass books written thousands of years ago. It only requires that you explore ideas, think critically and apply your knowledge to what you do.
Applied knowledge brings fulfilment to individuals’ lives. When carried to the masses, it is the seed that gives rise to peace and prosperity.