https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=Zjm36k2GoW0
Can you get a job or a career? Can you educate yourself? Can you regulate your the draw of temptation drug and alcohol use in particular sexual temptation as well? No, do you do anything that’s remotely resembling civic responsibility? Do you are a member of a political party? Do you go to church? You know, I don’t go to church because you know, their beliefs don’t match mine. It’s like who the hell cares about your beliefs? You’re like 16. You don’t even have beliefs. And if you think it’s like you’re right and that and the Catholic Church is wrong, well, good luck with that attitude. And that isn’t to say that the church, for example, or a political party doesn’t need repair, because all institutions are always falling apart and corrupt. That’s, that’s a story as old as time. That’s the evil uncle. But good, you have something to do. Go fix it up. Definition of man. Ah, what am I a biologist? But as it happens, I am a biologist. So I guess I don’t have that excuse. Productive generosity is good. I read, I once read a good description of Christian charity and it was productivity plus generosity, which I really like because the hyper empathic types only concentrate on the generosity end of that. It’s like, I’m generous. Yeah, but like, do you have any money? No, I’m generous with other people’s money. Yeah, well, you know, you’re missing half the equation there. And that’s really the distinction between conscientiousness and agreeableness from a personality perspective. Those are two cardinal personality traits and agreeableness, which is basically an empathy dimension has no correlation whatsoever with success in enterprise, business, creative domains. In fact, among managers, agreeableness looks like it’s slightly negatively correlated with success because hyper agreeable managers can’t say no, they can’t discipline their employees, they can’t set limits, and they’re susceptible to manipulation. So productive generosity is pretty good. There is more to it, obviously more to being a man than productive generosity. But as a central notion, that’s a good one. The productivity requires aim, orientation, responsibility, discipline, all of that, that willingness to work, that willingness to make sacrifices, which is the hallmark of maturity in the service of a higher goal. And that responsibility, the productive responsibility should manifest itself in relationship to the individual. So you should be responsible to yourself and your future self, the community of selves that you are across time. And then you should be responsible for and productive for as many people as you can manage. And so that might be first your intimate partner, your wife, second, your parents, your siblings, your children, maybe your children primarily, although there’s a trade-off there with your wife, then your local community, then your broader community. You want to take on all that responsibility if you can, in a sense that’s both productive and generous, that gives you something to do, justify your miserable life to yourself and everyone else. And you need to do that. It orients you solidly in the world if you do that. And it gives you a dragon to fight, a real one. And that’s where the gold is. So as everyone has known forever, and as we continue to remind ourselves, how should you arm yourself? Well, that’s kind of what a humanities education teaches you to some degree. Arm yourself with words. Be precise in your language. Say what you mean. Read. Read great men and great women. Make yourself literate. Get your tongue in order. Get it under your own control. Get rid of the ums and the likes and the you-knows and the pauses. And get rid of everything you say that you only say to impress other people. And just see if you can say what you believe to be true. That’s an adventure. That’s the thing about the truth. You know, if you aren’t speaking the truth, well, you got to ask yourself, if you’re not speaking the truth, who is it that’s talking? If you’re saying something that you do not believe to be true, it’s not you talking. It’s something else. It might be the part of you that wants to manipulate the other person into delivering what you think you want from them. Well, what is that spirit of manipulation that you’ve allowed to possess you? It’s not you. Let’s say you decide to live your whole life in that instrumental manner. You’re going to craft your words like the student who says, well, I’m going to write what the professor wants to hear so I get the grade. It’s like, well, you just turn yourself into that. Well, who is it that’s doing that manipulating? It’s not you because those aren’t your words. So even if you get the grade, it’s not you that got the grade. It’s the false you. It’s the manipulative you. So you do that your whole life. You don’t have your life. And then you think, well, God, that was a miserable life. I manipulated everybody. They were so damn stupid. They were sucked in by it. They’re all contemptible. Everyone does it, you know, which they don’t, by the way. And so that’s a pathway to bitterness, partly because if you’re a manipulator and you use your language falsely, you don’t live your own life. You live the life of whatever possesses you when you think it’s you manipulating. And so you live the life of the spirit of manipulation. And that’s, there’s no difference between that in some fundamental sense and demonic possession. So if that’s what you want, go right ahead. But what you miss is the adventure of your own life. You know, because if you say what you think, this is a really important thing to understand. You have no idea what will happen to you. You don’t know what will happen. You have no idea what will happen if all you do is say what you think, because you have to let go of everything. Just to do that, you have to assume that there isn’t anything better that can happen than what happens if you tell the truth, no matter what happens. Because you say, you know, I’ll tell the truth and I get in trouble. It’s like, well, is that good or bad? Well, it’s not so good when it’s happening. When you get in trouble, that can be devastating. But in the medium term or the long term, I mean, in my situation, I’ve gotten trouble plenty of times for things I’ve said. And many times I thought, you know, that was fatal. That was the end. I said something or it was misinterpreted, but often I said something that, you know, I was going to get taken out. I was going to get canceled. And that was the end of my reputation. And every single time, and I hope partly because I didn’t say things that I didn’t think were true, every single time it switched around. And so eventually the cancellation attempt not only failed, but massively backfired. But man, living in that gap between when the pressure was on, let’s say, and it turned around, that wasn’t pleasant. But it’s certainly adventurous because you don’t know what’s going to happen. And maybe that is the adventure of your life, right? Imagine that the world was constituted so that the true adventure of your life emerged as a consequence of truth in speech and action, because that would be reflective of the real you. So it would be you living. And then imagine that the adventure that would occur if you dwelled in the truth would be so overwhelming that it would justify all the suffering. And I think that’s true. The great people I know are brutally truthful to themselves and other people. And they have insanely adventurous lives. And they also get more and more and more competent. I’ve talked to my daughter a lot about this. My daughter runs my companies. My daughter didn’t know much about business when she started, and she was pretty sick too. And she didn’t know a lot. And so it was easy for people who thought they knew a lot about business to pull the wool over her eyes. But Michaela has the ability to ask stupid questions. And we’ve talked about that a lot. It’s like, you only have to ask a stupid question once if you’re alert. You ask a stupid question. And if you’re in a crowd and you ask a stupid question, 80% of the people in the crowd have the same question. They’re just too cowardly to ask. But you ask and then someone actually tells you, you never have to ask that question again. You’re no longer stupid.