“What? You search? You would multiply yourself by ten, by a hundred? You seek followers? — Seek zeros! –“

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I am going to shelve these works together:

• The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil by Philip Zimbardo
• The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists by Neil Strauss
• Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil by Hannah Arendt
• Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson
• The Sorrow and the Pity: A film by Marcel Ophuls (the book + the video)
• Management of Organizational Behavior: Leading Human Resources by Paul Hersey, Kenneth H. Blanchard, Dewey E. Johnson

A common theme connects them. Each time I encounter this theme I feel a familiar sensation.

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“The cross on which I suffered was not that I know human beings are evil – instead, I cried as no one yet has cried: ‘A shame that their most evil is so very small! A shame that their best is so very small!’“

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I’ve taught my daughters this: If you do not actively work to be morally responsible and conscious human beings, you will be nothing but another psychic jumble (another zero) tossed about in the social medium, one day this person and the next day that.

Being human is a choice. Human being is a constant action. Stabilizing and harmonizing one’s instincts — cultivating and maintaining a soul — takes conscious effort.

I’ve told my daughters that I am raising them to be Kick-Ass Women who use charm and force together in concert to control their environments, and that they will secure their power by inspiring the gratitude of their followers. Genuine gratitude is the only security.

Surrogates for gratitude such as overt coercion or moral manipulations work until they suddenly fail.

One more thing: gratitude is either spontaneously felt, or it is moralistic bullshit. Where gratitude is demanded, or where ingratitude is made shameful or immoral — chances are, someone is unconcerned with your true interests. At best, they are tricking you. The more likely scenario is much worse: presumptuous, ignorant, lethal benevolence. Such benevolence feels no twinge of conscience as it sacrifices you to its own ethic, manifested as knowing with certainty what your best interests ought to be.

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“One has been a bad spectator of life if one has not also seen the hand that in a considerate fashion — kills.”

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The antithesis of akrasia (passive being-tossed-about by circumstance, changing perspectives and personalities and ethics and opinions depending on what’s going on) is hubris (moral solipsism, the invalidation  of all incompatible moral claims for the sake of remaining inert). Hubris is no better than akrasia, though it is a lot more fun. Akrasia means to inhabit a world of other subjects, for whom one is an observed object (in po-mo terms, under the Gaze), and in traditional religious terms it is considered the “feminine principle”. Hubris means to inhabit a world of observable objects contained within one’s own subjectivity, taken phenomenologically, and that is the “masculine principle”.

These two can, in modern style, be averaged and neutralized into a grayish compromise nothing that sort of sticks to certain rules in order to not be bad. It’s boring, and in some important ways it is worse than akrasia or hubris. At least akrasia gives you something to act upon and hubris gives you something to fight. Sexless androgyny is neither masculine nor feminine and it barely feels human. Just glimpsing it makes me tired.

Then there’s narcissism, which is a wildly contradictory mess of wanting to be seen as one who doesn’t care about anyone’s point of view but one’s own, but sees oneself as someone seen, and is constantly caught up in projecting and feeding on external perceptions, which are dismissed as irrelevant once consumed… It’s all fucked up. When I smell narcissism, I back way away.

But then there’s another androgyny of full masculine and full feminine in tension, symbolized by the hermetic Androgyne, and the yin and yang, and I’d argue also the Star of David, and which is mentioned in some way in many religious texts in terms of inner-outer (“making the inner like the outer”, “within-you-and-without-you”, etc.)

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One more Nietzsche quote:

Artist’s ambition. — The Greek artists, the tragedians for example, poetized in order to conquer; their whole art cannot be thought of apart from contest: Hesiod’s good Eris, ambition, gave their genius its wings. Now this ambition demands above all that their work should preserve the highest excellence in their own eyes, as they understand excellence, that is to say, without reference to a dominating taste or the general opinion as to what constitutes excellence in a work of art; and thus Aeschylus and Euripides were for a long time unsuccessful until they had finally educated judges of art who assessed their work according to the standards they themselves laid down. It is thus they aspire to victory over their competitors as they understand victory, a victory before their own seat of judgment, they want actually to be more excellent; then they exact agreement from others as to their own assessment of themselves and confirmation of their own judgment. To aspire to honor here means: “to make oneself superior and to wish this superiority to be publicly acknowledged.” If the former is lacking and the latter nonetheless still demanded, one speaks of vanity. If the latter is lacking and its absence not regretted, one speaks of pride.

(All quotes above in italics are also from Nietzsche.)