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Methodological Individualism

The term methodological individualism was coined by the Austrian economist and historian Joseph Schumpeter, who also, incidentally, coined the term creative destruction, in reference to the “gales of innovation” which freedom of exchange unleashes.

Methodological individualism is another way of saying individualistic method. Both terms denote “a principle of explanation, in which the individual human being serves as the basic and most fundamental unit of analysis in the social sciences.”

A social system is a system of individual relationships.

All actions are performed by individuals.

The individualistic method — or methodological individualism, if you prefer — does not, however, claim that only individual human beings are real and that social phenomena do not exist. It holds, rather, that each individual human being is alone able to think, feel, and act.

Methodological individualism rests upon the principle that the relevant object of political and ethical inquiry are the individual human beings in question, as distinguished from a society, race, class, sex, or any other group. Quoting Karl Popper:

“[Social phenomena] should always be understood as resulting from the decisions, actions, attitudes, etc. of human individuals, and we should never be satisfied by an explanation in terms of so-called ‘collectives’ (states, nations, races, etc.).”

The reason this principle is so critical to ground in the facts that give rise to it (and to thereafter deeply defend) is that any other view of humanity — which is to say, any view that doesn’t recognize the individual as the proper standard by which societies are gauged and maintained — results in command and control: other humans, purveyors of force, seizing control over other individual human lives.

Individualism has always been mischaracterized by critics, most of whom to this day charge it with treating individuals as “a hermetically sealed atom” — atomistic, is their word for it — isolated, shut off, cut off, uninfluenced by others.

This very mischaracterization underpins J.K. Galbraith’s ersatz demonstration in his obscenely influential book, from 1958, The Affluent Society. Galbraith’s arguments are to this day deployed routinely — despite the thorough debunkings a number of Galbraith’s fellow economists and philosophers have given his arguments.

As Friedrich Hayek famously explained it in his devastating critique of The Affluent Society:

Professor Galbraith’s argument could be easily employed, without any change of the essential terms, to demonstrate the worthlessness of literature or any other form of art. Surely an individual’s want for literature is not original with himself in the sense that he would experience it if literature were not produced. Does this then mean that the production of literature cannot be defended as satisfying a want because it is only the production which provokes the demand? (Friedrich A. Hayek, “The Non Sequitur of the ‘Dependence Effect,'” in Friedrich A. Hayek, Studies in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics, University of Chicago Press, 1967).

Economic theory is not built or based upon the unintelligible notion that each individual person arrives at her or his values in a vortex — some metaphysically impossible place sealed-off from all other human action and interaction — and the fact that this is how critics characterize individualism tells you how little they themselves understand the term. Human choices do not occur in a vacuum.

Of course individuals learn from one another — especially in a free society: learn from, influence, build upon, reciprocate, and so on — and we do so as individual humans acting voluntarily.

This is good, and it is healthy.

It does not, as J.K. Galbraith proposes, invalidate individual choice, neither does it make values “artificial and illegitimate.” On the contrary, it makes all choice and valuing possible.

Because valuing is choice.

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The Power of Ideas

It was toward the middle of the twentieth century that the inhabitants of many European countries came, in general unpleasantly, to the realization that their fate could be influenced directly by intricate and absturse books of philosophy. Their bread, their work, their private lives began to depend on this or that decision in disuputes on principles to which, until then, they had never paid any attention. In their eyes, the philosopher had always been a sort of dreamer whose divagations had no effect on reality. The average human being, even if he had once been exposed to it, wrorte philosophy off as utterly impractical and useless. Therefore the great intellectual work of the Marxists could easily pass as just one more variation on a sterile pastime. Only a few individuals understood the causes and probable consequences of this general indifference.

 

— The Captive Mind, Czeslaw Milosz (winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, 1980)

 

 

 

Chapter 32

The power of ideas and the supreme role of ideas in human existence can be seen no more starkly than in the fact that people subscribe to them without any hesitation, wavering, or scruples.

Societies are the result of human action, human action the result of ideologies.

As the Czeslaw Milosz passage which I quote at the top of this chapter captures so perfectly, societies and any concrete order of social affairs are the direct outcome of ideas.

Ideas have consequences, whether for good or for ill.

The following is a real-life illustration — writ sickeningly large — of what can happen when the idea of individuality, individualism, and independent thinking are not regarded as primary but replaced instead with the ideology of egalitarianism by force:

When the Khmer Rouge seized power in April 1975, they did so with the intention of obliterating its hierarchical political culture in order to reconstruct Cambodian society from ground zero as the world’s most egalitarian, and therefore revolutionary social order.

That passage comes from historian Karl Jackson, in a heartbreaking book, published by Princeton Press, called Cambodia 1975 – 1978. In this book, Jackson describes the Khmer Rouge (which was the name of the socialist-communist-Marxist party that took over Cambodia in the mid-1970’s) as “sectarians and radical egalitarians [who] saw the diversity and differences between people as the root of all evil.”

This, extrapolated and elaborated from the ideas of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, was the ideology. It was led by a cult-of-personality named Pol Pot, Western educated, who was also the architect of the Killing Fields – a seemingly incomprehensible genocide where Cambodian cities were systematically depopulated and the entire Cambodian population enslaved on collective farms with a horrifyingly draconian ideology-of-equality imposed upon all.

“Typically, the slightest dissent would be punished by the offender getting clubbed or starved to death, and so many Cambodians were dispatched by such methods (approximately 1.7 million between 1975 and 1979 according to one estimate) that fields filled with corpses became the macabre hallmark of the regime” (Ibid).

From the Journal of Asian Studies (1998):

“First, they tried to eliminate the use of linguistic registers that connoted kinship, age and other social differences. The word comrade, mitt, was suppose to replace titles, honorifics and even kin terms. Second, many non-verbal cues that connoted status, such as polite greeting forms and bending down before superiors, were also discouraged.”

A historian by the name of Jay Jordens writes that the “Khmer Rouge realized Buddhism was at the core of Khmer ideas of social hierarchy. Thus by abolishing religion and destroying all vestiges of Buddhism; monks, texts, images, rituals, and so on, they might destroy the moral underpinnings of the beliefs in ‘unequal souls'” (Propaganda, Politics and Violence in Cambodia, 1996).

And from the website Asia Pacific Curriculum:

By 1977, the distrust on the part of the leadership had reached paranoiac heights and the purges of suspected traitors increased. Even the ranks of the Khmer Rouge cadres themselves were purged, sending increasingly larger numbers of them and their families to prisons where they were tortured and then murdered. The most notorious of these prisons was S-21, a high school in Phnom Penh that was converted into a prison and torture centre run by Kaing Guek Eav, also known as Duch. Out of an estimated 15,000 prisoners who were sent to S-21, only seven survived.

Prisoners housed there were photographed and tortured to produce confessions. When the interrogators were finished, the prisoners’ corpses were carried by truck to the “killing fields” outside of Phnom Penh. There are approximately 20,000 of these mass graves in various locations in the country.

The relatively short time that Pol Pot ruled — approximately four years — was a living nightmare. An estimated one-quarter of the Cambodian population was killed. I ask you to please pause for a moment and process that.

The Cambodian people who survived survived only on “a ladle of watery rice gruel a day.” They were forced into back-breaking labor most of their waking hours – separated from their families (families do not matter in the Communist ideology, if you don’t know, since all humans are comrades equally — loved equally, and it’s supposedly reciprocal — your parents the same as the parents of others whom you’ve never seen in your life and who did not raise you).

Pol Pot’s regime forced the Cambodian people to eat in spectacularly unsanitary cooperatives, treating them worse than the poorly treated farm animals. They lived under incessant terror of being reported for even minor acts “such as taking a coconut from a tree or allowing cattle to graze in the wrong field.”

And incalculable number of people died as a direct result of these filthy, terror-stricken conditions.

Vietnamese minority groups in particular were singled out for persecution and annihilation. So were the Cham Muslim minorities. Survivors report that urbanites suffered harder work and even greater suspicion than the peasantry. Virtually the entire population worked on farms, and do you know why? Because the ideology of egalitarianism decrees that all humans do everything the same. Thus, since the government couldn’t force people into instant expertise and the comparatively luxurious standards of urban living, the government went for the opposite: evacuating the cities overnight and forcing everyone, no matter their knowledge and training, into agriculture.

In terms of the sheer numbers of individual lives taken, Hitler, Mao, and Stalin killed far more people than Pol Pot, and yet he and his genocidal regime nevertheless stand out among them all — for being, in my opinion, the most horrific and evil-perfect-practitioners of their ideology, which regards individual human life as a non-existent phenomena, and therefore unimportant, people only worth anything to the extent that they help produce food “collectively.” Thus the Khmer Rouge slogans, written and posted where the Cambodian people could read them, contained a murderous contempt and disregard for individual human life:

“To keep you is no benefit. To destroy you is no loss. Better to kill an innocent by mistake than spare an enemy by mistake.”

The Khmer Rouge is among the most ghastly of proofs you will ever read about regarding the paramount role of ideas in human life.

For those who harangue and harass me and others like me for our defending individuality and individual rights, please read deeply about Pol Pot and the Khemer Rouge — their annihilation of individual rights, individuality, and independent thinking — read what it led to in Cambodia.

 

As Vincent Cook expressed it so well:

Mass death is certainly no stranger to Communism. Even today a terrible famine stalks North Korea to remind us of the lethal nature of Marxism. However, Pol Pot has earned a special place in the history of Marxian Communism as his Khmer Rouge earned the special distinction of being the one Communist movement in history to actually attempt the full and consistent implementation of the ideals of Karl Marx.

Most Marxists would recoil at the suggestion that Pol Pot is the logical conclusion of their social philosophy, yet any honest assessment of Marx’s theory cannot conceal the fact that the radical egalitarianism of the Khmer Rouge is precisely what Marx predicted would be the ultimate culmination of all human history. It must be clearly kept in mind that industrial socialism, as it was known in the former Soviet Union and other mainstream Marxist states, is not the endpoint of Marx’s philosophy of history. In his view, the abolition of capitalist production relations is only the first stage of the worldwide proletarian revolution.

Marx anticipated that there would be a radical redistribution of wealth and a withering of the global socialist state (the “crude” stage of communism) followed by a fundamental transformation of human nature as all individual culture, personality, and economic uniqueness disappeared (the “higher” stage of communism). Marx looked forward to a time when individuals would be freed from an alleged alienation from their own humanity supposedly caused by the division of labor and money-based economic transactions. Individuality would be replaced by a new generic “species-being” [Marx’s term] personality, a personality that would specialize in nothing and be an expert at everything.

It is now a fact fairly well-known, even among socialists, that economic calculation under pure socialism is an impossibility. And yet compared with the idea that any country or economy could survive, let alone prosper, after government abolishes the division of labor — simultaneously crushing all individuality in the process — the calculation problem, as it’s known, seems downright minor even though it’s not: simply because this latter idea is sheer madness.

“Most Communist movements, faced with the utter infeasibility of industrial production under socialist central planning (let alone an abolition of the division of labor), chose to reconcile themselves with capitalism in various ways and to defer the Marxist ideal of higher Communism to a remote future that would conveniently never come. Some Communists, notably the Soviets and especially the Yugoslavs, practically admitted that the species-being ideal would never be realized and were willing to settle for varying degrees of centralized socialistic control mixed with elements of capitalism” (ibid).

Maoists, however, remained pure — at least for a time.

Thus the “Cultural Revolution” of China which vainly tried to transform human nature itself — individuals do not exist, these Maoists preached — that is, until its stupendous failure forced even the most radical of Maoists to step back and reevaluate. This failure-followed-by-reevaluation changed Maoism across Asia and the world — with one appalling exception: Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge.

Pol Pot understood that industrialization and the cities which come about through the division of labor would have to be eliminated if the Khmer Rouge were to come anywhere close to an egalitarian society. This is why almost immediately after the Khmer Rouge took power (in April of 1975), they began evacuating Phnom Penh. They were, in a very real and literal sense, merely acting with the courage of their Communist convictions.

“The worst that can be said of Pol Pot was that he was sincere,” Vincent Cook also wrote, and he’s right:

“The Cambodian people were in fact freed of the ‘alienation’ of a division of labor and individual personality, and were reduced to a perfectly uniform egalitarian existence on the collective farms. If the cruel reality of the Khmer Rouge slave state didn’t quite come up to the extravagant eschatological expectations of Marxist true believers, the fault lies exclusively with those who think of the Marxist pattern of historical development and its egalitarian outcome as a desirable state of affairs. It is not enough to say of Pol Pot, as Prince Sihanouk did: ‘Let him be dead. Now our nation will be very peaceful.’ We must also acknowledge that a Pol Pot-type passion for equality remains as a threat to the peace and well-being of every nation even if the former dictator himself is dead.”

There should be no forgetting the crimes of the Khmer Rouge — no matter how much time passes — no whitewashing them, no cultural amnesia concerning them, nor any diminishment or rationalization of their utter evil, especially not by academic elites and ideologically bankrupt intellectuals explicitly calling for Communism and telling us, as a “reminder,” that “Communism is good.” These people and their mindset need to be ideologically exposed and defeated — routed — on the battleground of ideas, because the truth is that when the facts are made clear and the philosophies presented in full, without any equivocation, circumlocution, jargon, or obfuscation, they don’t even have an argument, and so they don’t stand a chance. Nobody has a right to the life or labor of another human being.

The Cambodian Killing Fields should stand eternally as horrific and twisted reminder of the philosophy of egalitarianism, and the human race should never forget that any minister of force preaching the egalitarian doctrine-of-envy is the direct descendent and ideological disciple of Pol Pot.

 

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Christopher Columbus, Howard Zinn, and A People’s History of The United States

This is excerpted from Chapter 25 of my forthcoming.

Chapter 25

Howard Zinn, who was not a historian, is the author of a cultic classic called A People’s History of the United States, which is a tour-de-force of historical misinformation, sloppy scholarship, and outright prevarications. This perhaps partially explains why on the subject of history and the role of the historian Howard Zinn once wrote:

“History is not about understanding the past [but about] changing the future.”

I know of no serious historian who would agree with that statement, which strikes me now as a pretty good definition of propaganda.

Given that Howard Zinn was not, by any reasonable standard imaginable, an actual historian, it is more than a little paradoxical, then, that this same Howard Zinn authored a book entitled A People’s History of the United States, which is now a staple in American colleges and high-schools and junior-high-schools all across the country, and for which reason I’m including a mention of it here, in this book: because prevarications and misinformation on this level, influencing countless young minds, must be countered relentlessly, forcefully, intellectually, factually.

It is, for example, a poorly known fact that Howard Zinn – who grew fabulously wealthy in the United States he hated: rich and famous here because people willingly and voluntarily paid him money in exchange for his book of misinformation (a process I fully support, incidentally, caveat emptor), loading him up with the dollar bills he claimed to hate, via the laissez-faire system he explicitly antipathized (Howard Zinn was a lifelong member of the Communist Party of the United States [CPUSA], though never, to my knowledge, allowed his money to in any way be expropriated and redistributed, as the CPUSA dictates would have it), who, indeed, never left the America he hated so much, dying here, an old man, famous and venerable, in 2010 – was a vocal defender of the Stalin-era Soviet Union and also the Mao Zedong-era China:

“China,” wrote Howard Zinn, in A People’s History, “was in the hands of a revolutionary movement, the closest thing, in the long history of that ancient country, to a people’s government, independent of outside control” — this in praise of Chairman Mao, the murderer, who has the blood of approximately 100 million on his hands. (Noam Chomsky, meanwhile, who also propagandized for Pol Pot’s genocidal Khemer Rouge, called Mao’s China “a just society,” and, perhaps anticipating the locavore fad we’re now enjoying, also described Mao’s blood-red China as “a new society in which very interesting and positive things happened at the local level.”)

I want to at this point remind all readers and respectfully ask readers never to forget that Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong were, in terms of sheer numbers of people killed, two of the most murderous tyrants in world history.

It is a poorly known fact, as well, that Howard Zinn was a huge supporter of the homophobic dictator Fidel Castro who, wrote Howard Zinn, “set up a nationwide system of education, of housing, of land distribution to landless peasants.” Zinn unfortunately neglects to even mention, let alone elaborate upon, Castro’s decades and decades of systematic repression, the forced international isolation, the horrific poverty created and fostered by him, the grinding oppression, and of course the mass executions of regime opponents, intellectuals, journalists, and homosexuals.

Why does Howard Zinn neglect to mention all of that?

To ask the question is, I believe, to answer it.

In the opening of his bestselling book A People’s History, Howard Zinn begins with this description of Christopher Columbus:

“So, approaching land, they were met by the Arawak Indians…. The Arawaks lived in village communes, had developed agriculture of corn, yams, cassava. They could spin and weave, but they had no horses or work animals. They had no iron, but they wore tiny gold ornaments in their ears.”

Here is how Hans Koning described Christopher Columbus, in a book titled Columbus: His Enterprise: Exploding the Myth, which appeared the year before Howard Zinn’s book was published:

“The population were Arawak Indians … a people who had developed agriculture (corn, yams, cassava), who could spin and weave, but had no iron, no horses, no beasts of burden…. Their society seems to have been based on village communes where most property was jointly held…. Some of these people wore little gold ornaments in their ears and noses.”

Neither Koning’s book nor Zinn’s book cite any sources, which is unheard of for a work of history which purports to contain authentic scholarship, and neither men were, I repeat, actual historians.

Here, however, is the main thing I wish to point out now.

Among the most famous passages in all of Howard Zinn’s literature is the opening paragraph of A People’s History, wherein readers are treated to a loose transcription of Christopher Columbus’s log (or diary). Zinn’s transcription, which is again following the lead of Hans Koning’s description in the book that appeared just the year before Zinn’s, introduces passages with leading sentences and then, in an appalling display of academic dishonesty, omits full sentences — at which point proceeding to quote completely out of context and striking out all passages from Columbus’s log that controvert his pre-formulated genocidal narrative.

Christopher Columbus, whatever you think you know of him, wasn’t, for the record, guilty of genocide.

In his log entry for October 12, 1492, Christopher Columbus wrote:

“I warned my men to take nothing from the people without giving something in exchange.”

Both Howard Zinn and Hans Koning completely omitted this passage.

But the worst is still to come.

In the same paragraph of A People’s History — the opening paragraph — Howard Zinn, purporting to transcribe Columbus’s log, writes the following. I’m quoting Howard Zinn precisely – and by that I mean I’m including Zinn’s crucial use of ellipses:

“They have no iron. Their spears are made out of cane…. They would make fine servants…. With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want.”

That is, I say again, an exact quote from Chapter 1, paragraph 1, of A People’s History of the United States, by Howard Zinn. This passage has been cited countless times over the years and decades, and it’s not a stretch to say that this Howard Zinn passage has had and continues to have real societal ramifications.

It is a total deception and fraud.

Please look now at what Howard Zinn omitted, without any mention of omitting it, and look what he replaced with ellipses. I quote from Christopher Columbus’s log:

“I saw some who bore marks of wounds on their bodies, and I made signs to them to ask how this came about, and they indicated to me that people came from other islands, which are near, and wished to capture them, and they defended themselves. And I believed and still believe that they come here from the mainland to take them for slaves.”

This translation comes from a well-known scholar named Robert Henderson Fuson – perhaps the most widely used translation of Columbus’s logs – who explains this passage further:

“The cultural unity of the Taino” (a more specific name of the tribe which Zinn calls the Arawaks [something like “Native American Indians” verus “Apache Indians”]) “greatly impressed Columbus. Those who see Columbus as the founder of slavery in the New World are grossly in error. This thought occured to Samuel Eliot Morison (among many others), who misinterpreted a statement made by Columbus on the first day in America, when he said ‘They (the Indians) ought to be good servants.’ In fact, Columbus offered this observation in explanation of an earlier comment he had made [in his logs], theorizing that the people from the mainland came to the islands to capture these Indians as slaves because they were so docile and obliging.”

The boldface emphasis is mine.

Zinn’s use of ellipses between the sentences “They would make fine servants” and “With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want” is in actuality Zinn’s linking together two sentences which are not even in the same paragraph.

As a matter of fact, they’re not even in the same entry date in Christopher Columbus’s log. They’re two days apart.

The truth is that Christopher Columbus, who was a devout Catholic at a time when Spain was under Muslim siege – the Muslims had long-ago conquered the Iberian Penisula, and 1492 was the very year that the crucial battle of Granada occurred – the truth, I repeat, is that Christopher Columbus, who was no saint or angel, but a soldier, sailor, and missionary, was driven to save Christianity. He therefore made it his mission to counter Muslim conquest and to, in turn, spread Christianity in order to combat Muslim rule.

Christopher Columbus was a man motivated, like all missionaries, by his drive to convert people to his faith. Which is why Christopher Columbus also wrote in his log, about these same natives – and this is something else you find nowhere mentioned in any of Howard Zinn’s literature:

“I want the natives to develop a friendsly attitude toward us because I know that they are a people who can be made free and converted to our Holy Faith more by love than by force.”

Howard Zinn’s famous passage is outrageously deceptive in its selective quoting, and Howard Zinn, who has influenced so many millions of young minds, is arrantly guilty of context-dropping and academic fraud – omissions which are crafted precisely to convince all readers that Christopher Columbus had no care or concern for the physical or mental well-being of the natives but was only driven by “a frenzy for gold,” as Zinn says, which then led Columbus to enslave the natives for profit – when, that is, he wasn’t hunting them down with dogs, since they could not supply him with vast treasures of gold, from mines which existed only Columbus’s imagination.

Howard Zinn writes:

“The Indians had been given an impossible task. The only gold around was bits of dust garnered from the streams. So they fled, were hunted down with dogs, and were killed.”

In response to which, the anthropologist Carol Delaney, also translator of Columbus’s logs, writes this:

“Columbus wanted to launch a new Crusade to take back the Holy Land from the infidels (the Muslims). This desire was not merely to reclaim the land of the Bible and the place where Jesus had walked; it was part of the much larger and widespread, apocalyptic scenario in which Columbus and many of his contemporaries believed.”

In reference to Columbus’s October 12, 1492, entry, Carol Delany writes this:

“In my first reading of the diary I could not understand why he seemed so driven to find gold. But this understanding changes when one realizes that finding the gold was necessary not only to repay the people who had invested in the voyage (and to induce them to finance another), [but was also] essential if he was ever to finance another Crusade. Today, we might disapprove of that motive, but at the time [when the Moors were taking over, with extreme force and violence, much of Europe] it was felt to be a worthwhile and Christian duty.”

Carol Delany says this as well:

“Columbus strictly told the crew not to do things like maraud, or rape, and instead to treat the native people with respect. There are many examples in his writings where he gave instructions to this effect. Most of the time when injustices occurred, Columbus wasn’t even there. There were terrible diseases that got communicated to the natives, but he can’t be blamed for that.”

The natives also gave back plenty of diseases to the Europeans.

It is also a fact that Christopher Columbus never owned a slave.

It is a fact that Christopher Columbus adopted an indigenous child and made this child his son, and Howard Zinn does not mention this.

It is a fact that Christopher Columbus did not commit genocide.

I’m no zealous admirer of Christopher Columbus, nor am I his defender. That is not my primary point here. I believe in accuracy and historical truth, of which Howard Zinn and his detestable book make a mockery, and that — historical truth and historical accuracy — is what I seek to defend.

The fact is that Howard Zinn’s gurus Mao Zedong, Fidel Castro, and Ho Chi Minh have far more blood on their hands than Christopher Columbus ever did, and I will leave you with a quote from an excellent historian named Oscar Handlin, of Havard University, who’s meticulous in his research and mind-spinningly well-read, and who in 1980 reviewed Howard Zinn’s book A People’s History of the United States, before Zinn’s book developed its cultic and slavish following:

It simply is not true that ‘what Columbus did to the Arawaks of the Bahamas, Cortez did to the Aztecs of Mexico, Pizarro to the Incas of Peru, and the English settlers of Virginia and Massachusetts to the Powhatans and the Pequots.’ It simply is not true that the farmers of the Chesapeake colonies in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries avidly desired the importation of black slaves, or that the gap between rich and poor widened in the eighteenth-century colonies. Zinn gulps down as literally true the proven hoax of Polly Baker and the improbable Plough Jogger, and he repeats uncritically the old charge that President Lincoln altered his views to suit his audience. The Geneva assembly of 1954 did not agree on elections in a unified Vietnam; that was simply the hope expressed by the British chairman when the parties concerned could not agree. The United States did not back Batista in 1959; it had ended aid to Cuba and washed its hands of him well before then. ‘Tet’ was not evidence of the unpopularity of the Saigon government, but a resounding rejection of the northern invaders.

Dr. Oscar Handlin, The American Scholar, 49, 1980.

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Are You Fascinating?

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Well, are you, punk?

Or are you boring as hell?

How, furthermore, can you tell?

How can you tell if you’re an inveterate bore, or if you’re just in a kind of long-term funk?

Much of what we hear about commanding attention and the power to fascinate is theoretical and abstract, a sort of psychological jargon: fascination triggers, hotspots, personality tests and the like.

Let us, for once, get concrete.

Here are 7 differences between the fascinating person and the boring piece of meat:

1. Fascinating people have many activities they enjoy and become good at, which gives them a greater wealth of material to mine.

Boring people have one or perhaps two.

Diversify, therefore, your activity portfolio.

2. Fascinating people communicate what most others can’t — or communicate it in ways most others don’t.

Words, contrary to popular belief, are not primarily for communicating — which is their secondary function. Their primary function is for clarity of thought.

Before one can communicate clearly, one must have something to communicate clearly.

Language brings about this process.

The desire for clarity presupposes the desire to be understood, and this is why the ability to communicate clearly — in writing or in speech — is one of the surest signs of intelligence there is.

And intelligence, as you know, is always fascinating.

3. Fascinating people aren’t afraid to try new things — which means:

They’re not only willing to break out of their comfort zone but also motivated to do so. Why?

Because they know that comfort breeds complacency.

Interesting people, understand, are, to one degree or another, adventurous. They like to get out and explore.

Life is largely an adventure — provided you treat it as such.

4. Fascinating people are au courant.

They keep up-to-date on at least some news.

Which is why as a bartender you often find yourself charmed by those customers who have a certain knowledge of pop culture: because this, too, shows that an effort is being made to stay informed.

Thus:

5. Fascinating people are knowledgable.

Boring people are poorly informed — and so they’re unable to hold up their end of the conversation.

Being poorly informed, let it be noted, is entirely within each person’s control.

The better you’re informed, the more you have to talk about.

The more you have to talk about, the more fascinating you are.

Which is not to imply that fascinating people blast through one conversational subject after another.

It means, rather, that the deeper down your knowledge goes, the greater your conversational pow-uh.

6. Fascinating people don’t conform

Independent thinking is non-conformity.

Conformity is about as boring and banal as it gets.

Fascinating people have the confidence to think for themselves.

Boring people do not.

Fascinating people like variety.

Boring people prefer the same old.

Conformity is the same old.

It is also the opposite of courage. It takes courage to respond to non-thought — which is to say, conformity — as it takes courage to break away from the pack.

It takes courage to think for oneself.

If you’re one of those rare courageous people, the world will be riveted by you.

7. Fascinating people are driven and disciplined.

Boring people are passive.

Discipline is habit, and habit is a choice.

This is precisely why no one is fated to be boring — not even close.

How, then, does one go about expunging inveterate vapidity?

Studies show that you can bore people in two fundamental ways: both in what you say and in how you say it.

Being boring, in other words, can be a matter of style or a matter of subject. Combine those two things into one and it’s downright deadly.

The qualities that make someone fascinating, or beguiling, or hypnotizing, or mesmerizing are — and this is important — a side-effect. They are a by-product: specifically, a by-product of a life lived well, a life lived interestingly.

The real insight into the power of fascination is this:

The fascinating person is not living her life to be fascinating: she’s living her life, rather, in a way that cultivates her living potential, and that’s why age cannot wither her, nor custom stale her infinite variety.

Make no mistake, there are in the universe an infinite variety of fascinating things upon which you may fix your attention.

To be fascinating, therefore, you must come to recognize life as the adventure it is, and you must then proceed accordingly.

You must crave new experiences and desire a deeper understanding of the world.

Decide what you want and figure out how to get it.

Boring people don’t have big dreams. They actually believe it when they’re told, as we all are at one time or another, that they probably can’t do it.

Fascinating people, upon the other hand, believe no such thing.

Fascinating people shoot for the stars — and often reach them. If they don’t reach them, they become incontrovertibly more fascinating just in their singleminded striving.

Fascinating people picture their lives as they want their lives to be, and then they focus their energy on shaping their lives in that way.

Don’t let others decide your future for you. Don’t give people that kind of control over you. This is not only NOT fascinating: it’s fatal.

Be the master of your own fate. Be the captain of your own soul.

Because, in the final analysis, fascinating people are the shapers of their own soul.

And that is why they seem to others not fractured but whole.




Excerpted from my forthcoming book Whiskey Wisdom: A Bartender’s Guide to Living Ravenously


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Whiskey Wisdom: How to be the Smartest Person in the Bar

(The following is excerpted from Whiskey Wisdom: A Bartender’s Guide to Living Ravenously)


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You can spot her from a mile away, the smartest person in the bar — or, if not quite from a mile away, nonetheless from very far.

She doesn’t necessarily think of herself as smart.

Still, her brain is carefully crafted — self-crafted and stylized — like a work of art.

Her eyes are alert and bright and lively. They twinkle.

She’s relaxed and polite, with a well-modulated voice that speaks to you in the appropriate tone.

Her smile glows like expensive stone.

You do not quickly forget that smile.

She walks purposefully, and yet not aggressively, or with an overbearing style.

She has a sense of humor.

You can see that she knows there’s a kind of dignity in loneliness. She doesn’t go out of the way to seek friends or groups or any kind of crowd.

In general she prefers quiet to loud.

She gives and receives compliments gracefully, can be strong and assertive, quick to stick up for herself, but she can also speak of her shortcomings and accomplishments with an equal ease which you envy.

When communication or clarification is called for, she’s never dismissive or inexplicably silent — never, of course, in any way aggressive or violent.

What’s her trick?

What’s the secret?

The secret is this:

First, develop a total disregard for where you think your abilities end.

You must aim beyond what you believe you’re capable of.

Do things you think you’re not able to do.

Nothing is impossible, in this regard. The will to believe is the most important ingredient in becoming what you want.

The discipline to follow through is next. It is also the most difficult.

Why?

Why most difficult?

Because it requires hour-after-hour, day-after-day practice.

It requires diligence.

Second — unless you’re in a technical discipline like medicine or mechanical engineering — drop out of college immediately.

College stunts the mind.

It’s a breeding ground of mindlessness and unoriginality, and an exercise in non-thought. It’s a snake-infested swamp of dogma — and, like all dogma, it will corrupt you and scar your soul irreparably.

College is conformity.

The cost of conformity is colossal.

Individuality, on the other hand, is a prerequisite of genius.

Genius is the cultivation of your living potential.

The deeper your cultivation, the deeper your genius.

Cultivate, therefore, a purpose around which you can construct your life.

Passion is largely willed: the more you do something, the deeper your understanding of it grows, so that after time your passion for that thing develops and spreads like a gorgeous soft surge of water-ripples.

Third, whatsoever thy hand findest to do, do it with all thy might.

What, after all, does it mean to be smart?

It means to self-stylize your brain, like a work of art.

It means to be intelligent — like you.

Intelligence is your mental capacity to deal with a wide range of thoughts and ideas.

That’s why it never mattered to you when you were voted least likely to succeed — why it never fazed you when they called you a misfit, a malcontent, alienate, disaffiliate, deviant, recalcitrant. And it’s why your natural-born predilections and proclivities and predispositions are and always have been irrelevant: because intelligence is an acquired skill.

It must be developed by each person’s own desire and activated by each person’s will.

It must be habituated and automated by each person’s own mind.

Which is why it’s quite rare and beautiful, and rather difficult to find.

This, incidentally, is true for both children and adults: the cultivation of intelligence requires effort — or, to put the same point in a slightly different way: thinking is an act of choice.

Thought requires work.

Whereas to be stoopid is relatively simple: all you have to do, in essence, is do nothing. If you do nothing, stoopid will naturally occur.

Being smart, however, requires a different sort of action.

It’s not passive.

On the contrary, thinking is an entirely active process the undertaking of which is, when you think about it, massive.

She’s intelligent, yes, but in a highly unorthodox way, they say, hard to pinpoint why: bookish but not book-smart, introspective, certainly, and everything she does — yes, everything — she does with all her heart.


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