The first step to breaking free from the past is changing how your brain operates. More important than what you experience will be how you interpret your experiences. The same conditions witnessed by different people will create quite different effects. Your mind is a factory for turning raw observation into elaborate paradigms of meaning.
Tag: identity
Who Do You Think You Are?
It is tempting to settle with the influences we have early in life. They give us guidelines that we think that we can always fall back on when the life’s new challenges come too quickly or hit us too hard. If you have the courage to undo the foundations of your upbringing, you will open yourself to all the versions of yourself that you can become. This is how you figure out what you actually care about.
Follow the Mythological Path in Life
Our lives become a part of mythology when we pursue personal transformation through primordial patterns in the human psyche. We follow the hardwired path to arrive at superior versions of ourselves. The stories which have recurred with the greatest longevity in our cultures are those which appeal most profoundly to our underlying program for progression through life.
Love without Discrimination is Meaningless
Choice is what will unlock your ability to accomplish your most heroic deeds. Discrimination is what will unlock the path you will follow and the battles you will fight. Choose wisely.
“But Gregory, Why on Earth Do You Need so Many Passports?”
Since it is not practical (and in most cases impossible) to exist beyond the influence of nation-states, the next best option for the exceptional person seeking to expand his identity is to embrace multiple nationalities.
Cultural Osmosis
The enemy of reason is authority. People either believe something because reason tells them it is a true belief, or they believe it because some authority figure, whether it be a teacher, a parent, a priest or a politician, tells them it is so and they choose not to actively engage their reason in questioning the truth of what they are taught.
The “Problem” of Immigration
Before I was introduced to voluntaryism I believed that illegal immigration was a huge problem for the people of the United States. However, I now understand that all of the alleged problems of illegal immigration disappear when we take government out of the equation.
Ideology, Identity, Solidarity, and Collective Action
The interrelated complex of ideology, identity, solidarity, and collective action form the ground level in fruitful social analysis. Leaving out this complex, as both mainstream and Austrian economists usually do, means that one sacrifices the opportunity to understand what otherwise seems inexplicable or gets explained only by bizarrely twisting the standard model. At least, so I have argued since the early 1980s, most fully in chapter 3 of Crisis and Leviathan, but with some elaboration and many applications in later works.
Fake News, Fake Politics, and Fake Policy
Fake news is as old as news itself. Political reporting in particular has always served as a tool of those who hold or seek to gain a grip on power. Respectable news sources, such as the New York Times and the Washington Post, are not and never have been strangers to the distribution of false, twisted, or selectively partial and slanted reports. Less prestigious news outlets have also played the game. Perhaps the only new development on this front recently is the use of the Internet to spread fake news quicker and farther than the old media could. The news cycle revolves constantly now, and hence news, true and false, is placed before the public on an instant, worldwide scale as never before.
Gender Identity is a Hall of Mirrors
I’ve said some things on transgender issues that if people were paying close attention might seem like I am playing both sides of the fence. I hold 3 main strident positions on the matter.