Our capacity to glean insights from our struggles gives us power and promise. Each time we’re exposed to a new challenge, we gain the power of resilience. Each time we engage a new concept, we experience the promise of greater possibilities.
Tag: trust
Be a Coach, Not a Cult Leader
When you get your kicks from being seen as the great and glorious guru, you become the kind of leader who instructs people in a way that makes them more dependent on your guidance.
Relationships Are Personal, but Rejection Doesn’t Need to Be
When people fail to satisfy you, try to understand their behavior in terms that aren’t about you. Consider the possibility that they are simply acting on their own self-interests in the best way they know how. And even if they made a real mistake or committed a real vice, it probably wasn’t because they were out to get you.
Prejudice and Privilege
Very few aspects of our lives are determined by the initial benchmarks people create in their mind on first view. The human brain makes new judgments with new information. It sets new benchmarks and new conceptual understandings. The aspects of our person that gets represented in people’s minds is not a pigeonhole and it isn’t a curse. 98% of the time you will get a new opportunity to represent yourself in a way that is unique to you.
Anarchy and Islam
I’ve met Muslims of every school of anarchist thought from anarcho-socialists to national-anarchists. Prominent among them are Hakim Bay’s “ontological anarchism” and Yakoub Islam’s “post-colonial anarcho-pacifism” but this is my story.
Cops I Have Known
I feel bad for the good people I have known who became cops. I know some of them had the best of intentions. Yes, some saw the pay and the “authority” as tempting bait, but even those managed to convince themselves this was a way they could do good while collecting rewards. Maybe they were even still good people as long as they were off the clock, but no one can be good while being a cop. Not anyone.
Liberty: Enemy of Crony Capitalism
Most people now deeply distrust the government, quite understandably. And many of these same folks have become aware of the extent to which crony capitalism is messing up their lives. Up to this point, libertarians such as myself can only say “welcome to the club.” But here is where things oft go awry.
Begging To Be Enslaved
“Unmoored”? Being chained to an aggressive thief makes people feel steady and safe? Can a person like that even be considered a person? Human, yes. I can see that, but without apparent “personhood”. Pitiful.
We Don’t Need The State To Educate!
Do we really need the State to educate? Most people believe this to be the case, especially for the poorest among us. But E.G. West and James Tooley – and several others – have looked at the actual history of education, and found something startling: mass education existed before heavy state involvement.
A Guide to the Basic Anxiety of Life
Underlying much of what we do is an uncertainty, an anxiety, a fear, doubts, dissatisfaction … And we react to these anxieties, dissatisfaction and uncertainty in so many unhelpful ways: we seek distraction, we eat unhealthy food, we procrastinate, we get caught in a cycle of anxiety and unhappiness, we lash out at others, we dwell in our loneliness, and then we get in denial about it all. If we could learn to deal with the basic anxiety of life, we would have much more ease and less struggle.