I recently encountered the Proust Questionnaire. It is a regular feature in “Vanity Fair” magazine, where it is answered by a guest celebrity. When I got about halfway through I thought, “Voila! This would be a good architecture for an interview with a very objective voluntaryist.”
Tag: value
There is Only One Way to Save Our City
While many of my friends and colleagues wait in hope of “reform”, I’ll continue my quest to change the world by investing my voice and my votes in an entrepreneurial theory of social change. While the world at large insists on celebrating and fearing great leaders, I will celebrate the power of the individual as expressed through innovation and voluntary interaction in the marketplace.
Social Norms, Moral Judgments, and Irrational Parenting
Our current norm of extreme protection of children has become, unfortunately, not just a social norm, but a moral norm. If you don’t watch your child (or have some other responsible guard watching) every minute, you are, in the eyes of many people, doing something immoral. How can we change this crippling social norm and get back to common sense?
Liberty and Community Go Together
There is a form of community that is the whole basis of the market economy. It is an extended network of human relationships worked out in peace and mutual agreement. So far as we know, the capacity to form such cooperative relationships is distinct to the human experience.
On Free Will and Determinism
Choices aren’t willed into existence, but rather choices are a reaction of how our mind and individual being interacts within the world. You didn’t choose your spouse because you willed it, you chose your spouse because you liked them.
Discipline Needs to Be Learned, Not Taught
We often force students to do all sorts of things that don’t matter to them in the name of teaching them the virtue of discipline. Students don’t need to learn discipline. Students need to learn how to identify their preferences, how to assess their priorities, and how to think in accordance with principles.
How Far Should You Develop a Relationship with People You Disagree With?
My wife and I are incredibly social people and we are able to attract plenty of friends who do share similar and complimentary ideas on the world, and respect within relationships. If I was unable to harvest great relationships, I probably would not hold the views I have today.
Don’t Be Afraid of Hard Work
It’s easy for people to make the fallacious leap from “hard work isn’t everything” to “hard work isn’t anything.” We may very well be a culture guilty of working too much, but that doesn’t mean we should abandon the idea that there’s such a thing as working too little.
Problems Define You
Anytime something is not as though you would prefer it, you are dealing with a problem. Problems, though subjectively defined and internally maintained, are fundamental to how thinking, judging brains interpret reality. Your reason and your judgment are tools for solving the problems that are an unavoidable part of living. You can languish in the process of discomfort, or entertain yourself with creating a solution.
Stop Looking For Something That Works
Sometimes things will work really well for other people, but they won’t work so well for you. Sometimes things won’t work out for other people, but they’ll work really well for you. Professional advertisers have a phrase for this: “Individual results may vary.”