I drafted a v1 of this philosophy some years ago. Much has changed. More will change. Here’s v2.
[Update: I now have people deeply devoted to philosophy critiquing this, asking for proofs and definitions. V3 in the works!]
[Some key updates made on April 11 after this original post was made on April 10, 2023].
Here’s the TLDR:
- Develop yourself and unlock your potential, create strength and become invincible against the bad actors and life events.
- Develop others with often indirect means to unlock their potential. Be a guide and a coach.
- Then to change the world for the better by increasing numbers, the community you can reach and ultimately shift the culture. Partnering with others, because this really is a team sport, is an accelerant to shifting culture.
This is the order to understand for life: Exist -> Survive -> Physical & Mental Strength -> Value -> Material Strength -> Survive well -> Thriving -> Happiness -> Spread the Thrive to others -> Spread the thrive to the world.
Existence is being alive (existing) and knowing it (consciousness).
We did not choose to be born into a skin suit or where we pop out, but once we live, we avoid pain and seek survival. Our development appears to flourish, when we seek development through challenges to thrive along with rest.
The physical supports the mental, the mental supports the material and protects the physical. To be supported throughout life, one must have strong physical ability, mental ability, and material ability.
Mental ability is the strongest of the three. It is supported by the physical and it creates the material. The material can be lost, but mental ability can recreate it anywhere, especially when knowledge is documented and when it can be accessed. Mental ability is the ability to create value and trade it for a profit without damaging other people or supporting structures. Damaging others ultimately creates weakness for the physical and requires greater expense of the mental and this distraction is from a greater need for protection.
A weak physical ability means you must have even more mental and material ability to survive.
A weak mental ability means you must have even more physical and material ability to survive and you must fight with all life left in you to increase your mental ability.
A weak material ability means you must have even more physical and mental ability. Focus your mental ability towards building strength.
Let’s define strength. Physical strength means you can both lift heavier objects and do this more often. Mental strength means you can endure and grow from the suffering and difficulties of experiencing troubles in the past, present and future. Material strength means you can endure financial surprises and opportunities that come with life and even move past them to greater opportunities. (The goddess of fortune wastes no time on the unprepared.)
Luck exists, but you are much better able to be prepared for it the greater your abilities are.
Relying on luck is faith or hope. Followers of faith or hope in the pursuit of luck must take action to achieve physical, mental and material ability. Not taking action is death.
The purpose of life is to thrive (pursuit of happiness). All actions of pursuit must be towards thriving. Therefore action is required for thriving.
If you do not choose to thrive, then you are choosing death. Feelings of helplessness are death. You must choose through reason what thriving is. Therefore reason enables thriving. Not using reason is destruction.
Other beings exist and have this same choice but many are not aware of it.
Everyone needs to survive, but some will choose destruction. That’s because the 7 deadly sins are out there. But, they are really often not sins but roads for learning. The key is to not go down these roads too far. When you go down these roads too far, then tunnel vision happens. This can happen with anything. Alcohol is an example. But rigid thinking is another example. Hard held opinions limit the ability to see connections of what is really going on. Some will say Things are not as they seem or the Lord works in mysterious ways. Watch out that this blocks the growth of perception.
Those who barely survive are to be carefully considered. Those who survive well at the nefarious expense of others are to be avoided at all costs. They are the ones who have gone too far down the road of greed or self importance or pleasure or any of the 7 deadly sins (there are more than 7 but they are more subtle) which leads to destruction. Those who survive without knowing why or are unconscious are to be seriously considered on whether to engage or not. Choose those who survive well through their conscious choice of survival as those who you work with. These are the people who are the strongest people on earth. By working with these people, others will see the example and be influenced towards the goodness.
Think of things in terms of manna (which bolsters your energy across the physical and the mental). The things that grow you. Think of the bad things as kryptonite. These are the things that take you down and reduce your manna. Money is manna (and material to thrive when the physical deteriorates) and community capital or the ability to create new tools is manna. It is a tool to do good for your development and safety and then to enable you to partner with others who are working on the same level.
Watch out for the difference between resistance and warnings. Sometimes you sense a warning and that means you should really be careful with your life moves. Other times, it’s resistance to something that really is a good move but either you have fear or you aren’t strong enough to make the move yet. The trick is when you know it’s resistance, to begin to build your strength there.
Fighting or taking from another is either destruction of the other or you or both. Therefore, this is the path of death and should only be taken if you are forced against your will. Avoid all situations where this can be a potential outcome. (I appreciate the skill of MMA and love seeing the amazing flying wing suit videos. I love seeing the amazing X Games feats. The human potential there is a wonderful example of what our bodies are capable of. But, when we are young we often take too many risks that ultimately destroy our skin suit. That to me particularly is folly. But some times that may be the best option depending on one’s circumstances. Consider Mike Tyson. Gifted beyond measure and able to prevent grave injury.)
Ensuring survival is done through strength. Strength enables reason to create value. Value creates distance from destruction. The greater the value created the greater the distance from destruction.
Acquiring strength through challenge (mental, physical, material) avoids destruction. Destruction of value is death unless a greater value is displacing it, creation primarily and then preservation of value is life.
Take care with how visible your strength is. Those who seek destruction will seek to gain or take from you. Avoid and defend by a means of strength which is developed through preparedness.
The time to act is now. But you must calculate the risks and prepare your strengths for your action. Regret is a hard learning. The stoics were right to be clear about what you can control and what you cannot. I haven’t seen when they discuss about the time to act. Irregardless, there are things you can influence and in that, is the danger and adventure. To know how your strength can influence. This is judgement. With your judgement, calculate and decide. Commit and move with strength. Careful to know when to show your cards. This is also a critical part of judgement. Showing your cards can cause the birds to fly away or the cat to tire of your petting. Letting just the need to know parts of your plan be known to those who can be persuaded to your influence. Do not discount Machiavelli. It’s not just state craft.
All forms of strength enable you to survive and thrive. To gain strength, you must prepare. Strength (mental, physical, material) allows for handing of danger and risk.
Handling danger and risk therefore requires preparation and training.
Preparation for danger and risk is therefore thriving. Avoiding real danger and risk is thriving. Knowing what is real danger and an opportunity for training is achieved by reason. Therefore using reason drives thriving.
Mental ability is knowing that your own self is all you ever have and knowing you have to make all action about acquiring strength of the three types to survive.
It is knowing the above and…
- ability to calculate potential beneficial outcomes
- ability to see how to push through the lower value obstacles
- ability to know how a given technology works
- ability to create and use technology and tools
- ability to know how to manage the technology so that there can be no competition or how to create an advantage no other can have.
- ability to gauge the value of others and to know if one is a partner of mutual benefit, an employee who has the ability to rise, or someone to completely reject.
It is knowing that mutual benefits are the joining of two or more individuals who can produce even more value. When you connect a lesser value with a higher value, the overall value is lowered unless there is some unforeseen unexpected reaction.
It is knowing that reason is necessary for action that will result in happiness. (Thank you Marcus Aurelius.)
With age comes a decrease in physical ability and mental ability, therefore the material ability must be very high. I think this is true even in countries with great social safety nets.
All this is to develop the self. The purpose of developing the self is to ultimately benefit others and humanity overall.
We are put here on earth in a skin suit with the ability to sense everything. Then our environment and genes all affect our conditioning of how we perceive and think. If you were born in Islamabad or Mississippi or San Francisco or Kansas or Ghana, you will be conditioned by those environments respectively. The purpose is to move past these things to see what’s really going on. It’s amazing because others are going through this same experience and we affect each other to overall create humanity.
The purpose of developing one’s own strength is then to develop the strength of the family, friends and community. That strength builds together and compounds. It begins to create a culture and an ethos. There is something we don’t yet understand (or I don’t) that we call coincidence or serendipity. It may be quantum entanglement. More about that later.
It is also critical to understand that teaching knowledge, which is strength, directly to a human will not work if interest is not present. Humans learn through indirect ways where interest drives curiosity driving discovery which turns into knowledge. Direct knowledge transmission without the individual’s interest often fails. Stories work very very well. Games work very well. Parables work very well. Challenges work very well. Evidence of this is everywhere.
On the mental, humans forget. It’s critical that knowledge is documented. Thankfully, we have some documentation of knowledge. As new knowledge is discovered for the individual, it must be documented in some way so it can be recalled. How many times have you learned the same lesson again because you forgot or the lesson came up on another context? For the culture overall, we must document. Many civilizations’ knowledge has been lost to us. How much has humanity discovered and lost? We don’t know. The individual must document. The culture must document.
The goal is to create goodness and a perfect world. That’s the goal. Once we create a perfect world, then we can build from there and move out to space which is where Elon Musk is. We need to store our knowledge on other worlds so it can be found again and humanity doesn’t need to reinvent the wheel. That’s pretty far out for most of us but it’s basically like this.
A critical understanding about developing the mental. Mental development comes through disassociation. Dissociation means perceiving beyond the environmental conditioning that happens to use when we are young. Disassociation can come from many forms of purposeful and intentional activity. Meditation, prayer, visualization, etc. Krishnamurti’s detachment is an example. Exercising when the endorphins come in and you feel your body working and you move above the feeling of hard work and suffering. Think of David Goggins here. There are other methods. But! Be careful because disassociation can be one of the seven deadly if taken too far. Too many drugs can take one down the road to pleasure which will lead to a plateau in self development (or a decline) and create weakness. Everything in moderation is a great clue we hear a lot. Even exercise taken too far can kill you. Too much detachment also leads to a plateau meaning it’s too focused on the self and the ability to benefit others slows or stops. The purpose of meditating in a cave for years is to change one’s perception so that when you come out into the world, you can help.
When it comes to choosing partners or employees, it’s critical to think of things as a team sport (Arsenal FC!) and not to fall into the fallacy of the Hero mentality. This is a pervasive distraction when sought as the determining criteria of goodness or value. Interview processes that focus exclusively on an individual’s ability to work alone with no team and no tools is short sighted. It’s best to test for how one works with others and can use the available toolsets or create new ones. A very pertinent example is ChatGPT, Bard, etc. We now have AI as an assistant (for the moment that’s what it is), and we must adopt this new tool and understand how our partners or employees can create more value with it.
Here’s the TLDR again.
- Develop yourself and unlock your potential, create strength and become invincible against the bad actors and life events.
- Develop others with often indirect means to unlock their potential. Be a guide and a coach.
- Then to change the world for the better by increasing numbers, the community you can reach and ultimately shift the culture. Partnering with others, because this really is a team sport, is an accelerant to shifting culture.
Once that’s done with enough people, we can move on and create other worlds.
That’s it.