A truly clueless book

I started to read Jonathan Weiner's Long For This World: The Strange Science of Immortality, and by page 70 I already wonder whether I should bother to finish it. I can tell that the book's author doesn't share many individuals' sense of urgency about survival (especially cryonicists') when he invokes mythology and history to illustrate previous failures in the quest.

By way of comparison, suppose someone wrote a book about the quest to, say, plug an oil gusher under the Gulf of Mexico, and started out by recounting the biblical story of the Tower of Babel to show the futility of man's efforts to reach areas where he allegedly doesn't belong (a message Leon Kass might appreciate). That would frame the book's message in a way hostile to its subject matter.

I get a similar impression of disrespecting the subject matter from what I've read of Weiner's book so far.

Cryonicists, especially, see death as an emergency that needs technological solutions just as urgently as we need technological solutions to the Gulf disaster. The dilatory efforts to find these solutions doesn't make the need for them any less important. The fact that people have expected, and demanded, the application of The Power of Man's Mind^TM (I bet Objectivists would like to trademark that phrase) to controlling the oil gusher shows that we still have a latent belief in human efficacy when a sufficiently dire emergency backs us to the wall. Cryonicists would like to see that same belief, and the social energy behind it, applied towards our more basic emergency which threatens us all.

More evidence for the decline of religion in the U.S?

I haven't paid much attention to the whole Tea Party phenomenon, but I have Google alerts set up for stories about Ayn Rand. So this one came to my attention:

Tea Party Embraces Ayn Rand, by Noah Kristula-Green

Rand’s popularity tells us two things about the state of modern conservatism.

First, it suggests that Rand’s atheism and permissive social views are no longer deal-breakers among conservative thought leaders. Jennifer Burns, the author of Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right, has explored Rand’s influence through the years. She told FrumForum that while religion had been a crucial issue for William F. Buckley and the conservatives of the 1970s, “someone like Glenn Beck isn’t going to argue about the existence of God or the need for religion. Beck and Limbaugh can use the parts of Rand they want to use and not engage the rest.”

I've read Burns's book. She argues that Rand helped to create a space on the right for conservatives with secular outlooks who didn't feel comfortable with the christian versions of conservatism dominant since the 1960's. Atheism also never had any necessary connection with Communism, so the collapse of the Soviet Union as an alternative political model 20 years ago has made room for a depoliticized nonbelief in religion in the U.S.

Kristula-Green continues:

Second and more troubling, the conservative rediscovery of Rand signals an increasing conservative divergence from mainstream America. Conservatives falsely assume that because more copies of Rand’s books are being sold, that everyone who reads them agrees with her. Conservatives are buying into Rand’s extreme views without understanding why many people—and not only liberals—revile her.

If, however, conservatives have warmed up to Rand in part because they share in the decline of religious belief in this country, how "divergent from mainstream America" does that make them, at least in this area?

Given that Rand's novel Atlas Shrugged reads today like survivalist porn, I still wonder how conservatives and libertarians handle the cognitive dissonance between their cornucopianism (for example, their enthusiasm for Matt Ridley's new book) and their doomsday predictions based on Austrian economics, which Atlas exemplifies. Yes, life promises to get better and better, despite what those "doomsayers" keep saying; but we need to build doomsteads in places like the Rocky Mountains to protect us from the coming hyperinflationary collapse of the American economy.

Eye health update

I saw my regular ophthalmologist yesterday. He said that the steroid injection I received in my right eye on July 1 for macular edema could raise the intraocular pressure, so he measured the pressure in both eyes. The left eye had a pressure of 18 mmHg, and the right one of 36 mmHg.

The right pressure reading gets me into glaucoma territory, so he gave me a bottle of Combigan drops to treat my right eye, and I have an appointment to see him again next week.

Fortunately I seem to tolerate the Lisinopril for my blood pressure. This morning I got a reading of 120/78.

The problem with the "passing phase"

I could handle Washington University academically, but my emotional maturity lagged behind. (It probably still does relative to most other men my age.) So I had to move back home in December 1979 because of severe depression caused by my feelings about a girl I knew there. (She turned out all right, apparently.)

The psychiatrist my parents sent me to in Tulsa to deal with my depression, the one my father saw to treat his depression a few years previously (apparently dysthymic tendencies run in the family), prescribed Norpramin, which I don't think helped me. I also found him unsympathetic and unhelpful in dealing with my emotional disturbances, so I declined to see him after a few visits and stopped taking the medication.

From hindsight I can see exactly the problem I had at age 20, and the aggressive sort of intervention I probably would have benefited from to boost my confidence and morale at such a low point in my life: I needed to acquire the metaphysical membership card in the Man Club, something which I still don't have this late in life.

But the counseling professions 30 years ago apparently didn't see things that way. They assumed that the Man Club initiation would happen "organically," without the need for interventions.

By contrast, psychologist Brian Gilmartin expresses an alternative view in this video clip and this one. As Gilmartin points out, dismissing the problem as a "passing phase" can result in the problem's duration until the sufferer himself passes out of existence.

So I continue to feel intrigued by the story I heard about a cryonicist in a polyamorous household who arranged for his older teen son's initiation into the Man Club with his concubine. I see a lot of value in this sort of arrangement, especially as a rite of passage, instead of just expecting that it will happen regardless as part of a boy's organic development.

I can understand why Tom Leykis feels this way.

As Bud Light says, here we go...

. . .

Here are some basic truths we’re not supposed to talk about, and about which I will elaborate as we go:

• Men who know what they’re doing and who still have both balls date women specifically to get laid. We pretend to listen to their mindless shit in order to get laid, and the reality is that we don’t hear one word that they say until we penetrate them. That includes you, Sweetheart.



• Most straight American men hate eating in fancy restaurants, dancing, seeing any films about vampires or romantic comedies or watching tv shows featuring dancing or “stars”. More shit we put up to see a warm, wet pussy up close. Then, we’re forced to live in the closet pretending that we like this shit. We hate it. We also hate your birthday, your family, Valentine’s Day, Christmas (with you) or any other day when we are forced to produce. Get it?

Men in cryonics have an extra set of problems with women, which keeps cryonics an overwhelmingly male subculture.

Some advice for college students

If you start out at one college or university and have to transfer to another one, trade up if at all possible.

I, by contrast, transferred from a pretty good university (Washington University in St. Louis) to a shitty pretend-university (the University of Tulsa. a.k.a. TU). That move substantially damaged the value of the degree I received from the latter.

I also lacked an organic connection to TU, even though I grew up in Tulsa and some friends of mine from high school also went there. For example, I didn't make any friends during my time at TU, apart from legacy friends from high school, because I didn't find the people there worth knowing.

As for girlfriend material at TU, not a chance. An English professor I talked to there, apparently some kind of James Joyce scholar, implied that I had something wrong with me because I didn't have a TU coed lined up to marry after I graduate! After meeting some very intelligent women at Wash. U., including my first exposure to Jewish women from the Northeast, how I could I take any of those TU coeds seriously?

Beating up on beta male cryonicist geeks?

The surprisingly hostile comments from readers appended to Kerry Howley's essay make me wonder if they result from its focus on a geeky beta male cryonicist. People feel safe in abusing his ideas and personality because their brains categorize him as a lower-status resident in the dominance hierarchy who won't retaliate.

If the article had focused instead on an extroverted alpha male cryonicist, with a younger, attractive girlfriend, plenty of money, relatively high status and the suggestion that he still has his "game" going for him, would it had generated so many hostile comments, simply from our disinclination to attack dominant males?

Sometimes Alex Jones says something reasonable.

Sometimes Nathaniel Branden makes an interesting argument.

The rioting in Oakland last night reminded me of something Nathaniel Branden writes in The Six Pillars of Self-Esteem. I think he, like his mentor Ayn Rand, exaggerates the content and influence of the bad ideas he attributes to liberal college professors 60 years ago:

The twentieth century witnessed a shift in cultural values in the United States, and predominately the shift has not supported higher self-esteem but has encouraged the opposite.

I am thinking of the ideas I was taught in college and university, during the 1950s, when epistemological agnosticism (not to say nihilism) joined hands with moral relativism, which joined hands with Marxism. Together with millions of other students, I was informed that:

The mind is powerless to know reality as it really is; ultimately, mind is impotent.

The senses are unreliable and untrustworthy; "everything is an illusion." Principles of logic are "mere conventions."

Principles of ethics are mere "expressions of feelings," with no basis in reason or reality.

No rational code of moral values is possible.

Since all behavior is determined by factors over which one has no control, no one deserves credit for any achievement.

Since all behavior is determined by factors over which one has no control, no one should be held responsible for any wrongdoing.

When crimes are committed, "society," never the individual, is the culprit (except for crimes committed by businessmen, in which case only the most severe punishment is appropriate).

Everyone has an equal claim on whatever goods or services exist - notions of the "earned" and "unearned" are reactionary and antisocial.

Political and economic freedom have had their chance and have failed, and the future belongs to state ownership and management of the economy, which will produce paradise on earth.

I thought of these ideas and of the professors who taught them in the spring of 1992 as I sat watching on television the riots in South-Central Los Angeles. When a looter was asked by a journalist, "Didn't you realize that the stores you looted and destroyed today wouldn't be there for you tomorrow," the looter answered, "No, I never thought of that." Well, who would have ever taught him it was important to learn how to think, when "advantaged children" aren't taught it either? When I saw a group of men drag a helpless man out of his truck and beat him almost to death, I heard the voice of my professors saying, "If you find this morally objectionable, that's just your emotional bias. There is no right or wrong behavior." When I saw men and women laughing gleefully while dragging TV sets and other household goods out of looted stores, I thought of the professors who taught, "No one is responsible for anything he or she does (except the greedy capitalists who own the stores and deserve whatever trouble they get)." I thought how perfectly the ideas of my professors had been translated into cultural reality. Ideas do matter and do have consequences.

Normally I would blame the Oakland rioting on the concentration of low-IQ people with absent Strict Fathers to socialize the boys properly. But this time around it looks like white anarchists from Berkeley, apparently taking Branden's parody of bad philosophy seriously, did much of the damage. Then these white guys go back to their neighborhoods with functional stores, leaving the poor minority neighborhoods in shambles.

I predict that these leftists will receive a pass from other leftists for doing the sort of thing white racists used to do to businesses in black communities, like in Tulsa's Race Riot.

The Hostile Wife Phenomenon makes it to the New York Times Sunday Magazine.

Kerry Howley's essay, Until Cryonics Do Us Part, appears now on the website of the New York Times.

I'd like to turn off my internal censor to say what I think about men in cryonics who put up with hostile wives. But I'd prefer to stay on friendly terms with these guys and hope they can get cryosuspended efficiently when the time comes.

The Hostile Wife Phenomenon does show cryonics' main weakness and vulnerability as a novel social movement. The cryonics community needs more women who sign up on their own initiative; more married couples or polyamorous triads or whatever, where everyone agrees on cryonic suspension; and more families who succeed in making a commitment to cryonics generationally transmissible. As I've noted in my comparison of cryonics with Mormonism, the latter novel religion/social movement succeeded precisely because it attracted a lot of women as early adopters who wanted to marry and form families with Mormon men to perpetuate the existence of the ideological community, even if in the start-up period many of them had to enter into "plural marriages" with a scarce supply of Mormon husbands, in defiance of the greater society's mores and laws.

Getting back to Howley's essay, the banality of one cryonicist's longish marriage to a hostile wife surprised me, given his reputation as a visionary thinker in other areas: "Marriage, despite its lack of clean edges and predictable outcomes, is one of the few institutions he seems to have no interest in reforming." I guess he didn't go into the polyamory, swinging, sex tourism and other transgressions I've heard attributed to some guys in cryonics.

Perhaps because my parents got divorced in my early 20's, I don't feel much of an investment in the idea of marriage as life-long project. I tend to view this sort of relationship like other kinds of relationships, including even citizenship in a country or membership in a religious community: You enter into the relationship, or accept it in the case of living in your native country, as long as the relationship meets certain needs at costs you find acceptable. Once the relationship stops working for you, back away from it and start to shop around for better deals. Unfortunately, cryonicist men with hostile wives who choose this course might have to do without docile replacement wives in the current life cycle.

My desacralized blood analysis

Apparently I need to get my LDL level down:



The nurse practitioner also wrote me a prescription for Lisinopril, to get my blood pressure down aggressively as a response to the branch retinal vein occlusion in my right eye.

The desacralized way modern medicine treats blood certainly contrasts with our traditional woo-woo beliefs about it perpetuated by orthodox christianity and vampire fantasies.

Forced perspective

I like how this guy thinks.

Brett McKay runs an interesting website. He also lives in my home town of Tulsa:



I've expected a turn towards more conservative ways of life. Societies display homeostatic mechanisms which tend to dampen deviations from long-term norms.

Cryonics and women, again

If you view cryonics as a novel social movement, as anthropologist Tiffany Romain does, why does it fail to attract female "early adopters," with a few exceptions?

By contrast, Mormonism attracted a great many female early adopters, which seems all the more impressive because these women had to defy taboos in 19th Century America against (1) leaving your family's church to get involved in heretical cults, despite a tradition of religious tolerance; and (2) polygyny and adultery. (Where do you think the early Mormon men's "plural wives" came from?) Interestingly, Mormon women converts didn't reject patriarchy as such; they just switched allegiance from the non-Mormon men in their own families to male authority figures in the new religion, apparently a form of "strict father" shopping analogous to looking for a new job or a new country to migrate to which offers a more attractive deal.

Since both cryonics and 19th Century Mormonism require people to move beyond their cultural comfort zones, and both promote the idea of surviving death, why has cryonics failed to attract more women, married couples who agree on cryonics, and even entire families where the children accept the generational transmission of the cryonics project?

Apparently cryonics has yet to find its Joseph Smith.

Albert Ellis versus Ayn Rand

You can download Albert Ellis's critique of Ayn Rand's Objectivism here. Ellis, true to his philosophical approach to psychotherapy, criticizes Rand's, and Nathaniel Branden's, ideas, but not their persons -- though Ellis's consistent abstraction of actions from the actors which generate them raises its own questions.

Ellis points out that the Objectivist world view, despite its emphasis on "reason" which makes it superficially resemble Ellis's Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy, has features which practically guarantee to make its adherents depressed, anxious or hostile. The memoirs and biographical accounts of Rand and her closest followers provide evidence to support that view.

By contrast, Ellis assumes that we'll naturally fuck up much of our lives as flawed organisms, but we can learn ways not to let these setbacks and disappointments disturb us unnecessarily.

Ellis illustrates his approach in his famous public debate with Nathaniel Branden, with Ayn Rand sitting in the audience:

“Nathaniel Branden tells us, in Who is Ayn Rand?, that ‘Ayn Rand is not the first writer to project a hero who is a genius; nor is she the first writer to project a hero who fights courageously to achieve his chosen goals. But she is the first to project a hero who is a hero all of the time that is, a hero who does not go out to fight a great battle and then come home to marry a hausfrau and to live his private life by a less demanding code of values.’ Branden is right: Ayn Rand’s heroes in her novels, such as Howard Roark and John Galt, are utterly impossible humans or, rather, superhumans. They have no flaws whatever; and are literally out of this world. It would be as easy for one of us mere mortals to maintain a friendly relationship with an Ayn Rand hero as it would be for us to befriend Jehovah or Jesus Christ.”

In the midst of my saying this, Ayn Rand, who was sitting near the front of the audience, became terribly disturbed and jumped up, exclaiming, “I am not going to listen to this debate!” She seemed to be trying to leave the auditorium (which happened to be the ballroom of the New Yorker hotel, where some eleven hundred people were tightly packed to listen to the proceedings), but was dissuaded from doing so by friends around her. Branden then angrily jumped up himself and shouted into the microphone that he did not think it ethical or honorable for me to attack a person who by the rules of the occasion was not free to speak for herself. For this statement the objectivists in the audience applauded him widely. Now there are several interesting points to be noted about this exchange:
. . .

b. If Rand really felt insulted by my referring to her novel heroes as “utterly impossibly humans,” then she is indeed easy to insult and could use several sessions of rational emotive behavior therapy! As I teach my REBT patients, human beings only become “insulted” when they take too seriously the barbs of others, and essentially agree with these others that, yes, they (the “insulted” ones) are somewhat worthless individuals. If Ayn Rand were truly in good mental health (not to mention as “heroic” as many of the objectivists like to think of themselves as being), she would surely not take my accusations too seriously, and would merely convince herself, calmly and collectedly, that her heroes are not really “utterly impossible humans,” would smilingly think of me as being at least slightly addled, and would listen to the rest of my accusations with equanimity. The fact that she apparently did seriously upset herself and (according to Branden) felt “insulted” lends considerable extra weight to the point I made during the debate and that I make in Chapter 2 of this book: that objectivists do not have what I would call real self acceptance, but merely accept themselves (or, in their terminology, esteem themselves) because they perform well or because others accept their views. If both Rand and Branden can so easily disturb themselves by my attack on the believability of Rand’s heroes, we can well imagine how upsettable other objectivists may be!

Given how emotionally Rand behaved in public to an outside observer like Ellis, you can just imagine what must have gone on in her private life. Why did Rand cultists in the 1960's subject themselves to this nonsense, especially ones not financially dependent on Rand?

Ayn Rand versus children

From Ayn Rand and the World She Made, by Anne C. Heller, pp. 136-137, in a passage about Rand's discussions with her friend Isabel Paterson:

Paterson also learned from Rand, although partisans of both women debate what and how much. In one early discussion, they were affably arguing about how far it is possible to extend the ethical limits of Rand's philosophy of anti-altruism, or selfishness. Paterson asked the younger woman her opinion of a riddle she recalled from Boswell's Life of Johnson. Imagine that you are in a castle tower with a newborn baby in your arms, Paterson proposed, and only one of you can escape alive. Would you save your own life or that of the baby? Rand shocked Paterson into momentary silence by declaring that she would most certainly let the baby die. How could you ethically do that? Paterson demanded. Don't human beings have a moral obligation to care for the young? No, Rand answered. She held no such view, although she did concede that her analysis might be different if the baby were her own. When Paterson suggested that such an attitude could be considered depraved, Rand declared, Very well, then, I am depraved. For the time being, that ended the discussion. Later, Paterson brought it up again. What would you do if the baby were your own? Reflecting, Rand answered that she still would choose to save herself, on the premise that without an adult to feed and care for it, the baby would die anyway. Aha! replied Paterson, who evidently found this point of logic persuasive. Rand later claimed that by means of such instruction, she converted Paterson from an entrenched secular Christian ethic to a morality of anti-altruism. Paterson thanked Rand for the clarification of parental ethics but insisted that she had always believed in enlightened self-interest, and the preponderance of evidence is on her side.

Not only did Rand disavow any regard for children's value, but she also apparently thought it better to kill her own children to save herself instead of allowing for the possibility that other adults might adopt them. Fortunately her parents didn't feel that way about her, considering that they put themselves at risk to finance her escape from the Soviet Union to the U.S.

So why have the natalist conservatives embraced Rand as a source of legitimation, again?

Right retina treatment

Yesterday I saw a retina specialist about the macular edema in my right eye. The specialist had his helpers take some photographs and other measurements, then he decided to inject a steroid drug into that eye. One of his assistants, who explained the procedure to me beforehand, said that they would use an ocular speculum to keep the eyelid open. Like in A Clockwork Orange, I asked? He hadn't heard of that movie!

The injection went according to plan, and now I have a bruise on the lower right front of my eye.

I have a follow up appointment with the retina specialist in six weeks, so apparently the treatment takes awhile to work.