Self-denial for the modern intellectual

Your job as a man in this life is to generate more certainty in the world than you consume.

I have low self esteem. That is a causal thing, a biological thing. Self esteem is not a conclusion you make after rationally inspecting yourself. It’s probably the thyroid or something, I don’t know the exact details. But I can say what it’s not: it is not a rational assessment, made by your higher mind, after neutrally inspecting yourself and making a distant, scientific, neutral and true rational conclusion and judgment. The emotions come fist, and the rational mind comes after. Self esteem is down in the gutter with drives and appetites, and that’s why you don’t get better self esteem by thinking about it, or convincing yourself with arguments. You get better self esteem by taking actions that are contrary to your post facto rationalization and self image, and you train yourself out of it, by gradual exposure therapy to your own agency.

You get better self esteem by doing things that you don’t expect in your rational mind to work out, because you, as a modern industrialized human, are extremely left brain dominant. You identify entirely with your left brain consciousness, and actively Other your left brain half. Only the rational and the articulated is real, in modernity. And half of life, of all experience, and half of your perception to and connection with and processing of, the world, you discard automatically. You are a half-wit.

“Just go up and talk to her” – the rational mind explains very well why this is preposterous, and can’t work. But paradoxically, its exactly because you do something that “can’t work”, that it is impressive and charming – because she observers that you are doing something brave. It can’t work – and that’s why it works.

“Just walk in and shake the managers hand” – Foolish old boomer adage of a long lost era of different social rules. It doesn’t work any more. There is no way to get a job if you don’t have connections. The rational mind, the left brain can articulate all day why this is ridiculous. And yet, despite being completely objectively wrong, it also still works. Because you are not the only half-wit.

“Just invest in yourself and trust in other people’s perspective of yourself. Prioritize the view that other people have of you, who tells you you are good and clever and competent, over your own view, that you will fail” - For whosoever will save his life shall lose it: and whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it.

Low self esteem is on the border of narcissism, if it isn’t fully within it. Everyone’s favorite TLP hammered down that narcissist doesn’t mean self-love, but self-obsession. What we call in common parlance low self esteem is mechanically similar to self-obsession – simply incurred by fear, instead of some other cause. Maybe all narcissism is incurred by fear.

Take the hierarchy of needs, or just dream with me as we paint a common sense picture. The animal wants to secure its immediate physical safety before it nests or breeds. The human mind wants to structure lower order security before it structures higher order priorities. But what if the human has “low self esteem”? What if the human just starts from a higher base level of neuroticism, of neurotic thinking, worrying? What if the human mind in question is constantly looking for threats, because the body it is imbibed in is functioning at a low metabolic rate, and the central nervous system is doing routine lower order priorities 24/7. Then you just get stuck in a rut of performing routine maintenance, and rationalize it after the fact.

Observe the self from a third point. The rational Monkey machine is running around performing routine maintenance, and then muttering to himself rationalizations for his actions. The fearful rat monkey says, No I Can’t Do That, because his central nervous system is overriding his higher order thought, but he perceives it, in his sense of being alive, as “Merely making rational observations and doing the rational thing”.

The lion is caged. The lion doesn’t destroy the cage, because there is only a 60% chance of not getting caught when you Is Out, and you’ll have to fend for yourself, and if you stay in the cage there is a 100% chance of continuing to be fed every day. No. NO. The lion is making a rational decision based on a rigorous cost benefit analysis.

Even conceptualizing it as “just take risks lmao” is still operating within Left-brain universe. It is gesturing towards the right thing, but the expression itself is false, and will not set you free. “Risks”. Percentages and calculation and odds. Gambling.

Gambling is sinful because it makes a mockery of, in the final calculation, love. It makes a mockery of what we call today “commitment”. When you love, you commit to the world, and you are always “risking” something. These are the wrong words, it’s understanding it backwards, but we were all born backwards in this age. When you love, the world comes alive and is filled with meaning, “because you are risking something”, to put it in a crude and low way. And gambling simulates this process as a crude mockery, by simulating “meaning” “stakes”, through a simulated “risk”. Like a video game simulates achievement, gambling simulates risk, and provides a poor substitute for the real thing. The optimal way to channel this process is love, romantic as well as charitable religious love, as one can be a doorway to the other, and it’s a degradation of one’s capacity for love to indulge in a mockery of it.

Thinking about it in this way, as risk and percentages and gambling, is still being the lion inside the cage. Destroying the cage is self-denial. Destroying the cage is prioritizing something more than your own left-brain calculations and “self esteem” and perspective. Destroying the cage is prioritizing a higher order than your own, without possessing it. The order must be greater than what you are capable of understanding. It must be greater than your left brain. You can never have certainty, you can never have it all “inside” the rational mind, and understand and shape rotate it and fully grasp it. You can never have certainty – the idea of chance calculation, odds and gambling, is exactly trying to Order the higher Order, within the lower order of your limited mental resources (half-wit) – to reduce the act to something that can be fully and wholly Understood.

Committing to something, to take the leap of faith, is to prioritize something higher than your own rational mind. This can be God or religion. It can also be something as simple and low brow, and the people around you. It can be something as simple as your beautiful wife. Or your parents, or your friends. The anxious, low metabolism, hyperthyroid, neurotic mind will look at all these characters, and try to control them – to contain them within the rational mind, within itself. This is what we commonly have called narcissism in the contemporary age: Only I exist (I can only have certainty of the Cogito), and Others exists only as an extension of my-Self (until proven otherwise by the scientific method – contradiction – “They will have separate existence from my rational understanding, once I can rationally understand a proof that they are”).

Language itself is priority left-brain. We can only gesture towards the horizon, we cannot point over it, to the thing itself, behind the horizon. The really cool trick is, that over the horizon, beyond language, all the small micro examples, and God, are all the same. But I can’t convince you of that, only bear witness from what I’ve seen, because I’m over the hill.

I have low self esteem because once when I was a kid I got really really scared, and my body and central nervous system has been clogging up my processing power by constantly looking out for trucks coming from a blind spot on my left, and preparing for physical impact. I have recently committed an act of extreme self-denial, and it unfortunately has to be an ongoing thing for a long while.

Self-denial. Self – Ego – Language – Logic – Right Brain. Dealing with the problems of the Self comes in different flavors. The eastern tradition believes in ego death, ego destruction, it goes in the other direction and Identifies with the left brain, and Others the right brain. The EGO becomes the Other, the enemy, the “cause of suffering”. This, as good modern discourse enjoyers, we can easily recognize as “just as bad as the other side”, and discard it. We desire a third option. Self-denial, is the middle path. The narrow path. Harmonious congruence between the higher and the lower, the left and the right, the outer and the inner, the rational and the extra-rational. Forwards and backwards.

I have committed an act of extreme self denial, in which I prioritized what literally everyone else thinks is true about my Self, over what I think is true about my self. They all think that I am very capable and will succeed at this project I have been working diligently to do a good job on. My working on it, and my statements in the social sphere that “everything will be fine, everything will work out” is generating Certainty in their lives, and they in turn trust me. I, in my private mind, am riddled with fear. I logic puzzle and analyze and create lists and logic gates and decision trees and plans for every eventuality, looking for trucks everywhere. Oh if I do this then that happens and then this. Would that be a truck? Over and over and over, 10-12 hours a day, for a month. But then at the end, in the final calculation, after looking for fail states and problem solving – you never get to a point of satedness, you never reach certainty. If you are a smart boy you can just keep thinking forever, and find new potential problems to safeguard against. But then in the end, when it comes time to Act, after planning and planning and planning. When it comes time to Leap, to Destroy the Cage – that action is self-denial. After relying on my Self for all this time, it must be discarded, and instead of trusting my Self – my rational calculations capable of finding infinite faults – I must now trust my loved ones. I prioritize a third person perspective, over my own. I accept my limitations, and I choose to step out into a greater world. A world greater than my Self, than the borders of my left-brain mind. I choose to believe in an existence of a greater world than my own, and that the actions in that Greater world can impact my inner world, not just the other way around. That if in the greater world, the Third Position judges me Good and Capable, then I am – regardless of how I feel about it, in my Self.

And that means that you can just go up and talk to her, and shake the managers hand, and start a business, and just Do Things. Because there is a Greater world, and the self is Lesser. And it doesn’t matter what you think about it. Facts don’t care about your feelings.