In Pursuit of Healthiness

The two greatest flaws in human thinking is the notion of good and evil and the idea that life is about the pursuit of happiness. 

From a very early age, infants are capable of discerning appropriate and inappropriate behavior.  They smile when they share things, and they frown when someone steals either from them or another, even a puppet.  But they do not have a notion of good and evil.  They simply like people being nice and selfless and don’t like people being mean and selfish.  It is only until later in life that we are taught the idea of good and evil.  When we do nice things, we are told that we are a good kid, a good boy, a good girl.  When we do mean, selfish things, we are taught that we are bad, and when adults do really mean, selfish things, they are evil.  When we learn that there are bad and evil people in the world, we are also taught that they are punished, either through cosmic justice or directly from other people.  While we are praised and rewarded for being nice and kind, we are punished and physically assaulted for doing mean, selfish things.  We are taught that people who do mean and selfish things deserve to be punished and physically assaulted.  We all grow up taking these things for granted and never learn just how damaging, destructive, dangerous, and ironically mean and evil this kind of thinking is.

The problem with this kind of thinking is that it releases us from the responsibility of abiding to our very own rules of morals.  So long as the other person has committed a moral infraction, I am free to commit any moral infraction in punishing them.  The Catholic Church, perhaps, was the best example of this irony in their persecution of heretics, non-Catholics, and simply anyone they didn’t like.  Label them as evil, and they were free to assault, torture, and kill them.  In this sense, the inception of evil led to the multiplication of evil as people were liberated to commit evil acts in attempts to punish those they believed were in violation of moral rules. 

It is one thing for you to be accused of breaking moral rules and being punished, but the brilliance behind the creation of good and evil is that the definition of evil was expanded beyond moral infractions to include disobedience.  Religious leaders created all types of rules that had nothing to do with morals.  You had to eat a certain type of food, avoid other foods, refrain from eating on certain days, dress a certain way, cover your head or don’t cover your head, women have to cover their faces or hair or skin, children have to obey their parents, everyone must obey their priest or Pope, you can’t get tattoos, you can’t drink alcohol or caffeine, you can’t sleep with someone of the same gender, you can’t dress like someone of the opposite gender, you have to be circumcised, you can’t worship other gods, you can’t cuss, you can’t work on Sunday, etc. 

At what point do you prioritize this list or assign certain weights to certain infractions?  Is it the same to kill your neighbor as it is for a man to wear a dress?  Is it the same to rape a virgin as it is to get a tattoo?  Is it the same to sleep with someone of the same gender as working on Sunday?  And what about cultures where tattoos are spiritual and religious rituals?  Are they the same as rapists and murderers?  While we all have a sense of how bad things are from rape and murder at the top to eating pork at the very bottom, a lot of people are confused and would equate a man wearing a dress with a rapist or child molester, and this is where the concept of evil fails.  Some might even go so far as to believe that it is okay to beat up or even kill a man who wears a dress, because in their mind, this person is evil and is equal to a rapist or murderer, while others would consider this person as equivalent to someone who has to go into work on Sunday.

In creating a moral equivalence between heinous, violent, anti-social acts and disobedience, the church and ruling establishments succeeded in putting the fear of god in you every time you disobeyed an authority figure.  They made you feel like a rapist or murderer for disobeying authority, for eating pork, working on Sunday, or a dude wearing women’s clothes.  As such, people who are anti-authoritarian at least subconsciously believe that they must be punished, and whether they know it or not, punish themselves by indulging in self-destructive behavior like binge drinking and drug addiction.  They think that being a rebel and disobedient automatically means they must harm themselves in one way or another.  There is nothing wrong with being disobedient.  It is not morally equivalent to any heinous, anti-social act like rape, murder, vandalism, or battery.  Of course, making disobedience morally equal to rape and murder allowed those in power to punish disobedient people in the same manner that they would punish a rapist or murderer.  If you want to domesticate humans, teach them that to be disobedient is the same offense as murder and rape, and you will be punished as such.  You will learn to fear being disobedient as much as you will learn to fear killing or raping someone.

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Let’s say you stop conflating disobedience with immorality.  How then would you describe a rapist and murderer if not evil?  Isn’t a child molester the epitome of evil, preying on innocent children?  One might argue that saying an evil person is actually a sick person is blaming a disease for behavior that people can really control.  For example, some people say that alcoholism is a disease or obesity is a disease.  This seems to liberate alcoholics and obese people from responsibility for engaging in unhealthy behavior. 

This is not what I am saying.  You don’t have to suffer a disease in order to be sick, ill, or unhealthy.  And you can either become sick by accident or on purpose.  You can choose to smoke cigarettes and get lung cancer or you can happen to grow up in a household that smokes indoors and get lung cancer through secondhand smoke.  Or you can just happen to get lung disease by living near a freeway because poor neighborhoods are often near freeways.  Certainly, there are things we can do to mitigate sickness, but a lot of times, we cannot avoid getting sick.  Whenever someone gets the flu, we shouldn’t blame them for catching it.  However, we can blame someone for not taking care of themselves and becoming sick all the time. 

Just as someone can become physically unhealthy by exposure to parents who are physically unhealthy, people can also become mentally and psychologically unhealthy by exposure to parents who are mentally and psychologically unhealthy.  The question is, what do we do with them?  The answer should not be inflict as much harm to them as they inflict upon others.  If someone is physically unhealthy, do we physically harm them further?  If you break your leg, do we break your other leg?  If someone is mentally and psychologically unhealthy, do we mentally harm them further causing more trauma?  Of course, if someone is harming people, we should isolate them to protect innocent people.  The question is, should we punish them beyond the restraint upon their movement?  Should we allow them to be raped and beaten up in prison?  Should we scorn them in public?  Should we drag them through the mud figuratively?  Should we label them as ‘bad’ and ‘evil’ people and treat them as such the rest of their lives?

For the same reason that we do not punish people who become physically unhealthy or sick, we should not punish people who become mentally or psychologically unhealthy or sick and commit moral infractions upon them.  In fact, the majority of times people commit moral infractions as a result of their psychological sickness, it is because they believe that they are bad and evil people, and as such, a bad and evil person seems bound to commit antisocial and violent acts.  If they realized that they were just psychologically sick and not ‘bad’ or ‘evil’ they might be a lot more lenient on themselves and not be inclined to commit antisocial acts.  They may be more inclined to seek help instead of hiding from the shame of believing that they are a ‘bad’ or ‘evil’ person.  When people hide from shame, they are more susceptible to becoming antisocial and then committing more antisocial acts. 

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The second great fallacy is that life is about pursuing happiness.  Happiness is only one treat that nature gives us for a greater purpose and goal.  That greater goal is healthiness.  Healthiness is an optimal state of being that is actually a dynamic state of growth and empowerment.  Organisms that are healthy are better equipped to prosper and adapt to their environments and pass on their healthy genes and behavior or culture.  Nature ‘rewards’ healthy organisms with a number of things including chemicals that make us feel good or happy.  We shouldn’t confuse chemical-induced feelings with our purpose in life.  If we do this, then we might as well just all become heroin or opioid addicts.  Unfortunately, most first world people think that their purpose in life is pursuing happiness or a chemical-induced feeling, so doing drugs is fulfilling their purpose in life. 

Nature also ‘punishes’ unhealthy organisms by not only depriving them of chemicals that make them feel good, but also giving them chemicals that make them feel terrible like cortisol, the stress hormone.  A common piece of advice is that events are neutral, our interpretation of them makes them pleasant or unpleasant.  Likewise, cortisol and adrenaline are not dumped into our blood stream randomly.  Our genes in combination with our upbringing and culture teach us when cortisol and adrenaline should be dumped into our blood stream.  Take snakes and spiders for example.  Most all of us are born to fear snakes and spiders.  If we find ourselves locked in a room full of snakes or spiders, our adrenaline and cortisol levels will be off the chart, and over time, our health will deteriorate.  We may even be driven mad.  But I keep watching video of people handling snakes and some people have these tiny, furry pet spiders that actually look cute and have changed my mind about spiders in general.  You see in these spiders thought and feelings that make me regret spraying and killing a spider with bug spray.  Spiders can panic, run away from you in fear, hide from you in fear, and suffer as they inhale toxic bug spray.  Our upbringing and culture can subdue our genes. 

Likewise, money and celebrity have never existed in nature for millions of years, yet humans get excited about it.  There is nothing in our genes that tells us to be attracted to large stacks of cash and millions of followers and likes on social media, yet they can release a great deal of dopamine into our blood stream (albeit temporarily).  Of course, abstractions like money, status, and celebrity can also be harmful and unhealthy to us if we obsess about how much of it we lack.  Pursuing it at all costs can also deprive us of experiencing pleasure from the more important purposes and goals in our lives.

A Harvard AI identified several factors that lead to happiness: autonomy, personal growth, self-acceptance, positive relations, purpose in life, environmental mastery.  However, I would argue that these are not factors that just lead to happiness but rather factors that lead to healthiness that are rewarded with chemicals that make us feel happy.  Likewise, the absence of these things can release cortisol which can make us feel anxious, depressed, upset, irritable, and sad. 

Right away with autonomy, you can see how obedience is the opposite and while we may be rewarded with money and status by authority for obedience, we are surrendering our autonomy which is also a source of happiness.  While we may be thriving at work by obeying our boss and in the process perhaps screwing over our staff and customers, we are rewarded with praise, bonuses, promotions, higher rank, and higher company status.  Herein lies our conflict, because when we get home, we don’t feel happy.  Rather, our lack of autonomy at work makes us feel depleted, frustrated, anxious, and depressed along with obeying orders that we know harm employees and customers.  This transitions into self-acceptance.  Part of us feels rewarded for obedience, yet another part of us feels punished for surrendering our autonomy and harming others.  We cannot accept ourselves if we feel conflicted about what we are doing and what kind of person we are being.  This conflict and self-doubt also releases cortisol and makes us feel frustrated, anxious, and depressed.  As a result of this, we don’t exercise, we eat horrible foods, and we effectively punish our bodies, because we can’t accept who we are.

Our personal growth is also stunted by acts of obedience and lack of autonomy.  If we are not in control of our actions, if we are compelled to subordinate our interests and concerns with the interests and concerns of authority figures who lord above us, then we cannot grow.  In fact, I read a book, The Eternal Child by Clive Bromhall and Rogue Primate: An Exploration of Human Domestication by John A. Livington that argue that we have in fact been trapped in a permanent juvenile state where we consider authority figures as our perpetual ‘loving’, ‘protective’ parents.  We don’t want to grow up and personally develop but rather live in a perpetual state of arrested development acting like children and never taking responsibility for our actions, one another, humanity, or the planet.  We are placed in this bizarre juvenile state of suspension because it is cheaper to hire and easier to exploit juveniles than it is grown-ass adults.

Positive relations, purpose in life, and environmental mastery are all related to the omnipotent trait of socialization.  Humans took over the planet, because humans, more than any other animal, developed the ability to live in larger and larger social groups through both genetic evolution and cultural design.  Part of that cultural design was the creation and enforcement of moral codes perpetuated through advanced language and communication.  When teenagers complain that social embarrassment or exclusion is a fate worse than death, they are not exaggerating.  To become isolated in human society is a fate worse than death, because humans are trained to and possess an innate capacity to harass one another and animals to exhaustion and then death.  This is how we hunt, and this is how we punish moral violators. 

However, we are talking about primitive humans with a primitive understanding of human psychology.  Certainly, when ancient humans committed moral infractions, they did not view this as mental and psychological sickness.  They could not put two and two together and understand that a misbehaving child is the product of parents who are  neglectful and/or abusive.  They could not understand that when parents shame their children into believing that they are bad people, the child becomes even more anti-social and withdrawn increasing the likelihood of more misbehavior.  It is now time to evolve and change all that.

As social creatures, the purpose in life is not wealth, status, power, or celebrity.  These traits are more descriptive of parasitic organisms than symbiotic and social ones.  The purpose in our lives, as social beings, as  the most socialized beings on the planet, is to work harmoniously and symbiotically with one another.  This cannot happen if we are busy being obedient to an authority that believes in accruing wealth, status, power, and celebrity.  In other words, by serving and being obedient to a parasite, one cannot fulfill one’s true purpose of living harmoniously and symbiotically with other humans and nature itself. 

For the most socialized creature on the planet, environmental mastery is not just about Boy Scouts stuff like being able to live and thrive in the wilderness.  For better or worse, we live in urban civilization and need to master the intricacies and complexities of our urban environment.  Since our urban environment is dominated by people, this means being a people expert.  Once again, being obedient to a parasite in pursuit of wealth and status, we cannot learn to be people experts.  We rather learn to become people parasites or harmful to people, viewing them only as one big clump of host prey instead of the wonderfully diverse, unique, and complex individuals they are.  People parasites are more likely to see the forest and not the trees and continually over-generalize people and place them in big groups based on pseudo-scientific demographic categories like race, income-level, generation, pedigree, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender identity, political identity, etc.  Parasites don’t need a fine-tuned understanding of their prey as much as humans pursuing harmonious and symbiotic relations with one another.  Parasites just need a broad and over-generalized understanding of their host prey in order to suck out their blood or nutrients.

Now, you may be arguing that instead of calling antisocial people ‘bad’ or ‘evil’ I’m introducing the notion that they are actually parasites.  This is a more accurate description, but it doesn’t mean that we should then punish and harm parasites.  After all, the only difference between a parasite and a symbiotic partner is whether they harm us or not.  Within us all are once foreign, independent organisms that now are an integral and vital part of us, our mitochondria.  Some archaebacteria may well have been harmful and killed their host.  As far as human parasites, since they learned to be parasitic, they can also learn to be harmonious and symbiotic.  They are not ‘bad’ or ‘evil’; rather, they are unhealthy.  When a human becomes unhealthy or stressed, they become antisocial and parasitic.  If you have ever heard of the Universe-25 experiment, you know that manufactured, restrictive, and over-crowded environments can turn otherwise social creatures into unhealthy, antisocial, and cannibalistic creatures.  It can happen and has happened with humans too.

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So what do we do when a human becomes unhealthy and antisocial.  If they are committing violent and antisocial acts, of course, we must isolate them.  But for all the sick people in the world, the important word here is healing.  They need to be healed.  We then reframe ourselves from punishers to healers, and we reframe ourselves from ignorant and obedient perpetual juveniles to conscientious, forgiving, healing, responsible, autonomous social adults. 

Basically, do you want a world full of good and evil people and moral enforcers who do evil things to evil people, or do you want to live in a world of healthy and unhealthy people and healthy people who try to heal unhealthy people?  In the former, you have a world of mostly unhealthy people, those who believe it is their job to right a wrong, to punish violators, to do harm upon those who do harm to others.  When you get cut off in traffic, the violator is not stressed out and inattentive or perhaps daydreaming like you do 90% of the time you drive, they are evil, and as evil people who inflicted harm and injustice to you, they deserve to be taught a lesson.  You speed and chase them down and then cut them off.  Has it ever occurred to you that when someone is cutting you off, they may be retaliating against you after you cut them off without even knowing it?  Instead, why not reframe them as stressed out and unhealthy.  In this case, it is better to leave them alone, slow down, create some distance between yourself and this stressed out and unhealthy driver.

In the latter, you have a world of mostly healthy people.  The act of trying to heal someone also makes you more healthy as opposed to the act of trying to punish someone which makes you less healthy.  In one world, you are more autonomous, more likely to personally grow, more accepting of yourself, have more positive relations, have a greater purpose in life, and are a greater master of your social environment.  In the other world, you are constantly defensive and vigilant against evil people, resentful, unforgiving, hostile, vengeful, as well as mindlessly obedient, stunted, self-loathing, lonely, directionless, and anti-social and mostly unhappy and stressed out, anxious, and depressed to boot. 

Just as one would optimize physical health by physically exercising regularly, one can also optimize mental and psychological health by exercising your autonomy, exercising your personal growth, exercising self-acceptance, exercising positive relations, exercising purpose in life, and exercising mastery of your social environment.  You do these by making decisions for yourself and living with those decisions as opposed to relying on others to make your decisions for you and then blaming them when things go wrong.  You pursue personal growth which always means doing things outside your comfort zone and learning something new and starting out as a novice where you make mistakes and fail.  It means learning to accept mistakes and failure without beating yourself up which also means exercising self-acceptance.  And you are more capable of accepting yourself if you don’t indulge in harmful and unhealthy behavior, like allowing others to make your decisions and not taking responsibility for your actions and decisions. 

You exercise positive relations by hanging out physically with friends instead of digitally on social media.  Just like being a novice, you accept the fact that you will make social mistakes, get rejected, and fail at friendships.  You must also learn to forgive yourself and allow yourself room to fail.  You must also avoid negative, toxic relations that only bring you down and compel you to be alone.  You exercise purpose in life by being a social, helpful, healing person instead of a spiteful, antisocial, moral enforcer that goes around harming others who you feel are immoral and/or disobedient.  You exercise mastery of your social environment by engaging in and contributing to your social environment.  There is no other way to master your social environment and exercise positive relations but to physically hang out socially.  Likewise, there is no other way to keep fit but to physically exercise, preferably outside your home with others, and there is no other way to lose excess weight than exercise and consuming fewer empty calories.

People have countless excuses for not socializing.  Primarily, people feel uncomfortable.  If they’re invited to a cocktail party, they won’t go, because they don’t want to feel awkward and stressed out.  But this is like someone avoiding exercise, because they don’t want to feel that initial burst of discomfort, sweat, soreness, and fatigue.  When you exercise long enough, your body starts to relax and enjoy the exercise, and eventually, you get chemicals that make you feel euphoric and less pain.  Likewise, after an initial burst of social discomfort (which many people mitigate with alcohol), your body starts to relax and enjoy the social interaction, and eventually, you also get chemicals that make you feel euphoric and less self-conscious.  Unfortunately, if you over-rely on alcohol to mitigate that initial burst of discomfort, you can undermine the social experience by becoming too disinhibited, too frank, too direct, too intimate, too pushy, too aggressive, and in many cases, too defensive and agitated when conflict arises.  Instead of reinforcing social interaction, excessive alcohol can do the exact opposite and deter you from social interaction. 

Another excuse for not socializing is that some people believe in social classes and levels and stratification.  They don’t want to hang out with people who they think are below them.  By the same token, why should anyone above them want to hang out with them?  So they don’t feel worthy of being around people above them.  This leaves them with very few possible friends who happen to be exactly at the same level they are at.  Of course, because a lot of people spend themselves into debt, you never can really tell if someone makes more or less than you based on their material possessions.  In the end, you don’t end up with any friends.  In reality, you can be friends with anyone from any social ‘level’, any race, any religion, any nationality, any sexual orientation, any gender identity, any age, any political view, etc.  Those in power have learned to divide and conquer, and only people who obsess about these different categories wind up divided and conquered.  If you ever watch those asinine sorority TikTok videos, you see a world of homogeneity with pretty, slender, light-skinned women.  They will likely go on in life to only interact with people they consider at their same level, and as a result, they will wind up mostly lonely, miserable, and antisocial.  I’m not sure what kind of man would want that as lifelong company, and even if they are selected for their looks, those looks don’t last forever.

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The biggest key here is self-acceptance.  Under the good-evil model, if you make a mistake and hurt someone and violate a moral code, you can’t accept yourself.  Bad people do bad things.  If you are compelled to criticize, harm, and punish moral violators, then you will also be compelled to criticize, harm, and punish yourself.  This is why thieves and strippers often throw away their money and waste it on luxury status items that immediately lose their value upon purchase.  If they valued themselves, they would simply invest wisely.  When we feel that we have done something wrong, we feel compelled to punish ourselves whether we are conscious of this or not.  We essentially abuse, mistreat, and undermine ourselves, because we feel like we deserve it, because we are bad. 

Recently, a British prenatal nurse was found guilty of killing seven newborns, likely more.  They found notes in her house presumably to herself that said things like, “I am evil I did this”, “I am a horrible evil person”, and “I don’t deserve to live.  I killed them on purpose because I’m not good enough to care for them”.  What if instead, she had written, “I am sick I did this”, “I am a sick person”, “I need to get help and heal”.  If she had viewed herself as sick rather than evil, it is more likely that she would have sought help and healing.

Not only does the concept of evil hurt us, but it hurts everyone around us, because we become unpleasant company.  If we don’t deserve positive relations and good, rewarding company, then we make ourselves unpleasant to be around.  But what if we used the healthy-unhealthy model?  If we witness someone committing a moral violation, our instinct would not be to harm them but to avoid or heal them.  As such, when we find ourselves committing a moral violation, our instinct would not be to harm or undermine ourselves but to heal ourselves.  What would that look like?

We would look for the origin and cause of our brief and uncharacteristic moral transgression, and we would discover its source.  Sometimes, we might discover that we are not in control of our lives, and we feel compelled to do things that harm others or ourselves.  Our frustrations mount, and we don’t feel good about ourselves, so we lash out at others and harm others.  The path to healing would not be to punish ourselves but to continuously question why we are not in control of our lives and decisions and how we can take back control.  Are we in a job or relationship that is toxic and harming us?  Should we leave it then? 

Healing also means going even further to origin triggers like a childhood traumatic event.  We can reframe the past in such a manner that it has less power over our present and future.  For instance, we might feel like a victim to an older sibling who abused us.  We will forever resent them for it and forever consider ourselves a victim for it.  But what if we learned to forgive them?  What if we focused on the good things they did like taking care of us when our parents were not available?  How can we blame them when they were just a kid too and they were put in that position by their parents?  By reframing the past and forgiving others, we can lessen the power the past has on our present and future and start the healing process.  The healing process cannot begin if we are constantly picking at our scabs or wounds, never forgiving and always feeling resentment and bitterness.  The best way to practice forgiving ourselves is through forgiving others, and the best way to heal ourselves is through healing others.

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When Adam and Eve ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, they were banished from paradise.  Ever since, their offspring believed in a world of good and evil, and they conspired to commit evil atrocities against those they considered to be evil.  It did not matter to them whether the infractions were immoral or simple acts of disobedience, they reveled in the creative and ingenious ways of persecuting, torturing, and killing in an orgy of retributive evil.  They dunked victims in vats of boiling oil, they incarcerated victims in tiny cages, they placed victims in metal containers and burned them alive, they placed rats in a bowl on their stomachs and heated the bowl to force the rats to gnaw their way into people’s bodies, they placed them on a cone and had weights pull their legs down ripping their internal organs apart, they tied them to horses and had their limbs ripped off, they were skinned alive, etc.  The tree of knowledge of good and evil might as well have been a concoction of the devil, and after eating from it, humans have lived in hell ever since.  It is time for humans to go cut down that tree of knowledge of good and evil and burn it.  There are only healthy and unhealthy. 

When an organism is unhealthy, it can no longer operate at full capacity and must make compromises.  When we are suffering from hypothermia, the body stops sending blood to the extremities and we suffer frostbite and can loose our extremities.  Likewise, when someone is suffering from abuse, they stop reaching out to others, they stop being social, they stop making friends, and they become increasingly isolated and in a constant state of defensiveness only caring about themselves and their safety.  Panic attacks and social anxiety only guarantee a lifetime of isolation and misery.  As such, they are more likely to commit antisocial acts, what we may interpret as immoral or evil acts.  Instead of abusing them further and causing them to hide in shame even more, leading to even more antisocial behavior, it is time humanity grew the fuck up and treated them as unhealthy people who need to be healed.  There should be no shame in being mentally or psychologically unhealthy, often as a result of sexual, mental, and/or physical abuse.  Out in the open, they can seek help and healing.  They can learn to trust others again and form the social bonds necessary to become more social and healthy beings. 

Imagine going to a doctor and telling them, “Doctor, my back is killing me, I’m feeling lethargic all the time, I’m often confused and disoriented, I feel like something is horribly wrong with me.”  The doctor replies, “Oh, I see what it is, you’re a bad person, you’re evil.  Here’s my prescription.  You need to harm yourself as punishment.  You need to get in a fight with your spouse.  You need to isolate yourself from friends and family.  You need to feel a couple weeks of shame.  You need to feel horrible about what a bad person you are.  You need to avoid healthy things like exercise and a good diet.  You need to binge and feel even worse about yourself.  You need to indulge in alcohol and drugs.  You need to hurt someone, because that’s what bad people do.  You’ll feel better after all this is done.”  It sounds absolutely absurd, but this is exactly what people do to themselves when they do bad things.  It doesn’t help them, and it doesn’t help society.  We need to stop doing this.

The Secret Life of Groceries: The Dark Miracle of the American Supermarket by Benjamin Lorr

This book begins with a bit of misdirection, first with its flowery prose, and then with its quant story of the founder of Trader Joe’s. 

“And when you start digging into precisely how the people in grocery think, you find one thing open and waiting in the center: the maw.  That voracious, devouring hole we feed three to thirty times a day, swallowing and salivating and stuffing, ceaseless in its demands right up to the point we lie in a hospital bed and it gets temporarily assisted by a polyurethane tube.  The maw to me, like the sun above interfacing with the chloroplasts below the leaf, is more than just a mouth: it is a secular revelation, a complex of destruction and creativity, anchored in need.  It is the sensory cells of the gut.  The neuronal charge to acquire.  The curiosities, comforts, and cravings we convince ourselves are necessities.  It – like the Vedic concept of Self/self – comes in the universal as well as the personal, each of our unique pie holes mere tributaries to some more tremendous vortex right at the heart of the human project.”  Quite a mouthful.

This book reveals the fascinating history of grocery stores from dusty bucolic general stores with no brands, no fancy packaging, no prices, and no touching, just some illiterate bumpkin grabbing stuff and weighing it and charging whatever the hell he feels like.  It is similar to the restaurant and hotel.  When the US built the interstate highway system, it spawned a huge motor tourism industry, but often times unwitting travelers would be screwed over at local restaurants and motels with questionable products and services, and a large portion of one’s income would be spend at restaurants and motels or hotels. 

This is how chains and corporate brands took over the US.  They offered standardized products and services throughout the country so wherever you traveled, you could trust a Denny’s, an IHOP, a Holiday Inn, or Hilton over a Joey’s Restaurant, or Bob’s Grill, or Highway 50 Inn, or Washington Hotel.  What we are experiencing now is a return to the local and regional.  With apps like Google Maps, Yelp, and TripAdvisor, you can now trust local and regional places again, and their charm and unique characteristics are quickly trumping the increasingly poor quality of chains and corporate brands. 

In fact, the tables have turned once again on minorities who used to be discriminated against at local and regional restaurants and motels.  In fact, black people had to rely on a guide book called The Negro Motorist Green Book in order to find places welcoming of them.  Today, we hear stories again and again of chains and corporate places discriminating against black customers, seating them in separate areas, providing poor service, having security follow them around, etc.  And on top of all this, corporations have embarked on a suicidal business model of cutting costs and wages as much as possible while still eeking out a profit while losing customers.  Their model is close to the old Russian oligarch model of selling off all the company’s assets.  The CEO doesn’t care, because once the corporation collapses, he just moves on to another corporation like the parasite he is.  The stakeholders don’t care.  They just sell right before the stock collapses like the parasites they are. 

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The author does a really great job of summarizing the psychology of modern grocery shopping: “…saving money becomes an act of loyalty for family, picky acquisition a sign of concern for health, and the decision to buy your child a more expensive but longed-for item an act of love.  And, of course, as reward for undertaking this new effort, we get the impulsive treat.”

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The book begins by covering Joe Coulombe, founder of Trader Joe’s, and it reveals his iconoclast, visionary abilities in addition to his photographic, savant memory.  According to Coulombe, “In 1966, I guessed that network television with its 95 percent-plus audience share just couldn’t go any further.  America at that time was frighteningly homogenous and I didn’t see it lasting.”  While America was becoming highly standardized and homogenous, Coulombe saw the writing on the wall, the contrary demand for customization and specialization that the market is now embracing.  He saw it coming decades ahead of anyone else.  Instead of everyone wanting what everyone else has, today, people want to differentiate themselves from the lowest common denominator masses, those who shop at Walmart, eat at Applebee’s or Olive Garden, drive American or Japanese gas cars, wear bright prime-colored clothing, and use Android phones.  Trader Joe’s is the Apple of grocery stores before Apple existed. 

While his competitors were just lazy and copied one another, Coulombe was a ferocious intellectual iconoclast who always asked why and why not.  One such example was in his views on race and gender.  While his competitors turned down people of color and only used women as secretaries, he employed people of color at every level of his company and assured equal pay for women and jobs outside of secretary. 

* * *

The book then takes a dark turn, as it should.  One of the most shocking parts of the book is how trucking companies wrangle truck drivers and pressure them into lease-purchase agreements, whereby they have to lease the trucks they drive and rarely stay long enough to own them.  They basically become serfs.  It’s the same trick as human traffickers.  I’ll get you across the border, but you owe me and you’ll have to work for free to pay off that debt.  When drivers are recruited, they aren’t told about this, and when they refuse to lease a truck, they don’t receive sufficient miles to make a living.  They also need to get an authority which costs $1200 which is like a license to drive trucks.  If they can’t afford it, they use the carrier’s authority but get charged a large percentage of their gross.  In one example, a driver’s gross was $200K a year, but after all the fees taken out and expenses that aren’t covered by the carrier, the driver only took home $17K. 

The worst part of the story is how women are treated in the industry.  There is rampant sexual harassment, molestation, and rape, and nobody seems to care.  The carriers often blame the victim, and because the recruitment pool is pretty sketchy to begin with, they get away with it.  They recruit pretty much from the bottom of the barrel, “homeless shelters, soup kitchens, recovery wards, prison work-release programs.”  This also means they’re taking in a lot of mentally unstable people and criminals, and because carriers look the other way when there are reports of sexual harassment or molestation or pressure the victim to retract their claims, the sexual predators remain in the system to harass and molest more victims.  It sounds a lot like the British seaman of the past, yobs impressed into service from the bottom of British society.

* * *

But just as trucking companies extract fees from truck drivers, grocery stores extract fees from suppliers for shelf space called slotting fees.  “These payments amount to $9 billion a year in industry profit.”  “…in January 2017, one retailer was charged $55,000 for 22×12 inches of shelf space.  For a single month.”  But that’s only the tip of the iceberg.  Suppliers are coerced into paying promotional fees, advertising fees, and giving the store free product they can sell for 100% profit. 

* * *

Because grocery stores became a race to the top with the largest supermarkets gaining dominance, they simply accrued more and more debt to grow larger and larger and they hoped that it would all pay off in the end when they achieved market dominance.  By then, they would pay off all their debts by screwing over their customers, their workers, and their suppliers.  Sounds like the modern tech industry.

* * *

The book winds ups revealing a lot of ways that people are getting screwed over by modern grocery stores.  Another such way is just-in-time work scheduling whereby workers are called up at any time when in need and then dismissed when not needed.  As a result, many workers wind up working parttime and cannot take on another parttime job, because they need to be available like a fulltime worker.  “Another [study] found that 60% of retail workers said that they needed to be available to fulfill every work schedule that might be assigned in a given week, and that a full third of all retail employees get less than twenty-four hours’ notice for schedule changes.”

* * *

The book also reveals that food safety in America is a farce, and the only guarantee of food safety is a lawsuit after the fact.  “…over the thirty-five days it takes to grow a chicken to maturity, the floor of the shed will rise six inches in height simply from the accumulated chicken shit the birds produce, and this chicken shit gives off ammonia gas so strong that the “live catch” handlers who go in to gather the chickens for slaughter have to apply cornstarch to their skin to prevent the ammonia from peeling the flesh off their bodies.”

“I kept thinking of the medieval practice of simony, where the wealthy could pay money to be released from their sins.  The grocery store felt like it was becoming a smug secular update.  The seals and certifications acting like some sort of moral shield, allowing those of us with disposable income to pay extra for our salvation, and forcing everyone else to deal with the fact that on top of being poor, they were tacitly agreeing to harm the earth, pollute their children via their lunch boxes, and exploit their fellow man each time they made a purchase.”

* * *

“Two ideas that are, by definition, in tension.  And thus taste – and consumption itself – is bound up in a paradox of sorts: freedom to express the unique self, but requiring approval from the greater conforming community.”

I think a lot of people are confused about American individualism and individuality in general.  We are not talking about ‘solitarism’.  American individualism is not the desire to go out and live alone in the wilderness, despite the romanticism of this idea by the likes of Thoreau’s Walden or Jack Kerouac’s adventures as a US Forest Service fire lookout.  American individuality is actually more hunter-gatherer micro-collectivism contrasted with the civilization macro-collectivism of Southern Europe, the Aztecs, India, and China.  Micro-collectivism means that you care about the collective, but only at a local level.  You’re an egalitarian that doesn’t believe in complex and large social systems where everyone is stratified and segregated by socio-economic and demographic traits. 

It doesn’t mean you want to do whatever you want and damn social conventions and morals and mores and what the neighbors say or what friends and family say.  It means that instead of caring what the mainstream media cares about, what your schools teach you, what your government cares about, what corporations care about, you only care about what your friends and family care about.  It’s not paradoxical at all.  It’s just a different level of collectivism.  Humans are intrinsically collectivists, but when they don’t want to be controlled by corporations or government, they’re labelled individualists like they want to go live in the wilderness in total solitude.  It’s all a word game like calling a statist a liberal when in fact a true liberal wants to be liberated from the state. 

* * *

Just when you thought things could not get worse, you get the story of a young Thai trafficked slave boy on a fishing boat.  His best friend was beaten by the captain and thrown off the boat.  I recall a very similar story in another book, perhaps it’s the same person who sells his story to anyone who will listen. 

* * *

“When shrimp lived in these more confined habitats, their sexual development was stunted by stress.  The females simply refused to develop ovaries.”  This reminds me of Universe 25, the experiment where mice were thrown together in a small, confined space, and they eventually went crazy and started attacking and killing one another until they all died despite ample food being provided.  This reminds me of developed countries with falling birthrates.  While I do believe in women’s rights and women in the workplace, it’s also quite possible that the stress of working and climbing the corporate ladder is not only making women want to delay childbirth and family but eschew it altogether. 

And one must wonder whether older people in general are much more vulnerable to stress than younger people, so if you are planning on delaying having children, as you get older, you succumb to stress more, and you are less likely to have a child, and if you do have a child, the stress of raising one gets to you more, and you are less likely to have more than one child whereas an uneducated young person is happy to make babies and raise them and deal with the stress one day at a time.  After all, we prefer to recruit soldiers young, because not only are they more fit, but they are also more naïve and amenable to the stresses of military life whereas the older you get, the less likely you would even consider joining the military, and if you did, the shock of military life would be so unpleasant that you would more likely try to quit or just never reenlist. 

Perhaps one of the most bizarre biological mysteries is how female shrimp, overcrowded in tubs would over time lose one of their eyeballs to the constant rubbing of it against the side of the tub, and as a result, hormones are unleashed leading to the development in ovaries “in as little as three days.”  So crafty shrimpers simply snipped off one eyeball of female shrimp to induce the development of ovaries.  Perhaps you could replicate this with human females. 

The story of the slave boy fisherman has an unbelievable twist.  After five years of free labor, he simply asks to leave and is allowed.  He works at a shrimp processing plant, but he isn’t paid, because he is charged for electricity and housing, so he returns to fishing where he becomes a supervisor.  The author asks if he ever abused anyone, and he denies it, but who knows.  This is a story of Stockholm Syndrome where he has adapted to the harsh conditions of slavery and abuse, and then like a prostitute who becomes a madame, he turns around and helps victimize others.  I doubt anyone who ever abused people or even killed them would ever admit that to a journalist when they get to share their story again and again as a victim.

* * *

Lest you think slave labor and human trafficking is not a 1^st world problem, you may have noticed a boom in Asian massage parlors in your city, at least, I have in Reno.  And don’t forget prison labor. 

* * *

In the final analysis, the author offers despair.  He argues that when consumers demand accountability, the added costs of audits and certifications and all are just transferred to the sellers who are then forced to cut costs in the only place they can, and that is labor, by going from low-paying to slave labor.  I find this specious, cynical, unproductive, and profoundly misguided.  It does make a difference.  Some producers can deliver without turning to slave labor, and with the help of books like this, there will be consumer demand that we know exactly whether the products we buy come from slave labor. 

Take for instance Temu.  Not only is Temu rife with knockoffs and counterfeits, it almost invariably uses prison labor, their prisons filled with political opponents, Falun Gong followers, and ethnic minorities the Chinese are attempting to eradicate or at least use as free prison labor.  As a consumer, you have the incredible power not to download the Temu app.  The author would have you believe there is nothing you can do, so you might as well shop Temu.  You might as well eat shrimp.  You might as well eat factory meat filled with antibiotics, hormones, and fed GMO corn.  You might as well shop at Walmart.  You might as well drive a Hummer.  You might as well buy clothes made in a sweatshop.  You might as well vote for a Democrat or a Republican.  You might as well invest in petroleum companies, tobacco companies, and buy a blood diamond.  I think the conscientious consumer is headed in the right direction, but change does not happen overnight, but change does happen when consumers demand accountability and ethics.  We just have to do a better job of it.  It doesn’t mean everything is useless, oh woe is me.  Give me a break.

Not to the join in the pessimists chorus, however, I would add that in order to be a conscientious consumer, you have to be able to AFFORD to be a conscientious consumer, and I don’t see Millennials and to a much greater extent Gen Zers having any extra disposable income to become conscientious consumers.  While Gen Xers may have been able to afford craft IPAs, Millennials often gravitated toward PBR as much for the price as the blue collar irony.  Today, with bar beer prices as high as $10, I don’t see many Gen Zers drinking craft beers, and many settle for the cheap corporate variety, or simply buy a 12-pack at home and pre-party. 

Fact is, after World War II, Americans became rich, and while there were many high school grads who became rich factory workers, there were also many new college grads who became rich white collar workers who became conscientious consumers.  As AI takes over white collar jobs, as white collar jobs pay less, as it becomes increasingly impossible to afford a college education, as older conscientious consumers have no children or fewer children then blue collar migrants, the number of conscientious consumers will plummet and along with them the demand for accountability. 

And with AI and robotics, just as with slavery in the American South, this will leave poor people with no jobs or jobs at much lower wages than without slavery or AI and robotics.  The fantasy of universal basic income is like telling poor white Southerners that plantation owners will share some of the profits from slavery with them.  You think?  In fact, I imagine the poor white Southerners are naïve and gullible enough to pick up guns and fight for their wealthy Southern counterparts in a contrived civil war again.  If you will, Donald Trump is much like the Southern plantation owner who tells them that he is one of them, that he will fight for them, that they need to take up arms and fight the evil cross-bred urbanites who don’t believe in slavery and racism.  And we’ve witnessed history prove that the illiterate white Southerner was willing to risk his life to fight for the rich Southern plantation owners, despite the fact that they neither employed him nor cared for him, just as Donald Trump could care less about poor, white rural folk.  W Bush didn’t care for poor black people during Katrina, but nobody is willing to accept the fact that Trump really doesn’t care for poor white people.  In fact, in reading his biography, his older brother who didn’t want to work for his father at first, became a poor white person who crawled back to his father for work and ultimately killed himself from drinking.  Trump views poverty as a punishment for disobedience.  He will not fight for the poor, just as he never fought for his brother.

* * *

The author sounds like a Brit in that he’s cynical and snide and doesn’t really think improving yourself amounts to anything more than a better version of yourself capable of doing nothing.  First of all, we shouldn’t be so depressed and upset that the world is the way it is.  We have this false impression that nature is like Disney and no one suffers, and when animals are eaten alive, they miraculously go into shock and feel nothing.  That’s all horseshit.  They feel horrific pain and suffering, and so do factory animals cramped in small spaces and torn from their parents or torn from their offspring. 

Nature was cruel and horrible before humans, but only through human vocabulary.  Without human vocabulary, nature was just atoms bouncing off one another.  Pain and suffering was neither good nor bad.  Humans came along, and because we are perhaps the most social creature, we created ethics which was a magic trick.  We are allowed to be ethical to one another, to those we feel belong in our group, and then we are allowed to be horrifically cruel to outsiders.  All along, nature has been horrifically cruel and in some cases with social creatures, quite kind and loving, but even then, a social animal under duress, like the mice in Universe-25, can be transformed into cruel monsters.  So the baseline is that life is full of pain and misery and suffering, and we are lucky to experience sporadic joy, love, kindness, and happiness, but only within our own groups.  We are ethical hypocrites who are happy to kill and incarcerate people of a different ‘race’ or religion or political opinion or simply other species we consider to be food and not pets.  That is the starting point. 

The question is not, why can’t we be the nice and loving and peaceful beings we are supposed to be.  We were never supposed to be that.  Nature isn’t much about that stuff.  That was a human invention to incentivize us to work well with people within our group which overtook the planet.  The question is, why not expand that group and expand our kindness, sharing, and love with more and more people and more and more species?  That’s how we took over the planet to begin with, by ever expanding our social groups from tribes, to villages, to cities, to nations, to global alliances.  Why not improve upon nature?  Why not take a tool that was designed to make us super cooperative within our own groups and extrapolate that to a tool that makes us super cooperative outside our groups?  Why not march toward universal altruism and kindness and love?  If we can afford to do it, and it benefits us all, why not? 

The answer is quite clear.  There is a small cabal of humans who still think that ethics is only a tool to incentivize cooperation within their group of elite, rich assholes.  They think of everyone outside of their group as prey, livestock, slaves, cheap labor, low class peons, peasant stock, what have you.  They have most of the wealth, most of the media, most of the politicians, most of the regulatory agencies, most of the military generals, most of everything, so you can see that wresting control from them to be kind and nice to everyone will be an uphill battle, but what else is there to do but give up, collaborate, try to join them, fight amongst ourselves like they want us to, and become unhealthy, lonely, miserable, cynics like the author?  Somehow I think those in power are more than happy to see educated people resign themselves to despair and cynicism, English style. 

Love-Based Leadership: The Model for Leading with Strength, Grace, and Authenticity by Dr. Maria Church

The very first leadership book I ever read was called Zapp! The Lightning of Empowerment.  If only everyone read this book, every work team would be empowered and highly motivated, and managers would just have to sit back and enjoy their dedication and hard work.  Self-help books and management/leadership books will continue to be written to the end of time suggesting that all we need is some healthy, constructive habits like love, empowerment, autonomy, coaching, emotional intelligence, character, integrity-based-leadership, etc.  Has it ever occurred to anyone why these things are not being taught and utilized, and they only occur in self-help and management books?  People pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for prestigious MBA degrees, and yet, they don’t even learn how to be effective leaders.  They learn how to be quantitative analysts and financial wizards and maximize profits by cutting costs, but they never learn how to be strong leaders.  Why?

The answer is quite simple.  Our world is dominated by people who don’t care about love, empowerment, autonomy, coaching, emotional intelligence, character, integrity-based-leadership, etc.  What do they care about?  They care about wealth, status, and power.  If you care about wealth, status, and power, you don’t care about love, empowerment, autonomy, emotional intelligence, character, morals, etc.  In order to acquire or consolidate wealth, status, and power, you must be a ruthless, spineless, despicable, immoral, shallow, soulless, piece of shit.  They don’t tell you this, because obviously, it would expose everyone at the top as such.  It’s just an unwritten rule. 

Of course, we’re all taught from a young age that it’s important to be moral, ethical, kind, sharing, helpful, merciful, nice, and collaborative.  But there are countless messages that also tell us to be ambitious, successful, driven, highly motivated, uncompromising, audacious, demanding, domineering, dominating, Alpha perfectionists.  There are countless messages that tell us that being moral, loving, kind, helpful, and collaborative is being weak, and people will take advantage of you.  We are taught that we live in a harsh, cruel, dog-eat-dog world, and you are either eating or being eaten.  Right after Darwin informed the world of genetics, the culture at the time misinterpreted this and supported the demented ideology of Darwinism and ‘survival of the fittest’.  It then morphed into eugenics, social engineering, and racism. 

In history books, we are taught that our leaders care about us and protect us, and that all these wars are necessary to ensure that we survive against evil empires and scary foreigners like Genghis Khan.  It never occurs to anyone that to many foreigners, Alexander the Great, Caesar, and Napoleon, were their Genghis Khan’s.  We never learn the truth that all leaders are corrupt and they all steal land from one another in a quest for domination and the accrual of wealth, status, and power. 

It’s almost like we live in two worlds that contradict one another.  We’re supposed to tell everyone that we’re the good guys.  We’re kind, loving, helping, sharing, and protecting.  But in reality, we conceal the fact that we are the bad guys despite the fact that we promote the idea of being tough, domineering, alpha, ruthless, cunning, cruel, and merciless.  We are obsessed with wealth, status, and power, yet we’re supposed to tell everyone that we’re not.  We celebrate people who have wealth, status, and power, yet we’re supposed to also be kind and thoughtful about the poor, the oppressed, the underdogs.  In politics, we have a Democratic/socialist Party that supposedly represents all our kindness, charity, helpfulness, and collaboration, but then we also have a Republican/conservative Party that supposedly represents all our toughness, militancy, domination, and selfishness. 

As a funny experiment, try doing this with your boss.  Ask them if they’re into collaboration, kindness, sharing, and ethics, or if they’re for merciless pursuit of market domination, profits, wealth, status, and power.  While some bosses are honest enough to admit that they’re ruthless profiteers, most will tell you that they are the other, that they are all about sharing, kindness, and collaboration.  Then tell them you’ve been reading a book about love and empowering workers and giving them more autonomy and trust, and you’d like to implement some of the ideas at work.  They’ll laugh you right out of their office. 

This is the big lie.  While our leaders are supposed to come across as caring, sharing, helping, collaborative, and kind, they do very little to support this image.  Meanwhile, what many leaders or managers or bosses are really thinking is that they should be domineering, demanding, tough, harsh, selfish, and profiteering jerks if they want to get ahead at the company.  Many also believe that if they’re too soft or nice with their staff, their staff will just take advantage of them.  In our modern business world, you only have aggressive and passive, domineering and submissive.  There is no room for assertive and collaborative. 

So you will read all the leadership and management books you want that will encourage love, sharing, collaboration, trust, relationships, a strong work-life balance, and finding meaning and purpose in your work.  But nobody else at work will care for these things, especially at the top.  They will never admit it, but what they want is to squeeze the most work out of you while providing you with the least compensation and job satisfaction.  When they’re done with you, they’ll just dispose of you and find another unwitting sucker, a cheaper and naïve version of you with less seniority and without the snide, jaded attitude. 

It’s the same deal with self-help books.  The reason why they don’t work is that the priority in life is not your happiness or even well-being and security.  Rather, the priority for most people is profiteering, wealth, status, and power.  In order to create inordinate wealth, status, and power at the top, you need to deprive everyone else of wealth, status, and power below you.  Wealth, status, and power are zero-sum games.  They only work by depriving others of wealth, status, and power.  So if I have all the wealth, status, and power, why would I care about your happiness, well-being, and security?  If anything, I would want to exploit you and ensure your unhappiness, poor health, and insecurity.  I would want to take away as much of your wealth as possible whether through taxes or getting you to spend money on useless, unnecessary things.  I would want to take away as much of your status as possible by pointing out all the things that are wrong with you, your inferior race, gender, income, religion, background, family, neighborhood, education, grades, intelligence, etc.  I would want to take away as much of your power as well by not only taking away your autonomy and independence but by inundating you with messages that you’re better off without them, but inundating you with manufactured threats that make you happy to surrender your rights, liberties, privacy, and freedom.  Every century has a boogieman, the Persians, the Mongols, the Native Americans, the Pagans, the Heretics, the blacks, the Gypsies, the Catholics, the Jews, the homosexuals, the Muslims, the transgender, etc.

* * *

The greatest myth is that domineering, tough, harsh, hard, alpha bosses are strong and courageous.  They live in a scary world with a lot of threats and dangers, and they are unafraid of leading a team into this pit of vipers and scoundrels.  In reality, they’re going to throw you first at the vipers and scoundrels while hiding in back.  In reality, they’re terrified of everyone including their own followers.  They need to use harsh punishment and the threat of injury or even death to keep their followers in check.  This also means that they need to convince their followers that falling into the hands of the enemy is even worse than staying with them.  This is also why they will treat their enemies and enemy prisoners so poorly.  The worse you treat your enemies and prisoners, the worse they’ll treat your people, and the worse they treat your people, the more your people will be loyal to you.

On the other hand, it takes tremendous courage, bravery, and toughness to lead with character, because it means admitting your own vulnerabilities and weaknesses and faults.  It means asking for help and relying on your followers for assistance.  It also means being weary of followers who might consider this sign of weakness as an opportunity to take leadership from you.  This is one reason why so many domineering leaders refuse to admit their weaknesses or faults.  But it takes incredible confidence and strength to be transparent about your weaknesses and limitations.  And it builds trust when you allow followers to fill in the gaps with their own strengths. 

Above all, being a collaborative, trustful, ethical leader, you need to have incredible self-control and self-awareness.  Allowing your negative emotions to get the better of you will undermine your relationships and trust.  You can’t lash out at people for disappointing you, disagreeing with you, not supporting your ideas, or not reaching their goals.  Either they will interpret this as you being a domineering boss or a weak collaborative leader.  You have to be consistent.  You can’t be a domineering boss one week and then switch to a collaborative leader the next week.  It doesn’t work like that.  Once you commit to being a collaborative leader, you have to remain a collaborative leader until the end. 

* * *

It’s unfortunate, but in our modern world, people tend to misinterpret a collaborative, ethical leader as a submissive, weak boss.  And at the same time, a lot of submissive, weak bosses try to be collaborative leaders but fail.  I’ve experienced a number of submissive bosses.  While I consider them to be superior to domineering bosses, it’s beyond frustrating when they allow a bully to thrive and torment their own staff.  They are both unwilling to see the horrible behavior in them and take action to stop it.  Even worse, they promote them to keep them in their pockets.  They suffer from rose-colored glasses, and then when the evidence becomes overwhelming, they blame the victims.  “If only you would give the guy a chance, he wouldn’t be so insecure and horrible.”  “You guys demonize and vilify her, and that’s not helping either.”  “If only you knew them like I know them, you would be more forgiving of their faults and shortcomings as a boss.” 

The submissive boss suffers from Stockholm Syndrome.  It’s likely they grew up with a tormenting and abusive parent, and their only strategy for survival was to be appeasing of that parent and avoid conflict.  As a child, there really aren’t many options.  Nobody tells you how to stand up to a bully, especially when it’s your own parent.  To stand up to a bully, to keep their staff in check, to question and challenge inappropriate behavior, to them is like being a 7-year-old and standing up to their abusive parent.  It’s impossible.  They survived childhood by appeasing and overlooking, and they survive being a boss by appeasing and overlooking bullies in their own department.

* * *

The best part of this book that I haven’t read in other books is the part on self-love.  No, this isn’t self-infatuation and self-obsession like many people go on about.  Self-infatuation and self-obsession isn’t self-love.  Quite the contrary, it leads one to oscillate between self-importance and self-hatred.  Either approach is unfair to yourself.  You can’t ever fulfill heightened feelings of greatness, superiority, and importance, because nobody will ever treat you like that.  You will also realize that it’s an unattainable ideal.  As a result, you’ll fall back to self-hatred and self-pity.  You’ll consider yourself a helpless, pathetic victim.  But that too will be too much, so you’ll just go back to feelings of self-importance and arrogance.  You’ll just bounce between the two until the end of time. 

Instead, it’s much healthier to discover a realistic self-assessment.  You are flawed.  You have faults and shortcomings, but this doesn’t mean you’re a weak, helpless, pathetic victim.  Rather, it means, you have work to do.  Once you learn to more realistically assess yourself, you also learn to realistically assess others.  Whenever someone disappoints you, argues with you, lets you down, hurts you, or isn’t kind to you, you won’t overreact and villainize them and become their sworn enemy.  You’ll accept them as flawed with shortcomings, and you’ll work with them to improve them. 

Accepting and loving yourself will lead you to accept and love others, as flawed and hurtful as they may be when they’re under pressure, stress, and upset.  Often, if you show them forgiveness, love, and acceptance, they will behave better.  Unfortunately, this is often interpreted and misunderstood as appeasement and submission.  You need to hold them accountable for their actions first, and then forgive them.  Once they admit what they did, you can move forward.  If they refuse to admit that they did something harmful, then it’s time to let the relationship go. 

Some people might argue, what’s so wrong with being a domineering, mean, tough, no-nonsense, emotionally stunted, egotistical narcissist?  If I’m winning, I’m rich, I’m in the upper class, and I have power and influence, what’s so bad?  Everyone is just jealous of me.  This is delusional.  First of all, you’re unhappy.  Happiness, according to a Harvard AI, is autonomy, personal growth, self-acceptance, positive relations, purpose in life, and environmental mastery. 

A domineering narcissist climbs the corporate ladder by demonstrating submission to every boss at every rung of the ladder.  They lead a life of behaving submissive and only get to act dominant with people below them.  This means that they have little autonomy.  Being submissive to people ‘above’ you and domineering to people ‘below’ you is the opposite of personal growth.  You also never accept yourself, because you are not at the very top.  There are no positive relations, just you pretending to like people above you and making it clear that you despise people below you.  If your purpose in life is wealth, status, and power, your purpose is meaningless.  And the only environment you master is the toxic environment of a hierarchy where nobody is happy.  On top of this, your mental and physical health are also in jeopardy.  You don’t respect or care about your body, so you abuse it, just as you abuse your staff and what family and acquaintances you may have left.  You don’t respect or care about your mental health either and allow yourself to be stressed out at work, playing office politics and undermining what you consider enemies and threats.  Your assertion that you’re winning, because you have more wealth, status, and power than others is pure delusion.

* * *

Another great section is the part on faith.  Domineering narcissists don’t have faith.  They don’t believe anyone is going to help them, and everyone will take any opportunity whatsoever to undermine or sabotage them, just as they have been undermining and sabotaging others.  They don’t believe in an afterlife.  In fact, many know that if heaven and hell exists, they’re more likely candidates for hell.  They live in the present.  They don’t even care if their children suffer or humanity is wiped out.  All that matters is them and the immediate present. 

But this is a terrifying and closed world, almost suffocating.  It means that feeling uncomfortable and suffering is unacceptable.  There is no such thing as suffering in the present to accomplish something greater in the future.  All they believe in is what is happening in the present, and they need immediate relief and immediate gratification.  In order to get immediate relief or immediate gratification, they will do anything.  They will harm their future selves with debt or some criminal prosecution.  They will harm everyone around them.  They will harm humanity and the planet.  They just don’t care.  All they care about is immediate relief and immediate gratification. 

In order to sacrifice in the moment to achieve greater things in the future, you need faith.  You need to believe that the future will be better, that your sacrifices and suffering will pay off.  At the very least, you’ll be less sensitive and avoidant of sacrifices and suffering.  This alone will make you more resilient and formidable.  It also means that you believe in the best in yourself, in others, in humanity, in nature itself.  You don’t think nature is just predatory and competitive.  You believe nature is also synergistic and collaborative.  You also believe that you and others are also synergistic and collaborative.  This is the only way that things will ever get better.  Faith is absolutely crucial for being a good, collaborative person.  Whether you have reasonable, credible evidence that the future will be better is irrelevant.  The mere act of believing in a better future will impact your present behavior and outlook.  Just like the mere act of believing that you will have a good time at a party and get to know a lot of nice, friendly people will actually help make you more outgoing and friendly and attract people and bring out the best in people.  Assume the future is a horrible place where you no longer exist and decay and rot back into the soil, assume that people at a party will be cold and boorish, and voila, you become a horrible person nobody wants to be around.

* * *

In the end, the author brings up one of the most important benefits of love, and that is healing.  Sometimes we think that love is for middle-class families that have supporting and loving parents, and they teach their children how to love and provide them with unconditional love, and they grow up to be loving and kind.  But love can happen for anyone, and it is especially important for people who have suffered traumas and lived a childhood devoid of love.  These are people who are sick and hurt, and they can go through their entire lives inflicting harm upon others, because that is all they know.  One of the greatest benefits of love is the power to heal. 

We think of evil people as being born evil, and they spend their entire lives conspiring to do horrible and wicked things to people.  In reality, everyone is born with a desire to be good, to contribute, to love, to be loved, to be valued, and to be healthy.  Somewhere along the line, a sickness arises.  Their parents may be afflicted by severe poverty, unemployment, crime, war, famine, discrimination, oppression, etc.  Under stress, parents don’t show much love and affection, and in many cases, they exhibit abuse and cruelty.  It is love that helps heal people, especially people who have never experienced much love and actually experienced more abuse and fearful behavior. 

When you get sick or break a bone or get a virus, there is a healing process where your body repairs damage or purges some toxic substance from the body.  This is what love does.  It helps purge the trauma and the symptoms of that trauma.  While you can try to distract yourself from the pain and suffering using drugs, alcohol, reckless behavior, self-destructive behavior, violence, rage, etc., these activities don’t heal you.  In fact, they only contribute to more trauma, pain, and suffering.  It is only love that can truly heal you and strengthen you.  Far from being soft or weak, love makes you incredibly resilient, persistent, strong, confident, and helpful.  The strongest, most resilient people on this planet have been exposed to love.  Meanwhile, drugs, violence, aggression, rage, and cruelty to others makes you increasingly weak, guilty, remorseful, self-loathing, insecure, anxious, depressed, and selfish.  Feeding on hatred and anger, envy, and chasing wealth, status, and power simply make you a weak, intolerable asshole who spouts off about being alpha and domineering to distract everyone from the simple fact that you are a weak, insufferable clown.

For me, the greatest benefit of love is liberation.  When we don’t have love, we are imprisoned in feelings of worthlessness, purposelessness, meaninglessness, self-loathing, self-doubting, and then alternating bouts of self-aggrandizement and narcissism.  We are trapped in a mindset that is toxic and unhealthy and keeps us restricted from doing things we want to do, being the person we want to be, having relationships we crave, and achieving things we desire.  Unlike a physical prison, it is a mental prison.  Love is the key that unlocks the door and releases us from all the toxic and unhealthy thinking and beliefs that keep us down.  With love, you can walk outside your prison and breathe fresh air and run free and do as you please.  You are not dragged down by regrets, guilt, self-loathing, selfishness, past traumas, resentment, fear, anxiety, and depression.  You are free.  Of course, at work, nobody is free, and nobody cares to allow freedom to thrive, because those at the top want you imprisoned not only in the confines of the office from 8 AM to 5 PM and often beyond, they want you confined in your own mental prison where you actually think wealth, status, and power is more important than your own well-being and happiness, than morals, ethics, selflessness, self-respect, decency, dignity, love, healing, and freedom.