To be a good follower.

"In the end, you will always kneel." - Loki of Asgard.

"If you don't want to lead, then you must throw your lot in with a group that has a good leader with a vision and purpose in life you agree with. You must then do what you can to support that team and its leader." - Cappy Cap, Enjoy the Decline.

"If you have nothing else to give, give fealty. It is in every man to recognize righteousness, and choose to take orders from it." - Thumotic.

Hierarchy is a central tenet of the Reaction. Hierarchy, by its definition, also demands that some will be leaders, and some will be followers.

Recently, Loki of Asgard, that charming fellow, made a post pointing out quite correctly that most people, not just women, are made to follow to various degrees. Not everyone can be a leader, and please don't buy that bullshit I was spoon-fed when I was thirteen about how "everyone is a leader in their own regard" crap. Some people don't like to lead, some people don't want to lead, and others are not fit to lead.

"Everyone is a leader" is like "everyone is special": technically true, if you twist the words enough, but made meaningless in any practical, constructive measure. Much like coming in first in a footrace in which you're the only competitor.

Some people can admit they are made to be followers. There is nothing wrong with being a follower. There is nothing wrong with playing a support role. The only problem is with being sheep. The difference is between one who follows, and one who is corralled.

There are multitudes of books, speeches, pamphlets, etc on what it takes and means to be a good leader. But what does it mean to be a good follower? I don't claim to be an authority on the subject, but I've written about my personal thoughts on the matter before, so...

The most important thing a follower can do is to recognise a good leader. Recognise righteousness, and take orders from it. How does one recognise a good and righteous leader? Of course, here I'm going to be talking about earthly leaders, whom everyone will deal with, so it doesn't really matter if you're a theist and your ultimate allegiance lies with your deity.

The best way, of course, would be to play squire to the leader's knight, to observe both the private and public spheres of your leader before, and while serving him. Now, it's true that getting a clear picture of what someone's private sphere is like before being admitted into it is hard, and I'm definitely not advocating prying, but at the very least one is obligated to observe your potential leader's doings for a reasonable period of time depending on the nature and degree of your following. If this leader is someone whom you are going to trust with your life, then observe them close and hard, if it's just for a task lasting a single day, less observation and introspection is needed.

Look up what your leader stands for, how he conducts himself. Ask those close to him and those who are already part of the group, as well, as those distant from the group, of their opinions.

Ask yourself constantly: is this someone whom I can follow? This counts double in the beginning stages of your leader-follower relationship, when you are still getting a feel for each other, but should never stop. If your leader deviates from righteousness and purpose, then it is your duty as a follower to make your concerns heard, for them and the rest of the group. Your duty as a follower is to provide feedback to the leader.

What can my leader do, before I begin to feel distaste for him? What depravity will it take before I can abandon him? How well are my leader's ideals and goals aligned with mine?

All these and more must be considered.

Nothing to report today.

Instead, please wander along to this marvelous collection of reactionary literature put together by Mr. W. C. Soto for the benefit of cheap asses like me who don't want to pay for good reading and has figured out that those books are largely unavailable in his country anyway.

My suggestion would be to start from the titles on Free Northerner's reading list, and work outwards from there.

Confucius - a smart guy.

Been reading through the Analects again, and noticing all the parallels that can be drawn. 

Confucius and reactionary thought

As a recap, the general consensus of the reactionary position, as outlined by Nick B. Steves:

• Hierarchical social structures: Hierarchy is not only not bad, but natural and absolutely essential to the proper functioning of any social structure;
• Sex Realism: Sex differences are real, are ordained by nature or nature’s god or both, and we ignore them at our peril;
• Race Realism: Race and group differences are real, are ordained by nature or nature’s god or both, and we ignore them at our peril;
• Memetic Realism (“Deep Heritage”): Traditional folkways tend to be real, i.e., non-ideological, and naturally arising adaptations to social realities, which therefore represent pretty good (at least) local solutions to very (or intractably) complex problems;
• Economic Realism (later badly dubbed “Microeconomics” and we still await a name for the phenomenon): In any economy where an absolutely fixed supply of (properly divisible) money is deemed impossible or impractical, there is ipso facto a con game going where the issuance of money has itself become a political weapon;
• (Hyper)Federalism: Local optima rarely scale well; subsidiarity; the right of exit must be guaranteed;
• Social Justice: If social justice is anything at all, it is merely justice;
• Democracy: The best and brightest of any society were ordained by nature or nature’s god or both to lead. Expansion of the franchise beyond that natural aristocracy is tragicomically foolish;
• Politics: Defined as competition for parcels of power over unrelated others, usually as a means of redistributing wealth, politics is rightly minimized in any sane society.

Of the points above, the Analects deal mostly with hierarchy, memetics and politics.

Getting back into the groove.

Ah, that nebulous period of time in between me finishing my final exams and getting my reports back from the university's career center as to prospective job offers. I'd rather not go for my commencement - it really is just one big waste of time, to be honest - but since my folks want me to go, I'll oblige them, I suppose.

Nevertheless, with a bit of idle time on my hands, I've been doing a little XML coding for various game mods. The most productive use of my time? Perhaps not, but it's definitely getting myself back in the creative and problem-solving groove that I've missed being in for a while now. And more importantly, it's a problem I can solve, as opposed to the various pieces of news that filter down into this box from the outside world.

Why you should learn game anyway.

"But I don't intend to pick up women," one of my classmates tells me when we're a little way out of the exam hall and on our way to the bus stop. "I don't see the point in this 'game' thing."

I've heard this line uttered sometimes in response to exhortations to learn game, in one form or another, such as "women these days aren't worth it anyways". The point these folks are making is that while they admit the value game has in the mating arena, they argue that they don't intend to mate anyway and hence have no reason to pursue game.

On the surface, that seems fair enough. I've explained in my previous posts the dilemma moralfags like me and Free Northerner face; while Roosh says to not let chastity hold one back and that passion is a virtue so long as it's in earnest, please excuse me while I disagree with the king, especially since I've recently spat out plenty of vitriol regarding the vileness of modern romantic love.

I fully understand that the deck is stacked against men in courts all over the world. I have no illusions as to how completely screwed over Singaporean men are in marriage, the cage that most of them unwittingly walk into. I fully agree with Aurini that 99% of modern women are unfuckable, let alone undateable. I fully have no intention of getting myself entangled with any sort of woman until the Cathedral falls, which might be years if we're unfortunate. Of course, there might be the exception if I'm blown off my feet, but as things stand, no thank you.

And I still am learning, and practicing in small amounts where possible, game. And if I were a mountaintop ascetic in a hidden monastery with some psuedo-mystic name like Thousand Leaves Fall, I would still go ahead and learn game.

So, if you, an unattached young man, not going to use game to pick up women, why should you go about learning it?

Work with what you have.

When I was thirteen and in your equivalent of junior high (I think that's right, isn't it?), I scored well enough on my primary school leaving examinations to be admitted to one of the more prestigious independent schools in the nation. The principal was a complete narcissist who ran the school as a vehicle for the primary purpose of making himself look better, and surprisingly that was one of the reasons why the kids who actually enrolled there learned something, because he'd be put to shame otherwise.

I've spoken at length about my time in the Singapore version of the Hitler Jugend; about how my principal's excuse was "I want to make a leader out of everyone. Even if you're on the bottom of the ladder, you are a leader in your own way." Which was bullshit for the four years I wore a uniform as a cadet, and I never ended up being anywhere near a leadership position.

Preferred it that way, too.

Oh, I would like to lead, especially in times when I know I'm capable of it in terms of technical know-how. But coercing people to do what I want when I want is a hugely draining mental and moral effort, and one has to be a fool to believe that coercion isn't required at some level to keep people in line, unless you're dealing with insectoids from the planet Zog. It's not that I won't take it if required to. It's just that it's not sustainable. I just want to be left alone, get my memos as to what to do, and be allowed to complete my job in peace.

Things that should be there but aren't.

Today I went out to try and get my hands on some coconut oil for frying purposes. You'd imagine that being in a tropical island not too far away from the world's greatest producer of the fruit (the Philippines, to be exact) it wouldn't be hard to find the stuff, but interestingly, it is. Checked out local health food stores on the internet, and those which did have tiny bottles of the stuff (100-300 mls) had it at horribly expensive prices.

Eventually, I did manage to find a retailer that I felt was reasonable, but only because the stuff was on a 30% discount at the moment. I'll test it out, see how it goes and I feel, and if it isn't up to snuff then I can go back to the far cheaper coconut cream for my saturated fat needs. I'm sure there are better suppliers out there, but I've exhausted my local internet capabilities.

But what is more interesting, though, is that most of the coconut oil actually states it's manufactured in the US. Considering the sheer amount of copra processed in the region, you'd imagine we'd have more regionally produced coconut oil, but the few examples I found that were manufactured in Thailand were every bit as expensive as the US-produced ones. I guess the fact that the retailers were health food stores had something to do with it, too, but...

By the same measure, you'd imagine that ghee would be freely available in Singapore, considering the 13% or so of the local population that's Indian. However, I've only run across ghee once in my life, and it was in a dingy mom-and-pop provision shop in the middle of Little India, in canned form to boot.

What kinds of fat do we locals use for cooking, then? The usual suspects: sunflower, canola, corn, generic "vegetable", so on and so forth, the usual suspects. You can see the local Indian cooks at the food courts frying unleavened flatbread in it; everyone regardless of race and creed has bought into the lipid hypothesis.

Monkey see, monkey do. Most people will eat what's set in front of them without thinking twice, especially if an "expert" tells them it's good(TM).

Where did the coconut oil and ghee go? Well, we do know where it went in the latter case. Things that were in our original cultures and traditions, tested and tried by time and proven to be at least workable, if not good for us - replaced by disgusting stuff because we're told "it's for our own good", and we just swallowed it whole without even toeing the water ourselves. Thank goodness we haven't given up using coconut cream in our curries, though, as also in traditional malay cuisine. Skim milk curry tastes bland and horrible by comparison.

Results of the Captain's "forced discipline and regimen month".

Or one month and five days, if you want to be strict about it. As set out in the initial post, five days weights, two days running, one running day every two weeks an off day.

A few things I've done to my diet:

-Cut out wheat as much as possible from my diet.
-Changed from vegetable oils to butter for frying.
-Now take whole milk, non-UHT.
-Limited rice a little more.

Results so far:

-I think my shoulder's almost fully back up to snuff now; mere twinges under my usual load. Once those are gone I'll be looking into increasing my weight load.
-Lost 3-4 kilograms (hard to get an exact handle, since it does fluctuate according to my fluid intake), from 82 to 78-79. Really, especially since according to that quaint little food pyramid, all those saturated fats going into my system should have made me a bloated blubber ball. You mean they lied? Say it ain't so!
-Finished my individual report for the designing of a vacuum distillation operation for the separation of acetylated castor oil from acetic anhydride and acetic acid.
-Started Koanic Soul, tested out my slightly customised Koan set, trying out Koanic's "faith of a mustard seed" koan at the moment, along with some glossolalia exercises. I'll have the lot in a separate post sometime soon.

I don't have a photo like Cappy Cap does at the moment, so you'll just have to take my word for it. But I will say that I'm rather pleased with the results.

Going off the narcotic drip.

I don't rightly remember when I stopped watching television. It was a gradual process, I gather; even though I'd never really been enthralled with the glowing picture box, I followed the occasional serial drama and cartoon series as a kid. (God, was Animaniacs cool.) But as the years wore by, the already low appeal of the televitz declined even further. Those moving pictures failed to inspire activity in my mind, and I got bored as a natural consequence. Watching television was a little - no, far too passive for my tastes. Just sitting, watching, and being numbed wasn't quite that appealing, and there was far too much trash to make waiting for the few things that interested me a worthwhile activity.

When I was thirteen, the internets exploded onto the scene with the acquisition of a 56k dial-up modem by my family. Now that was more interesting, for the simple reason that it was interactive, rather than the steady brain-rotting stream of passivity that was the televitz. Then again, even books like the fantasy novels I read (and still read, despite pollution by "my hot sexy paranormal boyfriend #342348") require some sort of user involvement in turning the words on a page into action in one's mind. When you read non-fiction, you're generally compelled to think and reflect on what you've just comprehended. With the internet, I didn't have to wait for the program to get to the few bits I found interesting; I could just bring up what I was interested in when I wanted it.

And for someone who has as small a brain-attic as I do and who needs to resort to the way of the engineer, the lumber-room of the internet is a godsend. Need a common counterargument for a point? Got it saved. Need a reference? Got that saved too. Need...I think you get my drift.

It's fun. It's engaging. And once you start running, you generally don't want to stop. When you find better, you develop a natural resistance to going back.

Same thing with video games. Sure, they were fun, but I don't really feel I'm deriving a lot of joy these days from running on a treadmill in a Skinner box. Besides, the quality of games these days from the big companies has dropped perceptibly, especially the AAA titles. For the last six months at least, most video games aren't cutting it for me any more; my spare hours are spent bouncing from blog to blog, article to article, book to book. Video games...sure, every now and then, but to the extent I used to play them when I was flapping about aimlessly in the wind?

Once you yank yourself off the drip, once you experience life, who would want to go back?

Once you have something better, why go back to something worse?

Especially when you can laugh at the world and throw rocks at it from the safety of your box while everything burns?

Desire vs. Morality.

I've written before on how I've had the desire to lead others, yet fallen short when it comes to exericising that desire due to my pig-headed unwillingness to use coercive force to compel others to my will.

Sometimes, I get bored and read the blogs of other young manosphere denizens like me, folks in their early 20s, and when I read about some of their goals and what they're building themselves towards, such as establishing a harem, I catch myself thinking "more power to them, but I could never quite do this."

Not that I don't have the desire to - I'm sure every straight, hot-blooded male has fantasised about being waited on hand and foot by a gaggle of HB 10s.

An outlet for pain.

Koanic stresses that Koans need a way of letting go of pain and negative feelings. Telling yourself things like "view every setback as a positive experience" may work in the short run, he points out in one of his videos, but without an outlet for the pain experienced by one's setbacks, dissonance eventually sets in between your hardware and software. As strong as you are, all this bottled-up crap will in all likelihood cause you to stop using a bad Koan altogether. Lying to yourself generally isn't a smart thing to do.

I'd like to suggest that this can be extended to life in general.

Koans - Squire set.

Hey, all. Another Koan post.

Suit up/Ease up (Steady) appears to be a great opener for a huge number of situations. Switch over to Inject Breath into the Now to maintain things - I don't know, but the pump visualisation + concentration on breathing makes rhythmic, repetitive actions go by quite a bit smoother, as if I were running. Not quite the zone yet, but I wonder if the meditation could reach that extent.

I haven't used the tongues koan of my core set that much yet, because I haven't had any chance to get into a situation that would make me anxious or jittery, but my presentations are coming up. One thing I've noticed is that it's a bit of a struggle to both recite tongues in my head and focus on much of anything simultaneously - I think with enough practice I might be able to do it subconsciously, perhaps? Well, if it's bad or I'm doing it wrong, I should feel dissonance and start struggling with it, so I think I'll catch on if I'm honest with myself.

A side note: I have a project deliverable on Thursday, so this will be the last post until then. I'll have a peering out of the box post up in order to return to our regular programming schedule, at the very least.

A quick core Koan set:

 
Core set:

First line is to get thing started, other two are continuations. I know Koanic's core set consists of four Koans, but I'll eventually expand them if need be while keeping things simple for now.

How I'm trying this is with a Koan proper, and also a quick visualisation I can use if and when I ever get too incoherent/panicky/whatever to run the actual words through my mind. Koanic suggested that it's more maybe not "saying the whole line" but just feeling what it's about", and the quick visualisation is to those ends.

Learning Koanic Soul, or at least, attempting to.

All right, I think you've had enough bitching from me about the shitty state the world is in; all this negativity is getting to me as well, and there's no sense endlessly wallowing in it. I'm long overdue for another self-improvement post, and what better way to do that than a spot of inner game?

You may remember that a little while ago, I joined Cappy Cap's Forced Discipline and Regimen Month, during which one of my goals was to learn something about a subject I had no knowledge of. Well, I've found something that's a) interesting, b) useful and c) falsifiable via my own testing in daily life, so why not?

What I'm referring to is Koanic Soul.

Now that I've figured out why I'm actually a lot more comfortable doing outrageously silly things with people I consider my in-group as opposed to my out-group (you'd think it'd be the other way around, since you can just dump people from the out-group), coming across Koanic Soul as a system of inner game for natural introverts does sound quite interesting. The principles which it's based on are plausible by my own evaluation, and I can go out and test it on the lab ladies (whom I will say after a number of months of being my game target dummies, have warmed up to me considerably. I suppose it is easy mode because a) they are compartively starved for male attention and b) anyone with a smidgen of game will become compartively alpha in that setting...)

But the most important thing that it appears to be selling is the path to the generation of a solid core self-identity, getting you to answer yourself as to the question of "who am I?" I will admit that is a rather big plus point in my book - I suppose a good proportion of this blog, reading back on my previous entries from the start of this year, has been an education in who I am and who I was even over this short period of time.

When I first started learning game from reading Roosh/Roissy et al, I'll admit to feeling heavily uncomfortable with pick-up per se, and gravitated towards the Ironwood/Vox Day camp of game. Pretty early on, I realised that my moral code would not live up to me closing on a girl (and fuck anyone who says it's beta), and went ahead and learned game to deprogram my brainwashing regarding sexual reality and get my masculinity up to snuff from the whiny, cowardly schlobb I used to be and still am where I haven't picked up all my pieces.

So yes, game for self-improvement as opposed to adding to my notch count, then testing the precepts on a group of captive target dummies. Which is why stuff that cultivates inner game appeals to me.

So the basic idea behind Koanic Soul is that one crafts a number of Koans, small, simple mantras that you can repeat to reinforce yourself, almost like meditation. People already oftentimes use some form of these, Koanic says, such as "this will be easy", "everything is a learning experience" and "I'm the best". The problem, he points out, is that many of these are not a) realistic, b) in line with one's genetic hardware, c) conflict with one another, or suffer from numerous other problems and as such, Koan crafting needs to be done very carefully and Koans tweaked from time to time.

Clearly, this needs a lot of self-reflection and honesty with oneself. It'll be a good exercise, if nothing else. The link I've provided up top to Koanic's blog should have his videos on a number of the basic ideas; considering some of the similarities between us, I think I should be able to use his own Koans as a template to craft my own personalised set and see where those get me.

More to come on this as events progress.

I formally join the Captain's forced discipline and regimen month.

Now that my shoulder's more or less mended (there are a few slight twinges remaining, but I'm sure they'll go away soon enough), I'm finding myself with a need to recondition, and what better way to do that than to join the good old Captain's forced discipline and regimen month?

My final semester in my chemical engineering degree will keep my mind occupied enough (oh god, vaccum distillation!), but I've found myself flagging a bit when it comes to the physical side of things. My body's gotten used to the light duty I took to recover, and I've got to whip it into shape.

A couple of goals:

Everything's falling into place.

Everything's falling into place now.

Over the last handful of days, I've been reading up almost everything I can find on the manosphere on Edenistic Theory, the associated phrenology (not the phrenology of old), and what it means for us all.

This shit is fascinating.

It all explains so much. On a macro level, it explains the cycle of history. R-selection and K-selection. Why the majority of people are idiots seeking wine, women and wantoness, and judging from the comments I often see left on internet forums, couldn't think their way out of a paper bag. Why some people think that argumentum ad populum is logically valid. Why the meat/protein-heavy paleo diet works.

Sure, I'm not Einstein by any means; I fully admit I'm slow on the uptake, and every single IQ test I've taken has returned me results within the 110-120 range. Seems that "major melon back" on my noggin isn't making me any smarter by those metrics, that's for sure.

On a micro level? It explains so-f'ing-much about my life. Shall I count just a couple of ways?

What The Observer does with his government cheese...

...Why, buy a copy each of Aaron Clarey's Enjoy the Decline and Aurini's As I Walk These Broken Roads.

Government cheese entered the bank account of this penniless student, government cheese left it. While others laugh and sing and dance and play their couple of hundred dollars' worth of cheese from the Budget away, I'm buying some good old-fashioned dead tree books.

They should arrive in this little podunk corner of the world in about 2-3 weeks.

Shock to the system.

I wonder if I need to unplug from the manosphere for a little while, maybe a day or two - it's starting to invade my dreams. Was taking an afternoon nap earlier today, and dreamt that I was taking some sort of test or exam about environmentalism/climate change, and while I don't recall much there was a header on the top of the exam paper along the lines of: "there are some who believe the great age of our ancestors is about to return, and if you are one of those you can check out right now at Hawaiian (some nonsense word here, full of ls)."

I also remember seriously considering standing up and asking the invigilator if I could just fail the test right there and then, or even just fail the whole damn class and take the "F" grade that would ensue.

Have been reading Vault. Co as well; I think I took a couple of hard smacks to the amygdala while going through the archives; my whole head felt like it was full of cotton wool after each browsing session and the feeling lasted for a good couple of hours. One of the posts was bad enough to make me cry out in anguish, loud enough to wake up my mother and have her chide me for disturbing her sleep.

I suppose on the bright side, a couple of blows to my amygdala will only serve to toughen it up.

Some music helped:

Asian Paleo.

Slightly off-topic before we begin: I was walking to the bus stop today when I came across an older man, perhaps in his 50's, looked like quite a respectable guy. He was out walking a small black dog, and because I'm making an effort to be more sociable to and about strangers, I gave him a nod and wave and said, "good day."

He immediately stared at me with a gaze of what could only be described as guarded fear. My smile immediately turned from genuine to frozen, and there was this enormous sense of awkwardness as I passed by him and his dog.

It...this just stuck out in my mind. I didn't dare look back to see if he was still staring at me, that's for sure.

Anyways, Asian paleo.

Improving one's speech.

I will admit, I have never been a very good orator. Part of this probably stems from the fact that no one wanted to hear what a fat kid had to say, except from maybe "stop it!", and once a habit's formed, it's pretty hard to break. I remember getting a hand-me-down cell phone from my alpha thug brother when I was sixteen, one of the few displays of kindness he ever showed me.

"What am I supposed to do with this?" I asked.

"Just take it or give it back," he snapped.

I got the message, palmed the phone and kept it duly charged and ready at all times. Over the course of the next two years I had it, no one ever called me on the thing, so I handed it away to one of my cousins a couple of months before I was due to be conscripted and cellphones weren't allowed during basic military training (at least, for me).