June 03, 2013
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I could have easily become one of those people, except for the fact that life and the government didn”t afford me the opportunity. In my high-school graduating class of 955 kids, I had the second-highest SATs but due to no looming sense of urgency and the fact that I had a roof over my head during my teens, my grades saw me graduating around 650th in my class. Then at 19, when my father died of colon cancer, it hit me”I”d either have to get my shit together quickly, or I”d become homeless in due time. With no safety net to cushion me, I hit the ground running, enrolled in college, and graduated at the top of my class. Without that gun to the back of my head and that carrot on a stick dangling in front of me, I likely would have lapsed into a life of petulant, indolent alcoholism.
Ever since then, my life has been an uninterrupted parade of having my balls busted and busting them myself”often simultaneously. And I feel I”m the better man for it. Rather than choosing to spend my life fleeing from pain and conflict and challenges, I tackle them head-on as if I was wrestling a gator. I”m in my 50s, but rather than allowing my body to melt into a sagging blob of failing organs, I hew to a rigid exercise and dietary regimen that would make Yukio Mishima”or at least Travis Bickle”proud. When the Grim Reaper finally comes a-knockin”, I will swing a barbell at his head and try to take him down with me.
And this is why I despise the cloying, coddling delusions of socialism and the welfare state it engenders”because it misapprehends basic human psychology, Dysfunction is rewarded and productivity is penalized. Citizens are plied with pain pills when they really need a shot of adrenaline. Rather than helping people realize their potential, socialism only stunts their growth. Socialism brings out the worst in people, resulting in dysfunctional societies that are, in a perverse way, antisocial.
We are all social animals to some degree, but only the weakest among us are strictly social animals. It would be naïve to deny that one’s lot in life is often shaped by external influences beyond one’s control, just as it would be foolish to disregard the overwhelming influence of personal decisions and will power. If that sounds too Nietzschean, Hitlerian, or G. Gordon Liddyan for your liking, I still deem it better than being some bearded, over-medicated couch potato who knows far too much about Star Wars and jerking off.
Idle hands engage in masturbation. I would rather work myself to death than slowly die while sitting on a couch chewing on day-old pizza and playing video games.
There’s a reason so many people “suffer” from little or no self-esteem. It’s because they don”t deserve it. They haven”t earned it. They seek it through others rather than through themselves. Society will only start to repair itself when individuals start to repair themselves. The best advice I could give to the demoralized, intoxicated, teat-sucking Anglosphere comes from a friend: “Pull your head out of your ass by your bootstraps.”
