Rinzai Did Nothing Wrong.

“However well-meaning and strong the individual man may be (if he could only use his strength), he still has not the passion to be able to tear himself from the coils and seductive uncertainty of reflection. Nor do his surroundings supply the events or produce the general enthusiasm necessary in order to free him. Instead of coming to his help, his milieu forms around him a negative intellectual opposition, which juggles for a moment with a deceptive prospect, only to deceive him in the end by pointing to a brilliant way out of the difficulty — by showing him that the shrewdest thing of all is to do nothing.”   -    S.A. Kierkegaard.   The Present Age , by Soren Kierkegaard . Consider three good premises for narratives; you’ll find they have a lot of shocking, almost (dare we say it?) Archetypal Similarities:   I.             A Boy falls down a well (or well-like fissure in the ground) and finds ...

There is a song called “Most Girls” by the artist Hailee Steinfeld, and it’s honestly an awful song, because it is a toxic, spiteful answer to a common compliment. The compliment, in its generic form, is “you’re not like most girls”, to which the artist answers with the claim, “I want to be.” It’s like the sort of people who take issue with the thought that parents would, say, raise their children properly and lovingly by telling them that they are special. If I had to guess at why so many people fall for self-destructive tendencies, it’s not because they think they’re special but because they’re taught they’re “normal” and expendable “like everybody else”. Yet this is utter poison and the most depraved of narcissistic tendencies, since it implies not only that the child has absolutely nothing to contribute to an ailing populace, but also that *nobody* does and no one *ever has*. “Equality”, expressed in such a lifeless form, is death, since it is only “special” people who break out of...

I promised to abstain from talking about pickup artistry, however I must nonetheless address the implications of this Sartrean philosophy on *interpersonal relationships*, which are the part of his philosophy which seems most painfully self-evident:   Because there is no human nature, no authentic self, and nothing which is hidden “just beneath the surface”, there are just three words regarding all your hopes and dreams of finding love which best describe your situation: **“No one cares.”** It only takes a couple years of personal experience to learn this fact, though people may deny for decades. No one cares about your Soul, its beauty, your ideals and principles, your bleeding heart, your passion, your good will, your virtue, nor your goals and interests… *except for you*.   Yet this is why the existentialists are optimists. If you alone must champion the things that “truly matter” in your life, then no one but yourself can stop you. When you walk into a bar and see somebody...