A harsh lesson I have been learning is that I am not on 'the right'; that most of those on 'the right' are really no different than those on the left, they've just elected a different flavour of Vampire Lord to flash firmware into their mind. They're eager to cheer on 'thought leaders' (repeater stations) as they fight the woke and own the libs, but are incapable of discerning the nature of the system itself, or of assessing subtler critiques than pro- or anti-skub politics.
I think you can still be on the right and recognize your fellow travellers are not very perceptive. I tend to shun labels myself. I do agree people look for a saviour. That is their downfall. Most want to be obedient to a king whom they imagine can be benevolent. Anything but stand alone and make their own decisions.
Many are easily swayed by a new guy at the top while ignoring global elites, billionaires funding NGOs, the schemes of the UN etc. It gets tedious after a while. But most prefer their comfortable lie.
Many people are on the level of a child, who does not want any itchy socks on, and mommy says that the child can choose between red or blue itchy socks, and then being fooled by the "empowerment" of being able to choose itchy socks.
Then, when having been stuffed into the rest of the itchy clothes matching the color of the socks, they complain about it, but are too childish or lazy to positively and constructively go find clothes that are very nice to wear.
However, I would like to compare some, unwilling to change the conditions, to a stubborn child, refusing to wear anything, hence not being able to go out and enjoy the four seasons fully together with other children.
Some could also be like a very obedient child outwardly, who, when mommy turn her back on them, retaliates by going criminal, stuffing their pockets with unhealthy candy, an extreme materialism or gluttony leading them into suffering.
We are owed nothing. Fair enough. That is the world. Completely absent the actions of other humans, the world is perfectly within its character to crush us, kill us, make our last instant of existence maximum terror and maximum pain. That is the truth. We are owed nothing.
It depends on what you want. We do owe something to our fellow humans. That is how a community is built. It is expectation that is killing us. Entitlement.
We are social primates and group cohesion is an almost overwhelming drive. This can be weaponized by cynical entitlement. It can also be harnessed by authentic leadership.
My intuition is that a meaningful life is one that has inculcated the complete rejection of entitlement and the complete embrace of obligation. To be owed nothing and to owe everything, all at once.
Yes, no one talks much about obligations. Especially voluntary obligation based on a sense of gratitude for the world we have been given. Despite all the problems we face living in a time and place with antibiotics or communication tools like Substack is pretty incredible. We are obligated in a sense to preserve these things to help others.
Gratitude for the world we’ve been given, exactly. One of the few fundamental choices a person must make is gratitude or resentment. Each colors the world in near totality.
This surprised me because it takes for granted the corrupted use of “rights” by modern SJWs while theoretically arguing against it. I’ve certainly heard this argument before, but usually it would go on to point out what Thomas Jefferson, the Constitution, etc, meant by rights. This ignores all that.
It’s an antiwoke perspective from within a world where the woke have succeeded in cutting off any connection to the past.
"Better still is to be thankful if you have no special treatment and to reject it if you do.."
Best advice I've heard in years.
You really nailed it in this article. As I read it, I couldn't help thinking, this is the mindset that would help someone survive if they were lost in the wilderness.
It also makes me more confident that, as upside down as our current Clown World may seem, it is indeed a huge corrective bottleneck we are going through.
That may be a good way to look at it. Our Clown World is a corrective. It may separate the wheat from the chaff. Or perhaps separate the attentive from the distracted. The middle classes have tacitly endorsed much nonsense and it is now collapsing their world.
This is basically a Calvinism/AmericanDream remix. It's true *to an extent* but the actual result is, anybody who *isn't* successful, *fails* to reach out and grab the golden ring *for any reason at all*... we deem it to be their own fault. This serves two functions, in real, practical life:
1) It's OK to discriminate against people who *aren't* successful, as well as their children who had nothing to do with it anyway, because lack of success, in America, is considered a *moral* failing.
2) It removes from us the tedious moral obligation to care for the poor, widows, old people, and people who were generally dealt a sh*t hand in life. We treat people who are poor because they're alcoholics *exactly the same* as people who are poor because their moms drank while pregnant and they have an 85 IQ. And what's worse, If that 85IQ person manages to reproduce, we treat his or her kids (who may be completely normal), as though they partake in this failure. Middle-class America is terrified of being socially contaminated by failure, and middle-class America needs to get its effing head out of its collective arse about that.
I submit that while we don't have any entitlements, we do have obligations and responsibilities. As Americans, and as Christians. And one of those obligations (at which we typically fail) is to extend the same grace to people who are not successful, as we do to people who are.
I agree we should help others. But the focus for the individual cannot be an expectation of help or, even worse, a sense of entitlement others should help them. God helps those who help themselves. We must educate people to feel empowered. Learned helplessness accounts for a great deal of generational poverty.
I disagree we routinely lump lots of people into one failure category. Quite the opposite. Modern Western nations are being destroyed because we are elevating the unsuitable because they have some protected characteristic regardless of their abilities. We are elevating the hopeless.
I get what you're saying. I don't think you realize the true implications.
This is already the religion of America. No, we shouldn't teach disempowerment. Yes, we should try to get people out of generational poverty.
But this also results in the very widespread belief, which most of the middle class acts on, that economic failure is, always in and every circumstance, a moral failure, and probably contagious. Which actively contributes to generational poverty.
People can, and very often do, become downwardly mobile due to circumstances beyond their control. And in America, they are treated as though *this is their own fault* and both they, and their children, are judged and shunned for it. The middle class treats the downwardly mobile like lepers. My aunt became a widow at 45 when her husband got cancer and died. She supported herself and her remaining minor child by going to work as a secretary. She had nowhere near the earning power of her late husband, but she was a righteous woman and did the best she could. They came down in the world, and the family was treated *exactly the same* as if they'd become poorer because of a gambling addiction.
In my own family, we've sacrificed my potential second income, so that we can homeschool the kids. We economize on a lot. That's our choice, of course, but it has pretty much the same social consequences as being lower-income due to divorce or a drug addiction. We are viewed with deep suspicion. Around my same-income neighbors I tone down my vocabulary and affect a lower-class accent to fit in. Around people who are our equals in education, we are basically viewed as class-traitors because sacrificing income in order to raise your own kids makes other people feel guilty about how they've raised their own kids, and because social compliance is the highest virtue of the American middle class. *Any* voluntary choice you make that diverges from the social norm, is viewed as implicit judgement of everybody else, and reason to be cast out of the fold.
The family I grew up in were social lepers because my Dad got flattened by a drunk driver on his evening commute one night. There is no "work harder, get a better job, make more money" with a massive TBI. There's "work really hard and in ten years you'll be able to read again". That was an amazing accomplishment, btw. And yet, our family were failures. Because of Dad. It was never the drunk driver's fault, because in America, every failure is your own fault. And we don't hang out with failures because it might be contagious. If we let you into our club, *our* dads might get run over, too. You can't be too careful.
But also: money is the only metric by which we measure failure and success.
Literally: if you're rich, and your daughter gets knocked up at 16, well that's unfortunate but whatever. We all did dumb stuff when we were kids, right? If you're poor, and your daughter gets knocked up at 16, it's because you're trash and you should be ashamed. It's only a moral failing if you don't have money. Money, or lack of it, is the scale on which we measure the worth of a human person, and whether or not they deserve forgiveness.
I submit that, as Americans, valuing individuality and individual success *above all other things*, which we do, is really f***ed up. There should be other things at the tops of our hierarchies: virtue, education, religious observance, family loyalty, generosity, hospitality, personal integrity, honesty, courage, self-discipline... ALL of those things are more important. It's not that working hard and making the best of your circumstances is not good, or not important, it's that as Americans we IDOLIZE economic success to the exclusion of every other human virtue, and this is pathological.
Perhaps this is true in some cases. I do think America is still better than many places though. But the point of the article is the litany or rights we have are nonsensical, and we should not be teaching the young to expect them. America may have bigger, more systemic issues like those you outline, but we don't help anyone by making them dependent on others to survive.
I am not sure, Brett. Insights can come suddenly for some, and never for some.
I have a statue, and it came from a Chinese shop. I asked the Chinese in the china shop what it said. They said to me, it meant “Na-o–a-mi-to-fu” but they did not understand themselves what it meant, and when searching the Internet I found that “Na-Mo-O-Mi-To-Fo” means “I take refuge in Amitabha Buddha”.
“Amitābha” is translatable as “Infinite Light,” hence Amitābha is often called “The Buddha of Infinite Light.”
So “Na-Mo-O-Mi-To-Fo” basically means I want to become enlightened or I want to know the truth, in my opinion.
Later I stumbled upon these gentlemen's quotes:
"One of the chief obstacles to intelligence is credulity, and credulity could be enormously diminished by instructions as to the prevalent forms of mendacity. Credulity is a greater evil in the present day than it ever was before, because, owing to the growth of education, it is much easier than it used to be to spread misinformation, and, owing to democracy, the spread of misinformation is more important than in former times to the holders of power.”
/ Bertrand Russell
”In religion and politics, people’s beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second-hand, and without examination, from authorities who have not themselves examined the questions at issue, but have taken them at second-hand from other non-examiners, whose opinions about them were not worth a brass farthing.”
/ Mark Twain
I realized that in order to come closer to evident truth, "reality", I must understand different kind of lies.
Sitting in stillness, breathing deeply, often helps a lot in this process. For me, it has led to direct conversations with a higher awareness than my little silly ego.
The Wordpress site implies many arhants isn’t necessarily a good thing, even in the face of superabundance:
“Our main focus is to bring science into politics, and this includes to look at overpopulation, democracy, resources, World Peace & ecological sustainability, and much more.”
An arahant, a "worthy one" in Buddhism, will act in a more unselfish way, will be at peace when others panic in fear, will not overconsume when others do, will accept reality, when others won't and will be able to tell lies from truth, and will be able to guide people well in democratic decisions, for the best of the entirety of Gods creation. The arahants will be very useful in debates, and as "servant kings", just like Jesus.
If we all see the beneficial thing together focusing on rights, that would not be a waste. It is only a waste when not enough people care. So, first the individualistic must lose their rights, be inoculated with poison and die, and go to eternal hell... Then they might care? But too late... Good luck in hell, all greedy ones!
"Since they will not last they are not something to rely upon. You therefore have no rights, only temporary advantages, and reliance on this is not a workable strategy over the long-term."
But conditioning others - preferably the majority - to think of "rights/privileges/entitlements" as something tangible and real the way a potatoe is real, is definitely an advantage to anyone who recognise the utilitarian and instrumental worth of rights et c, and chooses to master others for their own advantage, by playing on others' sense of rights.
And you don't have to be sociopathic to do it: if you were sociopathic (or psychopathic if you prefer), you wouldn't care about rights et c anyway. The arguement that we are ruled by sociopathic elites falls flat on its face when what sociopathy actually is, and how such persons actually act. They can barely go shopping for groceries without getting into trouble - the idea that they could rule business-empires or have political careers is simply preposterous and an excuse for people trying to make sense of or rationalise politics/business-decisions that are beyond and above their cognitive, spiritual or moral horizon.
Which isn't a slur on people - not being a bastard is after all a good thing, for society as a whole.
Master reality is good advice and perfectly in line with what we know about human cognition/intellect, now that we have gotten rid of the Freudian fallacy and anti-science. CBT (no, not the fetish - the therapy) is firmly grounded in training the patient/student in mastering their circumstances, and was developed and inspired by an old Communist-era method from 1960s Poland (as the East Bloc wasn't poisoned by the Freudians the way the West has been). And opposite purely theoretical methods and models of psychology/psychiatry (Freud, Jung, et cetera), CBT can point to empirical facts, rather than pure theory.
Also, only by mastering reality can you change it in a positive way. Otherwise you can at best achieve *not* making things worse than when you started.
Will to Power, in other words. No Will - no power.
A harsh lesson I have been learning is that I am not on 'the right'; that most of those on 'the right' are really no different than those on the left, they've just elected a different flavour of Vampire Lord to flash firmware into their mind. They're eager to cheer on 'thought leaders' (repeater stations) as they fight the woke and own the libs, but are incapable of discerning the nature of the system itself, or of assessing subtler critiques than pro- or anti-skub politics.
https://pbfcomics.com/comics/skub/
I think you can still be on the right and recognize your fellow travellers are not very perceptive. I tend to shun labels myself. I do agree people look for a saviour. That is their downfall. Most want to be obedient to a king whom they imagine can be benevolent. Anything but stand alone and make their own decisions.
Many are easily swayed by a new guy at the top while ignoring global elites, billionaires funding NGOs, the schemes of the UN etc. It gets tedious after a while. But most prefer their comfortable lie.
Many people are on the level of a child, who does not want any itchy socks on, and mommy says that the child can choose between red or blue itchy socks, and then being fooled by the "empowerment" of being able to choose itchy socks.
Then, when having been stuffed into the rest of the itchy clothes matching the color of the socks, they complain about it, but are too childish or lazy to positively and constructively go find clothes that are very nice to wear.
However, I would like to compare some, unwilling to change the conditions, to a stubborn child, refusing to wear anything, hence not being able to go out and enjoy the four seasons fully together with other children.
Some could also be like a very obedient child outwardly, who, when mommy turn her back on them, retaliates by going criminal, stuffing their pockets with unhealthy candy, an extreme materialism or gluttony leading them into suffering.
Science is clear. In a society going individualistic with high inequality, the murder frequency goes up. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_economic_inequality#Crime
So clearly we must try to solve the problem of our itchy socks positively and constructively! That is the only mentally healthy and adult thing to do!
Harsh but fair
Excellent. Stirner was right. But if not for „causes“ what would theorycels do!?
Indeed.
Another solid essay.
We are owed nothing. Fair enough. That is the world. Completely absent the actions of other humans, the world is perfectly within its character to crush us, kill us, make our last instant of existence maximum terror and maximum pain. That is the truth. We are owed nothing.
In the face of that, what do we owe?
It depends on what you want. We do owe something to our fellow humans. That is how a community is built. It is expectation that is killing us. Entitlement.
We are social primates and group cohesion is an almost overwhelming drive. This can be weaponized by cynical entitlement. It can also be harnessed by authentic leadership.
My intuition is that a meaningful life is one that has inculcated the complete rejection of entitlement and the complete embrace of obligation. To be owed nothing and to owe everything, all at once.
Yes, no one talks much about obligations. Especially voluntary obligation based on a sense of gratitude for the world we have been given. Despite all the problems we face living in a time and place with antibiotics or communication tools like Substack is pretty incredible. We are obligated in a sense to preserve these things to help others.
Gratitude for the world we’ve been given, exactly. One of the few fundamental choices a person must make is gratitude or resentment. Each colors the world in near totality.
This surprised me because it takes for granted the corrupted use of “rights” by modern SJWs while theoretically arguing against it. I’ve certainly heard this argument before, but usually it would go on to point out what Thomas Jefferson, the Constitution, etc, meant by rights. This ignores all that.
It’s an antiwoke perspective from within a world where the woke have succeeded in cutting off any connection to the past.
Perhaps. But it is better to teach people to expect no entitlements in life. That's the point. Not an exploration of natural rights.
"Better still is to be thankful if you have no special treatment and to reject it if you do.."
Best advice I've heard in years.
You really nailed it in this article. As I read it, I couldn't help thinking, this is the mindset that would help someone survive if they were lost in the wilderness.
It also makes me more confident that, as upside down as our current Clown World may seem, it is indeed a huge corrective bottleneck we are going through.
Looking forward to seeing you on the other side!
That may be a good way to look at it. Our Clown World is a corrective. It may separate the wheat from the chaff. Or perhaps separate the attentive from the distracted. The middle classes have tacitly endorsed much nonsense and it is now collapsing their world.
Yes.
But.
This is basically a Calvinism/AmericanDream remix. It's true *to an extent* but the actual result is, anybody who *isn't* successful, *fails* to reach out and grab the golden ring *for any reason at all*... we deem it to be their own fault. This serves two functions, in real, practical life:
1) It's OK to discriminate against people who *aren't* successful, as well as their children who had nothing to do with it anyway, because lack of success, in America, is considered a *moral* failing.
2) It removes from us the tedious moral obligation to care for the poor, widows, old people, and people who were generally dealt a sh*t hand in life. We treat people who are poor because they're alcoholics *exactly the same* as people who are poor because their moms drank while pregnant and they have an 85 IQ. And what's worse, If that 85IQ person manages to reproduce, we treat his or her kids (who may be completely normal), as though they partake in this failure. Middle-class America is terrified of being socially contaminated by failure, and middle-class America needs to get its effing head out of its collective arse about that.
I submit that while we don't have any entitlements, we do have obligations and responsibilities. As Americans, and as Christians. And one of those obligations (at which we typically fail) is to extend the same grace to people who are not successful, as we do to people who are.
I agree we should help others. But the focus for the individual cannot be an expectation of help or, even worse, a sense of entitlement others should help them. God helps those who help themselves. We must educate people to feel empowered. Learned helplessness accounts for a great deal of generational poverty.
I disagree we routinely lump lots of people into one failure category. Quite the opposite. Modern Western nations are being destroyed because we are elevating the unsuitable because they have some protected characteristic regardless of their abilities. We are elevating the hopeless.
I get what you're saying. I don't think you realize the true implications.
This is already the religion of America. No, we shouldn't teach disempowerment. Yes, we should try to get people out of generational poverty.
But this also results in the very widespread belief, which most of the middle class acts on, that economic failure is, always in and every circumstance, a moral failure, and probably contagious. Which actively contributes to generational poverty.
People can, and very often do, become downwardly mobile due to circumstances beyond their control. And in America, they are treated as though *this is their own fault* and both they, and their children, are judged and shunned for it. The middle class treats the downwardly mobile like lepers. My aunt became a widow at 45 when her husband got cancer and died. She supported herself and her remaining minor child by going to work as a secretary. She had nowhere near the earning power of her late husband, but she was a righteous woman and did the best she could. They came down in the world, and the family was treated *exactly the same* as if they'd become poorer because of a gambling addiction.
In my own family, we've sacrificed my potential second income, so that we can homeschool the kids. We economize on a lot. That's our choice, of course, but it has pretty much the same social consequences as being lower-income due to divorce or a drug addiction. We are viewed with deep suspicion. Around my same-income neighbors I tone down my vocabulary and affect a lower-class accent to fit in. Around people who are our equals in education, we are basically viewed as class-traitors because sacrificing income in order to raise your own kids makes other people feel guilty about how they've raised their own kids, and because social compliance is the highest virtue of the American middle class. *Any* voluntary choice you make that diverges from the social norm, is viewed as implicit judgement of everybody else, and reason to be cast out of the fold.
The family I grew up in were social lepers because my Dad got flattened by a drunk driver on his evening commute one night. There is no "work harder, get a better job, make more money" with a massive TBI. There's "work really hard and in ten years you'll be able to read again". That was an amazing accomplishment, btw. And yet, our family were failures. Because of Dad. It was never the drunk driver's fault, because in America, every failure is your own fault. And we don't hang out with failures because it might be contagious. If we let you into our club, *our* dads might get run over, too. You can't be too careful.
But also: money is the only metric by which we measure failure and success.
Literally: if you're rich, and your daughter gets knocked up at 16, well that's unfortunate but whatever. We all did dumb stuff when we were kids, right? If you're poor, and your daughter gets knocked up at 16, it's because you're trash and you should be ashamed. It's only a moral failing if you don't have money. Money, or lack of it, is the scale on which we measure the worth of a human person, and whether or not they deserve forgiveness.
I submit that, as Americans, valuing individuality and individual success *above all other things*, which we do, is really f***ed up. There should be other things at the tops of our hierarchies: virtue, education, religious observance, family loyalty, generosity, hospitality, personal integrity, honesty, courage, self-discipline... ALL of those things are more important. It's not that working hard and making the best of your circumstances is not good, or not important, it's that as Americans we IDOLIZE economic success to the exclusion of every other human virtue, and this is pathological.
Perhaps this is true in some cases. I do think America is still better than many places though. But the point of the article is the litany or rights we have are nonsensical, and we should not be teaching the young to expect them. America may have bigger, more systemic issues like those you outline, but we don't help anyone by making them dependent on others to survive.
You're entirely correct.
This is one of those things where the opposite of one bad idea is usually another bad idea.
It's OK to reject both bad ideas.
"And we don't hang out with failures because it might be contagious."
Exactly. A short account of my own experience in that regard: https://therealskidmark.substack.com/p/philippe-and-jocelyne
As The Buddha said, seeing the world as it is typically takes a lifetime. Practice, practice, practice.
Yes, a good point. It does take a long time. We cling to our illusions.
I am not sure, Brett. Insights can come suddenly for some, and never for some.
I have a statue, and it came from a Chinese shop. I asked the Chinese in the china shop what it said. They said to me, it meant “Na-o–a-mi-to-fu” but they did not understand themselves what it meant, and when searching the Internet I found that “Na-Mo-O-Mi-To-Fo” means “I take refuge in Amitabha Buddha”.
“Amitābha” is translatable as “Infinite Light,” hence Amitābha is often called “The Buddha of Infinite Light.”
So “Na-Mo-O-Mi-To-Fo” basically means I want to become enlightened or I want to know the truth, in my opinion.
Later I stumbled upon these gentlemen's quotes:
"One of the chief obstacles to intelligence is credulity, and credulity could be enormously diminished by instructions as to the prevalent forms of mendacity. Credulity is a greater evil in the present day than it ever was before, because, owing to the growth of education, it is much easier than it used to be to spread misinformation, and, owing to democracy, the spread of misinformation is more important than in former times to the holders of power.”
/ Bertrand Russell
”In religion and politics, people’s beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second-hand, and without examination, from authorities who have not themselves examined the questions at issue, but have taken them at second-hand from other non-examiners, whose opinions about them were not worth a brass farthing.”
/ Mark Twain
I realized that in order to come closer to evident truth, "reality", I must understand different kind of lies.
I made this list in the process
https://vetenskapligapartiet.wordpress.com/vi-vill/sanning/
Sitting in stillness, breathing deeply, often helps a lot in this process. For me, it has led to direct conversations with a higher awareness than my little silly ego.
The Wordpress site implies many arhants isn’t necessarily a good thing, even in the face of superabundance:
“Our main focus is to bring science into politics, and this includes to look at overpopulation, democracy, resources, World Peace & ecological sustainability, and much more.”
An arahant, a "worthy one" in Buddhism, will act in a more unselfish way, will be at peace when others panic in fear, will not overconsume when others do, will accept reality, when others won't and will be able to tell lies from truth, and will be able to guide people well in democratic decisions, for the best of the entirety of Gods creation. The arahants will be very useful in debates, and as "servant kings", just like Jesus.
Do you believe in "superabundance" on this planet? I did, until I understood the exponential function. https://odysee.com/@valsamverkan:3/Den-viktigaste-videon-som-du-n%C3%A5gonsin-sett-av-Albert-Bartlett:d
A man who practiced much: "What is God? Thich Nhat Hanh answers questions Plum Village" Seeing God, as he is.
If we all see the beneficial thing together focusing on rights, that would not be a waste. It is only a waste when not enough people care. So, first the individualistic must lose their rights, be inoculated with poison and die, and go to eternal hell... Then they might care? But too late... Good luck in hell, all greedy ones!
I am not sure the point you are making.
I suggest sitting in stillness and breathing deeply and focusing. Any questions that may arise, I will answer.
"Since they will not last they are not something to rely upon. You therefore have no rights, only temporary advantages, and reliance on this is not a workable strategy over the long-term."
But conditioning others - preferably the majority - to think of "rights/privileges/entitlements" as something tangible and real the way a potatoe is real, is definitely an advantage to anyone who recognise the utilitarian and instrumental worth of rights et c, and chooses to master others for their own advantage, by playing on others' sense of rights.
And you don't have to be sociopathic to do it: if you were sociopathic (or psychopathic if you prefer), you wouldn't care about rights et c anyway. The arguement that we are ruled by sociopathic elites falls flat on its face when what sociopathy actually is, and how such persons actually act. They can barely go shopping for groceries without getting into trouble - the idea that they could rule business-empires or have political careers is simply preposterous and an excuse for people trying to make sense of or rationalise politics/business-decisions that are beyond and above their cognitive, spiritual or moral horizon.
Which isn't a slur on people - not being a bastard is after all a good thing, for society as a whole.
Master reality is good advice and perfectly in line with what we know about human cognition/intellect, now that we have gotten rid of the Freudian fallacy and anti-science. CBT (no, not the fetish - the therapy) is firmly grounded in training the patient/student in mastering their circumstances, and was developed and inspired by an old Communist-era method from 1960s Poland (as the East Bloc wasn't poisoned by the Freudians the way the West has been). And opposite purely theoretical methods and models of psychology/psychiatry (Freud, Jung, et cetera), CBT can point to empirical facts, rather than pure theory.
Also, only by mastering reality can you change it in a positive way. Otherwise you can at best achieve *not* making things worse than when you started.
Will to Power, in other words. No Will - no power.
All good points. I wasn't aware CBT came from the Eastern Bloc. You learn something new every day.
Attending to reality would solve many problems for many people.