The "Right" or "Based" blogosphere, or Manosphere in its various manifestations - strikes me as the latest iteration of a theme of self-improvement that probably began with Machiavelli's The Prince; included Samuel Smiles (who coined "self-help"), Dale Carnegie's How to win friends and influence people, and many versions of the power of positive thinking ("every day, in every way, I'm getting better and better").
Nowadays there are many blogs catering to this theme, online podcasts and lectures, as well as books.
The idea is to improve your own life - by key insights, or new behaviours - with "improve" being in some way that matters to you...
Maybe simply feeling better about yourself, getting more money and/or a better job, improving health and bigger muscles (+/- greater strength), defending against violence, surviving disaster, gaining the admiration of men, or getting more sex with more women.
Self-help is implicitly rooted in secret knowledge; and this secret is always some key information about becoming clearer and more focused on what genuinely benefits you; and the key insight is about how to pursue your own self-interest more effectively.
In a nutshell: the appeal is a promise of more-effectual hedonism.
Well, all very understandable -
But what does this kind of stuff have to do with being a Christian?
...To do with following Jesus Christ to resurrection into eternal Heavenly life?
To ask is to answer.
12 comments:
Heh, my mom pushed Carnegie on me as a teen. I was high-achieving but not "nice." It was one of the most revolting books I'd ever read, up there with Lord of the Flies. I tried it again as an adult while striving for corporate advancement and still came away thinking whatever it would help me achieve was not worth the cost.
But all I saw on the Christian side of things was more of the same: "What would Jesus do?" efforts to create little clones of Christ. Surely to enter heaven one must first of all actually exist!
@Mia - There seems currently to be such a big problem of Christians getting at-first distracted by secondary issues, irrelevances, or even by errors - then these become invested-in, heavily defended...
And eventually these secondary or false matters consume the Christianity altogether, or just leave behind some bits of terminology or practice.
To my perception, since 2020 and continuing, I see online a steady trend of more and more people falling-away on a monthly, perhaps even weekly basis.
*Many* whom I used to regard as on-the-same-side, and who I once read with some benefit; I now read only very selectively, with much wincing and pain - but most I simply have learned to avoid.
They just don't seem much interested in the real thing anymore; and aren't really bothered about salvation. They have more *urgent* issues...
Young men with lots of testosterone and 50 - 60 years of life ahead of them are going to have a different orientation than retired, elderly professionals already doing end-of-life planning.
@A-G - And your point is...?
Surely you don't believe that - as of 2024, in The West - old people are more likely to live salvation-orientated Christian lives than the young?
Objection, leading.
Old people are more "salvation-orientated" because they're on the cusp of death and no longer in the mix of romantic relations and the workaday world. Young men have to learn things like how to attract a mate, how to become physically healthier so they feel better and perform better overall, how to succeed in the marketplace so they can provide for their families, etc.
I've noticed in my own breast that the strongest motivations to evil have come in the form of an anxiety over not getting all that I can out of life. This anxiety almost presents itself as an alternative ethical system with its own sense of "good" and "bad", and one even feels a sense of guilt for not following it. This is the crazy thing to me--one can feel guilty for not being behaving evil.
I imagine that people whose Christian faith is, for whatever reason, founded on fear, especially of missing out on heavenly rewards, are most vulnerable to apostasy, since in this case both ethical systems would operate on psychologically similar tracks, and though one at least is directed to the world after, it would be simple to switch from one fear-based approach to life, to another.
It is infinitely liberating, and fills one with tremendous courage, to simply deny the world, and to turn one's back totally on any appeals of utility extraction. This is part of what, I believe, I have found so compelling in Wagner.
@AG - You are talking about the olden days (before c.1990). In these End Times, old people (i.e. the post WWII generations) are, ahem, *Not* "salvation-orientated" - but instead short-termist, virtue-signalling, hedonic materialists.
I thought everybody knew that, by now?
@Joseph "turn one's back totally on any appeals of utility extraction"
Interesting comment. But world *denial* doesn't work any more (e.g. see writings on Oneness), because it points on conformity now and death ASAP.
I'm pretty sure the best Christian attitude (the attitude from which Christian aspirations best emerge and are sustained) is to love this world in its creative and loving aspects; and confidently to hope for the full manifestation of these aspects in Heaven.
How I think about it is if I deny certain things, or more so have a hypothetical willingness to die at any time (so that I have no fear of death), this very much increases my faith and my connection to the spiritual world, freeing up energy almost as a mystical process. On the other hand I don't think I have any positive desire to die, and if there was any real threat I'm sure I would do everything in my power to avoid such an outcome. I probably keep the speed limit better than most. (I also don't have any children--yet.)
I think I see what you mean, as denial is concept with certain Buddhist connections that, if applied by a modern Westerner, will necessarily go along with an attitude of defeatism. One must believe that one lives at this time and place for a reason. And as I've now checked, denial is never used in reference to the world in the King James New Testament. Jesus did not come to deny the world (it was actually the world that denied him) but to overcome and redeem the world.
Every day, in every way, my life getting worse and worse
@Ap - I hope you are aware that (according to the infallible doctrines of Based-"Christianity") you have just publicly declared yourself guilty of the Mortal Sin of "black-pilling"?
@BC yes I convict myself guilty, from now on I will try to get more money, learn women psychology + also look maxx so to have this-worldly success and redeem my black-pill-non-vitalic-optimistic sins.
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