Archives for July 2020

A Jewish reader of The Intactivist Guidebook writes:

I read the chapter on Opposition. It was a little hard for me to follow.

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I tried so hard to apply your advice to the organized Jewish forces in my head, but I could not succeed, it was too complicated. They are too powerful. They have this huge advantage that they can call anyone, such as Iceland, anti-semitic for eg working to outlaw circumcision in their non-circumcising country. The fear of being called anti-semitic is the most powerful toxic force on the planet imo. Please give us a clear directive for how to defeat them!

I’ve edited the message a bit, but this was my reply:

If the Opposition chapter was hard to follow, let me try swapping real-world political groups for a more absurd situation:

Suppose you are part of a high school clique of mean girls. You want to get rid of a girl who is prettier than you because she might steal your boyfriend. How would you get rid of her?

One way is that you could approach her and tell her not to look at your boyfriend. If you were to do things the masculine way, you’d beat her up. But this is a clique of toxic mean girls. If you did that, you’d be seen as insecure, and everyone would know you think she is prettier than you. What would you do?

Well, the toxic mean girl way would be to spread a rumor about her. Tell everyone something about her that would lower her status (Ex: “slut”). Of course, you wouldn’t tell her directly. In fact, you might never have a conversation with the prettier girl. You might not even tell her friends. You’d tell your friends who are friends of her friends.

This way, what happens is: you tell your friend, who tells her friends, who stop hanging out with her. Now she has no friends and is unpopular, and your boyfriend won’t even see her at the parties where he might leave you for her because she doesn’t get invited.

This girl – if she is not socially savvy – might protest that the rumor is untrue. Many people might know that she is not a “slut” or whatever you’ve said about her – but they don’t want to be seen sitting at the table of an unpopular girl, lest they be seen as unpopular too.

If you saw this beautiful girl who was all alone, unpopular, destroyed by rumors, who could not get anyone to sit with her or invite her to parties, what would you tell her to do?

This is basically the process that opposition groups run when they fight Intactivists. They spread a rumor (“anti-Semite”) to their friends (coalition groups – politicians, media, etc.) who tell our friends (the public, audiences, platforms, businesses, parents) who stop being friends with us because they don’t want to be seen sitting at the unpopular table (associating with “racists”).

It’s just that their friends have a lot of reach. They are – in this analogy – an upperclassman who knows everyone, while we are a new transfer student freshman. I think the impossibility of this task that you feel is the relative difference in resources. The difference is so great that this girl even knows the faculty. There are even rumors about her that she secretly runs the school. Tough situation!

You could say ‘well, just don’t worry about it – you only want to be friends with people who see you for who you are anyway!’ – but this ignores the bullying, the unfair treatment, and the missed opportunities from not being invited places.

It also ignores the fact that the pretty girl can’t even get decent people to be friends with her because they are afraid of retaliation from the upperclassmen mean girl. She is so well connected friends of hers might attack your friends, just to prove their loyalty to her. The prettier girl would not only need friends who see her – she’d need friends you are so brave and loyal they are willing to stand up to the bullying of well-connected and more popular students.

What my book advises is to first build a coalition of likely allies. In this analogy, it would be the other people who would likely be your friend and don’t care what the popular girls call you. Maybe this is other people she has ostracized, been unfair to, people who just don’t care what she thinks. Maybe this is people who are naturally going to like you for who you are. But you want a circle of friends outside her influence. In the book, I give a list of likely allies, but I’m sure you can name more.

Second, you have to make sure you are your friends are aligned. You know that your opposition will spread rumors about them too. Plus, you and your friends might fight because that’s what friends do. High school girls are not known for their lack of drama, and political movements are even worse. I talk about this in Chapter 6: Needs and Chapter 7: Allies. You and your friends work together and don’t devolve into your own mean-girls drama where you just spread rumors about each other.

(Side-note: Every time you see activists engaged in infighting over petty drama, just imagine mean girls fighting over who is prettier. It is much funnier and does more to further the goals of the movement than infighting does.)

To avoid infighting, you might have to integrate, align, and heal your own insecurities. For example, suppose in our analogy a girl ever prettier than both girls agrees to help our social outcast become popular. Are you too insecure to work with her? What if you catch your man looking at her? You could get rid of her to fulfill your own need to be the prettiest, but it won’t get you closer to the goal of popularity. Having the prettiest girl on your side would help, but to work with her, you’ll have to get over your own ego.

Once you have your group, you work your way up. Say you want something she controls. Let’s say the yearbook editor is her friend. What points of leverage do you have to take that? Can you split their friendship with a rumor of your own? Can you make friends on the yearbook and get your agenda through anyway? Can you get leverage by talking to the yearbook advertisers who don’t go to your school and she has no power over?

This is an analogy, but you see the process. You’re not looking to get her. You’re looking to get everyone to stop sitting at her table. You want to make it so that if she won’t invite someone to her parties it isn’t social death and in fact that there is a social cost to being her friend. This will take time, but this girl has spread a lot of rumors about a lot of people, and many are starting to realize this is just a social tactic she uses against people she doesn’t like.

Of course, you’re talking to someone who never played these games in high school and just sat with the band kids, video production crew, and goths. But I always found goth girls hotter, so maybe I had a strategy of my own.

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Read The Intactivist Guidebook for yourself here, because all the popular kids and pretty girls love it.

It seems odd how much focus those who write about relationships put on romantic relationships but not friendships. Most people only have one major romantic partner at a time, whereas they frequently have many friendships. Even people who are polyamorous or highly promiscuous still usually have far more friends than romantic or sexual partners. Plus, casual sexual relationships are called “friends with benefits.”

For most people friendships are the gateway to the other important connections and experiences of their lives. Many people even discover their romantic partner(s) through their social network, in addition to where they work, what hobbies they pick up, what media they see… If so much of our lives come through are friendships, why isn’t there as much deliberate thoughtful writing about how to have good friendships as there is about romantic relationships?

The most popular book on friendships, How To Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie, is really just repackaged sales advice about how to make yourself more likable. This approach to friendship is light-years behind where the literature on romantic relationships is. Most of the deep connections I’ve had in my life have usually involved hard conversations at some point in which each of us shared parts of ourselves that the other might not accept. Carnegie’s advice skips over all that and is primarily focused on the question: how do I become more likable?

A book on friendship that is solely focused on becoming more likable is like a book on marriage that is solely focused on how to become more attractive. Yes, becoming attractive helps, but that alone will not lead to a successful marriage. A good book on marriage would cover things like communication, commitment, your internal beliefs… Likability advice alone is a pick-up artist mindset applied to friendships, where the whole focus is on how you get the other person, not how you build a deep connection with them.

When I looked at the existing literature on friendships, most of it shares this flaw so deeply that they don’t even use the word friendship – they call it networking and frame it in the context of “building your social circle.” Much of the writing on friendship is context-specific, like developing friends at work (“team-building”), at church (“fellowship”), or in small social groups (“community”). They use different words, but these are all really the same question – how do you make more friends? There are a lot of books that claim to be able to teach you to make yourself more likable – books on increasing your persuasion, charisma, speaking ability, body language, etc. – but very few that focus on the question of friendship directly.

When I say friendship, I mean close relationships that are not romantic but still committed. Someone who you go to work with, but would never see again if you quit that job is not a friend, just a co-worker. One definition of a friend I heard was “anyone who would be willing come over and help you move.” It might sound like a silly definition, but there is some wisdom to it. While many people might see the people who share their politics or belong to the same social tribe as them as friends, how many of those people would be willing to go out of their way to help you lift boxes into a moving van?

Deep friendships usually involve moments where you or the other person are not likable. Many people think that conflict is bad for relationships. In reality, only unresolved conflict is bad for relationships. If you’ve ever had a fight with someone and been able to resolve the disagreement, your connection to that person actually gets stronger, not weaker. One of the pieces of marriage advice I’ve received is that it’s important to have a process for forgiveness in any relationship because in 20+ years of connection, you will each wrong the other at some point. The same is true of friendships.

The lack of writing or focus on friendships seems like an important cultural blind-spot, because friendships may actually matter more than romantic connections. Yes, you might spend more time with your romantic partner, but the fact you have less time for friendships doesn’t make them less important. If anything, it means you need to be more deliberate about your friendships, since you have less time for them. Whereas relationships can grow over the course of years, friendships have to deepen quicker.

Most Americans do not have more than three close friends. Loneliness is an epidemic. Perhaps the fact the only cultural advice we have around friendships comes from transactional relationships in the context of specific groups is part of this. People used to make friends through church, work, and family. Now, most people don’t go to church, more and more are working from home, and many people do not have big families or live close to their relatives. The places where these connections could happen naturally are disappearing. One could go out of their way to join meet-up groups, but there is still very little written on how to turn those connections for casual social relationships to real deep friends.

This is also a political liability. In my book, The Intactivist Guidebook, I wrote that the strength of a movement is the strength of its relationships. Strong friendships allowed you to work in larger groups to solve political problems. If you want to resist the tyranny but only know 2-3 close friends, your protest will only be 2-3 people. American politics has been reduced to people yelling at each other on the internet in part because many of the people invested in it do not have many friends and those involved don’t know how to resolve conflicting beliefs in their relationships.

At the same time, more and more people want an intentional community, which is just a fancy word for living with your friends under a shared agreement or set of values. I can’t tell you the number of people I’ve heard say they’d love to move somewhere with a group of people they know and just live on one big piece of land, but they don’t know enough committed people to make it work. There is a missing piece of knowledge between the desire and actually making it work. Imagine where romantic relationships would be if there was no writing about them, or shared memes and conventions like “marriage,” “dating,” or “monogamy.” This is where people are with friendships. We all want this thing called “tribe” or “friendship” but no one has a clear path to them and most are just making it up as we go.

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Books are portals. Find the right one and it can take you somewhere. Most of the big events of my life occurred because I was willing to step through one of these portals into a new unknown. By clicking this article, you’d already stepped through one yourself, which will lead you into a deeper understanding of who I am, and maybe lead to a journey for you as well.

1. Enders Game by Orson Scott Card – This book has influenced the way I view strategy and life. It is about someone who is highly intelligent, but also highly empathetic. By deeply understanding his enemy he can defeat them, but in doing he feels compassion for them and no longer wishes to harm them.
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2. A Field Guide To Earthlings by Ian Ford – This was the book that made me aware I was autistic. It is a book by someone with Aspergers intended to explain social interaction to other people with autism and Aspergers. I remember thinking it was the best book I’d ever read on understanding people and social interaction, wondering why I related to it so much, and then putting two and two together. This is the book I have gifted most to others.
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3. The Drama of The Gifted Child by Alice Miller – This was the book that first made me aware of the impact early life experiences and trauma have in later life. I have seen parts of myself in this book, and most people I’ve shared it with have found it highly related as well. The book does an excellent job at showing how even subtle forms of bad parenting – like only showing a child love when they perform well – can lead to problems later in life.
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4. Sit Down and Shut Up by Brad Warner – Bard Warner was the author who introduced me to zen and zazen (zen meditation). Sitting zen was one of the first daily spiritual practices I took up. I started when I was eighteen and did zen meditation pretty consistently for nearly a decade. It was during zen meditation that I first became aware of the feelings I had around circumcision that lead to my first film, American Circumcision.
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5. The Completion Process by Teal Swan – Completion Process is something I use nearly every day. I practiced it first from the book and at a retreat of hers. After becoming interested in healing work in my early twenties through things like zen meditation and Alice Miller’s writing (see 3 & 4 above), I spent nearly a decade trying every healing method I could find – inner child work, reiki, shamanism, etc. Some were bullshit. Some were life-changing. This was in the latter category. Of all the stuff I’ve tried, this has been the most effective.
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6. 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey – The habits in this book are so ingrained in me, it was only after writing my own book that I looked back and saw how much of the advice I gave and followed in my own life came from this book. Now what this book teaches is second nature to me, so obvious that it seems odd to me when others don’t follow it, but that is probably because I read it in my formative years.
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7. Amazing Spiderman 1–40 / Chris Claremont’s run on X-Men – My idea of what heroism is was formed by reading my Dad’s Spiderman comics at age four, which he started collecting when he was four and began with Spiderman issue #4. I can still see some of those early covers in my mind. Both Spiderman and the X-men were willing to do the right thing even when it was unpopular, would not personally benefit them, or would result in others hating or misunderstanding them. Good role-models for a kid.
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8. 4 Hour Body by Tim Ferris – This was the first book to get me seriously thinking about my health. The book trailer got me pumped and generated massive buy-in. I’d always been a little overweight and felt like clothes didn’t “look good” on me. After reading this I went from eating processed carbs, grains, and sugar to meat, vegetables, and legumes. I dropped forty pounds in two months and went from being perpetually tired to high energy. Huge life change.
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9. Why Men Are The Way They Are by Warren Farrell – I read this book in high school, and it gave voice to many of the feelings I had but couldn’t find a name for. When men feel wronged, insecure, or afraid, those feelings are often invalidated by dominant cultural attitudes or beliefs. This book made those feelings safe and helped me understand why I was having them. It was what Alice Miller would call an “enlightened witness,” meaning someone who sees your pain and empathizes with it.
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10. Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu – I was introduced to this book by a friend in my hometown who I ran into after college. I’d just broken up with my girlfriend, lost the gig I thought I had, and moved back in with my parents with no idea what I was going to do with my life. He told me about the concept of “action without action” and suggested that instead of constantly worrying about what would happen, I let it come to me. I decided not to think about what I would do for a week, and if nothing happened, I’d go back to worrying again. In three days, a contact in LA called me and asked if I was moving out there because her company needed an editor. I said yes, and everything for my trip came together easily as if on it’s own. I carry this book with me whenever I travel now and re-read it whenever I find myself worrying.

• Honorable mention:
  Trust Me, I’m Lying by Ryan Holiday – This book influenced how I saw, consumed, and used media. I’ve been following Ryan Holiday’s writing and book recommendations since he was posting on the old Tucker Max forums. His description of the media landscape has only grown more relevant, as has his prescriptions. Interestingly, Ryan himself has managed to withdraw from the daily storm of media to do things like write books on ancient Stoicism and live a relatively traditional life.

Books are a window into someone else’s mind. Hopefully, this post has given you deeper insight into mine. I encourage you to continue the journey by picking up one of these and reading it. Happy journeying.

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P.S. You can find my films and books here, and get regular recommendations and writing from me by subscribing here.

Get The Intactivist Guidebook ebook here:

https://gum.co/XNbtW

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I said I wasn’t going to do it.

I said The Intactivist Guidebook would be print-only.

But… you all talked me into it.

Two things convinced me:

1. The overwhelming demand. Seriously, I got a bunch of emails about it. I also ran a twitter poll, and over 50% of respondents said they’d buy the ebook version. I’m holding you to that, cause it’s up now.
2. Some people said they couldn’t get the book where they were. The Intactivist Guidebook is on Amazon in every local country, but apparently shipping to Egypt (yes, we have readers in Egypt) costs way too much. So, now we are on digital.

Also, some said they wanted to avoid Amazon. For them, we are also on Barnes & Noble.

I want everyone to be able to read this. I hope you enjoy it, and it helps you change the world!

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• Buy on Amazon here.
• Buy the ebook here.
• Buy on Barnes & Noble here.
• Read the first chapter for free here.

My documentary American Circumcision is now on Amazon Prime.

Watch the film on Amazon Prime here:
https://www.amazon.com/American-Circumcision-Marilyn-Milos/dp/B07DW9M34K

In addition to those places, you can still watch the film at all the previous places it was available, like Vimeo, iTunes, Google Play, etc.

Watch the film on all other platforms:
https://circumcisionmovie.com/see-the-film/

How You Can Support The Film:

• Please leave a positive review on Amazon. 
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There is an idea among both conservative and liberal circles that cancel-culture will eventually burn itself out. That over-use of political accusations will devalue them, and people will stop taking them seriously. Critics of cancel-culture claim that if people repeatedly call their opponents names like “racist,” “Nazi,” etc. then these words lose their meaning, and the accusation is less powerful the next time it’s made.

This idea is probably best articulated as “political inflation” here:

While this might make sense in theory, in practice, cancel-culture is becoming stronger. Why?

Inflation occurs when your currency has nothing backing it. If you print more money out of thin air, yes it is devalued. However, if your currency is backed by gold, it does not lose it’s value if you have more gold. You can always print more money if you have the gold to back it.

What is the gold that backs “cancel” accusations? Political force.

If someone is “canceled” and the accusation sticks, they can be fired from their job, banned from social media, denied the use of payment processors, be targeted by law enforcement, kicked out of their university… the list goes on and on.

Cancel-culture accusations are “gold-backed” if there is enough political-force to enact a material loss on their targets. Yes, the number of targets is increasing, but is the political force of those who hurl these accusations increasing also?

The activists enforcing “cancel-culture” are getting a lot of purchasing power for their currency. If you wanted to devalue their currency, you wouldn’t go after the paper accusations. You’d go the ability to enforce those accusations – the gold backing them.

Accusations do not stick when there is no gold (political force) backing them. Take for example, the right-wing conspiracy theory that the Clintons are involved in a secret pedophile ring. Pedophilia is a serious accusation. What gold (political force) backs this accusation?

None. Sure, it sounds bad, but the people pushing this theory have no political power to enforce it, whereas the Clintons are some of the most politically powerful people in the world. This is a fiat-accusation.

What power backs an accusation of racism, even very spurious or likely false ones? Governments, corporations, political coalitions, media, universities, etc. Basically, everyone. When these institutions participate, they create gold-backed accusations.

It is actually conservatives and self-proclaimed liberals that are peddling a fiat currency when they talk about “having the better argument” or “appealing to reason.” None of that matters, because reason is not the currency of politics. Power is.

If you wanted to devalue these accusations, you’d have to take the gold (political power) behind them. If an accusation is not backed by power or the power backing it has no power over their particular target, then the accusation will not affect them. This is why those who are self-employed or live outside the system in some way (ex: Joe Rogan) seem less susceptible to cancel-culture, whereas people who commit less serious offenses often receive greater punishment.

This is also why some targets of “cancel-culture” remain unharmed, even when the accusation might be true or they actually deserve “canceling.” For example, Harvey Weinstein was an actual sexual predator. The accusations against him were known by most of Hollywood. However, he remained unharmed until he lost political power, at which point he could be canceled.

When Weinstein was publicly accused, he reminded his opponents of all the liberal activism he had done, as an appeal to how he could be politically useful. Of course, he wasn’t useful anymore, and the system discarded him. While he deserved to be “canceled,” he wasn’t canceled because he was morally wrong. He was canceled because he lost power.

Stop looking at the fiat, and go for the gold.

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If you want to understand how someone is canceled, my book The Intactivist Guidebook lays out the process and gives practical advice for activists to build their own currency. You can reach the first chapter for free here.