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Make Self-Knowledge Great Again: The Art and Principles of Self-Knowledge
This book is not approved by any board of licensed professional counselors nor would it be in the interests of a board to do so. This book is for those who would like to get to know themselves better but have not the time to manage a relationship with a therapist who is ignorant of philosophy and its importance in the modern world.
After reading this book you will have more empathy for yourself, plenty of tools for self-therapy, and knowledge of the structure of your inner world.
You will also have gained more empathy for others, a keener sense of interpersonal boundaries and why they matter, and knowledge of how to build a strong adult life anchored in reality.
Additionally, this book serves to combat the abuses of nihilism, political correctness, radical egalitarianism, leftism, and licensed counseling that so often harm well-meaning people.
Lastly, this book will help you to stir up the good
kind of trouble. In order to save civilization we must Make Self-Knowledge Great Again!
After reading this book you will have more empathy for yourself, plenty of tools for self-therapy, and knowledge of the structure of your inner world.
You will also have gained more empathy for others, a keener sense of interpersonal boundaries and why they matter, and knowledge of how to build a strong adult life anchored in reality.
Additionally, this book serves to combat the abuses of nihilism, political correctness, radical egalitarianism, leftism, and licensed counseling that so often harm well-meaning people.
Lastly, this book will help you to stir up the good
kind of trouble. In order to save civilization we must Make Self-Knowledge Great Again!
- GenresPsychology
388 pages, Kindle Edition
Published February 22, 2017
5 people are currently reading
51 people want to read
About the author
Steven Franssen
18 books34 followersSteven Franssen is a writer, consultant, and musician.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
June 21, 2022
I purchased this book with high expectations. I was a fan of Mr. Franssen’s streams and I hoped to find the same wealth of wisdom in his written expression. It turns out, however, that absent the enchantment of rhetoric inherent in the audio-visual medium, his dialectic leaves much to be desired.
The following list is an interpretation of the contents for the first 20/100 subchapters or “lessons”, except for those I skipped because they were redundant, with interspersed commentary where appropriate.
Section 1A: In Relation To Oneself- Theory and Structure
1. We change the world by changing ourselves. Self-Knowledge leads to self-mastery. To be master of oneself means to act proactively, grounded in your highest values as opposed to acting reflexively, based on short time preferences, emotions, unmet needs, or trauma. Self-mastery makes one impervious to the volatility of the world.
2. Freedom to experiment and make mistakes is an essential element of growth and mastery. Preventing ethical mistakes is the domain of parenting and not friendship. By learning to cherish experimentation, mistakes, and the resulting consequences, we develop relationships that allow us to pursue our greatest dreams without sacrificing for the smallness of fear-based attitudes of people who cannot tolerate mistakes.
3. What saved one in childhood kills him as an adult. As children we develop patterns of thought and strategies that minimize the abusiveness of our parents. These coping strategies and defense mechanisms turn into addictions in adulthood that must be dismantled if we are to interface fully with reality. Addiction kills the soul. It deadens the wonder of life inside us. The children of addict parents have their psychic energies drained and the trauma perpetuates. The way to wean off addictive patterns is to fill our inner lives with meaning. To decode our emotions and grieve our traumas. To remove the external factors strengthening such patterns (relations, job, outlets, etc.) and to reinforce our internal pain tolerance through repeated privation of pleasures.
4. The child who is wounded by his parents has no recourse but to bury these feelings which manifest into adulthood as two forms of complexes: the parental rescue and the parental revenge fantasies.
The parental rescue fantasy is the unconscious hope that someone will come along and fill our unmet need from childhood for attention and understanding. The most common forms of it are celebrity and hero worship. The pernicious consequences of this complex are prioritizing the out-group over the in-group.
The parental revenge fantasy is the unconscious hope that the projection (that is the assumption) of the abuses of our parents onto others and our subsequent confrontation with them will fill our unmet needs from childhood for closure. This complex manifests in adulthood as aggressive behavior and criminality.
As we heal our parental revenge and rescue fantasies we become less impulsive and more able to suspend judgement until sufficient evidence is at hand. Therefore we act with more clarity in the interests of good over evil.
6. In childhood we lack agency or wisdom and thus it suits us to adopt a reactive attitude. As we grow in body and mind however we must shed these infantile behavior patterns into proactivity ─ into asserting our true identity as the embodiment of our highest values.
At this point I would like to interject and draw attention to a claim made in this subchapter: “Should this [proactive mindset] occur on a large enough scale, society will become oriented toward healing from trauma. Wars will end. Pollution will disappear. Crime will plummet. Governments and religions will eventually vanish. [...] People will hold strong, accurate boundaries with one another. The planet’s wildlife will thrive, humans included.” Governments and religions will vanish? Just what are govts. and religions to Mr. Franssen, one wonders? And it is not only a rhetorical question, because I do not know. Are they systems of repression? Of oppression? Consequences of our collective corruption? Are they mere coping mechanisms for the struggle of competing in life? Does he see the sum of all human interaction through some Freudian psychoanalytical lens as one grand limbic organ? What does Franssen think the state of man in nature is? Prototypical governments and religions have been a product of mankind since man was still getting used to donning animal skins and was scared of fire.
That the role of national defense of govts. and the epistemic substantiality of religion are consequences of ordinary adversity, that govts. and religions are not frameworks for enabling us the very proactivity of which he speaks… the notion soars past stupid, prances beyond delusional, and borders on the insane. Not a good impression to make in the first chapters of a book that should teach you how to orient yourself in life. I will touch more on this in the conclusion so let us move on.
7. There are 8 “marks” one must abide by in order to bring out their “True Self”. Mr. Franssen
Defines “Self, True-” in the glossary as “the very best within ourselves that retains a conscious awareness of our core of truth and nature of reality”. The term is possibly taken from
((Alice Miller)). That book is on my reading list but until I get to it for a better understanding, and because there is too much poetry in the given definition for my taste, for the purposes of this reading and of this review I will define “True Self” as “the distilled essence of one’s nature as it would exist in ideal conditions”. And I define the “self” as “actualized inner potential”.
These 8 marks are the so-called 8 Cs of self-leadership: calmness, courage, curiosity, clarity, compassion, confidence, creativity, correctedness. One wonders what is the difference between courage and confidence. We shall find out.
To assume calmness is to live with poise. It is to remain centered in your purpose in the face of the turmoil of others. One’s actions take on a humility nurtured by the gentle hum of the ever more present True Self.
8. To live with courage is to assume independence and responsibility. If or when one outgrows his friends, family members, social groups, professions, addictions, ideologies, it takes courage to disconnect and move on into uncharted territory. To build courage we must learn and intimacy that sustains us more than the old ways and connections. Through performing our responsibilities we gain courage, and we internalize the solidarity we once sought externally.
9. To live with curiosity is to forgo a bunker mentality in favor of a wide-ranging survey of all things emotional and intellectual. Curiosity is the catalyst for growth and thereby, improvement. To live without curiosity is to stagnate in a state of arrested development.
10. To live with clarity is to value harsh truth over comforting illusions. Mr. Franssen believe in a gnostic “universal ethics” as opposed to objective morals posited by Christianity or the CTMU, but the principle is similar enough: by seeking clarity we dismantle illusions and thus equip ourselves for making the best choices and adopt the best strategies to live in accordance with a universal fitness function.
11. To live with compassion is to invest yourself in those who are worthy of it. Compassion is a prerequisite for generosity and together they form a catalyst for growth and improvement in society both at the macro and the micro scale, so long as compassion is applied with fair discrimination between those who make a productive use of it and those who live parasitically or predatorily.
12. To live with confidence means to live in “connectedness” with one’s competence in whatever endeavor is at hand. Connectedness is the quality of being in contact with the best sides of oneself, such that one has full range of his faculties. Confidence naturally comes out of this quality of being. One gains confidence through building competence; and that confidence further enhances his competence. The feedback loop can go both ways, where insecurity breeds failure. We must strive to stay on the positive upswing.
13. To live with curiosity is to live with an open heart and an open mind, in love and apprehension for the world.
.
“Creativity is the play of the inner child as permitted by a person's psychological defenses. In the times children are free of the burdens their abusive parents place on them, they engage in life spontaneously. Children learn through play. Children make sense of the world, bring order to chaos, and broaden their horizons through a joyous discovery process that invigorates their bodies with a sense of possibility and wonder. [...] We must remember the spectacle of the unknown, the gravitas of heroism, the splendor of nature, and the promise of reward we once beheld as young children.”
Curiosity is a prerequisite for creativity and together they form the catalyst for self-actualization. What’s more, creativity is necessary for good parenting that enables well-adjusted children and in turn a wholesome society.
14. Through rebellion one breaks away from unhealthy systems and toxic environments or connections. This makes it an important step on the path to emotional maturity because it enables opportunities for growth and improvement.
Taken in good faith this can be good advice but here again I must interject with a caveat. Mr. Franssen says:
“The degree to which these systems were unhealthy is the degree to which we need to rebel. We make the fundamental choice to say, “I am going to make my life’s decisions for myself based on my own volition, not any rules I feel impede my growth.”
How does one decide what is unhealthy and what growth means? Based on what standard? On which principles? Mr. Franssen directs you to rebel based on your personal feelings but that is precisely antithetical to wisdom and tradition. The advice given is too vague and feels almost purposefully tailored to be taken out of a good faith context and give license to pursue any kind of sin and vice. If one takes a moment to recognize it, this rhetoric rings of liberalism and feminism. Indeed, this advice is especially pernicious to women who are biologically incapable of leadership and must rely on the guidance of a patriarch, be he the father or husband. It is the grossest error to tell a woman “Do what thou wilt.” yet this is what Franssen does here and other places in a vague way that leaves him plausible deniability. As another reviewer aptly remarks:
“These come often in passing, sometimes merely as implicature, and rarely as overt, but worth stating here is that these things come as floating edicts with no skin in the game for the one suggesting them. These can drastically derail your life if taken imprudently. Some people should disentangle themselves from toxic and imminently harmful family ties; some can move to a foreign land, pick up its language and culture, and become better for it; some should intervene into a potentially disastrous home life situation. Chances are, this isn’t you, and you should follow your basic instincts instead of an e-celeb who doesn't even know who you are.”
(https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...)
15. There are three levels of Self-knowledge. The lowest is where the True Self is entirely disconnected from oneself and he is Self-ignorant. This amounts to a shallow personality, unprincipled behavior, a reactive and trend-following attitude. In short, a sheep.
The second and intermediate level is where one is Self-aware but not Self-actual. That is, one can see his inner nature and understand how his wounds impair him but the process of healing has not yet advanced enough to produce a significantly positive character. This amounts to an often jealous or contemptuous personality where one is eager to condemn the “shallowness” or “fakeness” of others while forgetting he has been in their place himself.
The third level is the fulfillment of the Self-actualization process where one lives as the embodiment of his highest values and therefore has sympathy and understanding for those at the lower levels. Except, of course, when sympathy or compassion do not comprise one’s “highest values”. See Thus Spoke Zarahustra.
16. As much as it may seem righteous to condemn and ostracize people belonging to the class so-called ‘toxic abuser’ (the name is self-explanatory; includes psychopaths and narcissists), there is the more pertinent realization to be made which is that those abusers have successfully gotten involved with us, which calls for further introspection into our behavior patterns that allowed it in the first place, so that it doesn’t happen again. It is possible to empathize with the wounds of such abusers, while keeping them at a distance.
17. Children who suffer parental neglect never develop their inner world and grow up to be emotionally illiterate. This emotional deadness manifests in adulthood as nihilism and it is particularly pernicious in those with an intellectual bent.
“The heartless intellectual uses his own intellect to remain set against himself. When a feeling arises he will always choose to use some system or method of ‘handling it’ like a dirty diaper, the way his own emotions were once regarded as a child.
[...]
Living among warring and competing societies and ideologies can have a dissociating effect on us. We begin to admire public intellectuals for their clever ways of outpacing the symptoms of the dying West and become their cultists.”
I would like to point out that there is an obvious and time-tested remedy for these existential woes that Mr. Franssen forgoes to mention.
20. This subchapter, lesson 20 out 100, ends on page 58 out of 375, and this is where I decided to stop the analytical reading because I realized it wasn’t worth the effort invested and I was just getting frustrated at the anti-wisdom presented. I conclude the review here but I will read the book to the end at a faster pace while skimming over the bs. This review will cover only what I have read analytically up to page 58 but my final star rating /5 will be based on reading the whole book.
Anyway, subchapter 20:
The subsequent stage to rebelling, after having lived reactively for a while, is to build a structure on which to base our living. “The foundation of our life’s structure is made up of our basic beliefs. [...] Out of our own basic beliefs spring our principles.”
And how, pray tell, does one acquire their “basic beliefs”? So much for universal ethics, I suppose. The idea of life structure advocated here is to continually refine into principles a set of behavioral patterns that we constantly test against their outcome. The problem with this way is that it is not possible to pay off for the average person, let alone the below average.
By the definition of average, the average person is confused, weak-willed, unprincipled, ignorant, and too dim-witted to construct for themselves a refined model of the world that can serve them reliably with positive life outcomes. Franssen expects everyone to be their own little scientist and their own little philosopher but insofar he pushes this book to a general audience he is telling everyone to reinvent their wheel, against better, existing alternatives. As one can observe by simply looking around, the belief systems of the average are unrefined and tend to syncretism. They are necessarily moderate. In contrast, a pure ideology cannot be but extreme, for it takes a penetrating intellect to deconstruct it down to the metaphysics and solve all contradictions. But the average 100 IQ, cash-register-working person has never even heard of the word “metaphysical” or if they did they have no clue what it means. If you don’t believe me go ask your mom or your aunt.
Review continued in the first comment . . .
The following list is an interpretation of the contents for the first 20/100 subchapters or “lessons”, except for those I skipped because they were redundant, with interspersed commentary where appropriate.
Section 1A: In Relation To Oneself- Theory and Structure
1. We change the world by changing ourselves. Self-Knowledge leads to self-mastery. To be master of oneself means to act proactively, grounded in your highest values as opposed to acting reflexively, based on short time preferences, emotions, unmet needs, or trauma. Self-mastery makes one impervious to the volatility of the world.
2. Freedom to experiment and make mistakes is an essential element of growth and mastery. Preventing ethical mistakes is the domain of parenting and not friendship. By learning to cherish experimentation, mistakes, and the resulting consequences, we develop relationships that allow us to pursue our greatest dreams without sacrificing for the smallness of fear-based attitudes of people who cannot tolerate mistakes.
3. What saved one in childhood kills him as an adult. As children we develop patterns of thought and strategies that minimize the abusiveness of our parents. These coping strategies and defense mechanisms turn into addictions in adulthood that must be dismantled if we are to interface fully with reality. Addiction kills the soul. It deadens the wonder of life inside us. The children of addict parents have their psychic energies drained and the trauma perpetuates. The way to wean off addictive patterns is to fill our inner lives with meaning. To decode our emotions and grieve our traumas. To remove the external factors strengthening such patterns (relations, job, outlets, etc.) and to reinforce our internal pain tolerance through repeated privation of pleasures.
4. The child who is wounded by his parents has no recourse but to bury these feelings which manifest into adulthood as two forms of complexes: the parental rescue and the parental revenge fantasies.
The parental rescue fantasy is the unconscious hope that someone will come along and fill our unmet need from childhood for attention and understanding. The most common forms of it are celebrity and hero worship. The pernicious consequences of this complex are prioritizing the out-group over the in-group.
The parental revenge fantasy is the unconscious hope that the projection (that is the assumption) of the abuses of our parents onto others and our subsequent confrontation with them will fill our unmet needs from childhood for closure. This complex manifests in adulthood as aggressive behavior and criminality.
As we heal our parental revenge and rescue fantasies we become less impulsive and more able to suspend judgement until sufficient evidence is at hand. Therefore we act with more clarity in the interests of good over evil.
6. In childhood we lack agency or wisdom and thus it suits us to adopt a reactive attitude. As we grow in body and mind however we must shed these infantile behavior patterns into proactivity ─ into asserting our true identity as the embodiment of our highest values.
At this point I would like to interject and draw attention to a claim made in this subchapter: “Should this [proactive mindset] occur on a large enough scale, society will become oriented toward healing from trauma. Wars will end. Pollution will disappear. Crime will plummet. Governments and religions will eventually vanish. [...] People will hold strong, accurate boundaries with one another. The planet’s wildlife will thrive, humans included.” Governments and religions will vanish? Just what are govts. and religions to Mr. Franssen, one wonders? And it is not only a rhetorical question, because I do not know. Are they systems of repression? Of oppression? Consequences of our collective corruption? Are they mere coping mechanisms for the struggle of competing in life? Does he see the sum of all human interaction through some Freudian psychoanalytical lens as one grand limbic organ? What does Franssen think the state of man in nature is? Prototypical governments and religions have been a product of mankind since man was still getting used to donning animal skins and was scared of fire.
That the role of national defense of govts. and the epistemic substantiality of religion are consequences of ordinary adversity, that govts. and religions are not frameworks for enabling us the very proactivity of which he speaks… the notion soars past stupid, prances beyond delusional, and borders on the insane. Not a good impression to make in the first chapters of a book that should teach you how to orient yourself in life. I will touch more on this in the conclusion so let us move on.
7. There are 8 “marks” one must abide by in order to bring out their “True Self”. Mr. Franssen
Defines “Self, True-” in the glossary as “the very best within ourselves that retains a conscious awareness of our core of truth and nature of reality”. The term is possibly taken from
((Alice Miller)). That book is on my reading list but until I get to it for a better understanding, and because there is too much poetry in the given definition for my taste, for the purposes of this reading and of this review I will define “True Self” as “the distilled essence of one’s nature as it would exist in ideal conditions”. And I define the “self” as “actualized inner potential”.
These 8 marks are the so-called 8 Cs of self-leadership: calmness, courage, curiosity, clarity, compassion, confidence, creativity, correctedness. One wonders what is the difference between courage and confidence. We shall find out.
To assume calmness is to live with poise. It is to remain centered in your purpose in the face of the turmoil of others. One’s actions take on a humility nurtured by the gentle hum of the ever more present True Self.
8. To live with courage is to assume independence and responsibility. If or when one outgrows his friends, family members, social groups, professions, addictions, ideologies, it takes courage to disconnect and move on into uncharted territory. To build courage we must learn and intimacy that sustains us more than the old ways and connections. Through performing our responsibilities we gain courage, and we internalize the solidarity we once sought externally.
9. To live with curiosity is to forgo a bunker mentality in favor of a wide-ranging survey of all things emotional and intellectual. Curiosity is the catalyst for growth and thereby, improvement. To live without curiosity is to stagnate in a state of arrested development.
10. To live with clarity is to value harsh truth over comforting illusions. Mr. Franssen believe in a gnostic “universal ethics” as opposed to objective morals posited by Christianity or the CTMU, but the principle is similar enough: by seeking clarity we dismantle illusions and thus equip ourselves for making the best choices and adopt the best strategies to live in accordance with a universal fitness function.
11. To live with compassion is to invest yourself in those who are worthy of it. Compassion is a prerequisite for generosity and together they form a catalyst for growth and improvement in society both at the macro and the micro scale, so long as compassion is applied with fair discrimination between those who make a productive use of it and those who live parasitically or predatorily.
12. To live with confidence means to live in “connectedness” with one’s competence in whatever endeavor is at hand. Connectedness is the quality of being in contact with the best sides of oneself, such that one has full range of his faculties. Confidence naturally comes out of this quality of being. One gains confidence through building competence; and that confidence further enhances his competence. The feedback loop can go both ways, where insecurity breeds failure. We must strive to stay on the positive upswing.
13. To live with curiosity is to live with an open heart and an open mind, in love and apprehension for the world.
.
“Creativity is the play of the inner child as permitted by a person's psychological defenses. In the times children are free of the burdens their abusive parents place on them, they engage in life spontaneously. Children learn through play. Children make sense of the world, bring order to chaos, and broaden their horizons through a joyous discovery process that invigorates their bodies with a sense of possibility and wonder. [...] We must remember the spectacle of the unknown, the gravitas of heroism, the splendor of nature, and the promise of reward we once beheld as young children.”
Curiosity is a prerequisite for creativity and together they form the catalyst for self-actualization. What’s more, creativity is necessary for good parenting that enables well-adjusted children and in turn a wholesome society.
14. Through rebellion one breaks away from unhealthy systems and toxic environments or connections. This makes it an important step on the path to emotional maturity because it enables opportunities for growth and improvement.
Taken in good faith this can be good advice but here again I must interject with a caveat. Mr. Franssen says:
“The degree to which these systems were unhealthy is the degree to which we need to rebel. We make the fundamental choice to say, “I am going to make my life’s decisions for myself based on my own volition, not any rules I feel impede my growth.”
How does one decide what is unhealthy and what growth means? Based on what standard? On which principles? Mr. Franssen directs you to rebel based on your personal feelings but that is precisely antithetical to wisdom and tradition. The advice given is too vague and feels almost purposefully tailored to be taken out of a good faith context and give license to pursue any kind of sin and vice. If one takes a moment to recognize it, this rhetoric rings of liberalism and feminism. Indeed, this advice is especially pernicious to women who are biologically incapable of leadership and must rely on the guidance of a patriarch, be he the father or husband. It is the grossest error to tell a woman “Do what thou wilt.” yet this is what Franssen does here and other places in a vague way that leaves him plausible deniability. As another reviewer aptly remarks:
“These come often in passing, sometimes merely as implicature, and rarely as overt, but worth stating here is that these things come as floating edicts with no skin in the game for the one suggesting them. These can drastically derail your life if taken imprudently. Some people should disentangle themselves from toxic and imminently harmful family ties; some can move to a foreign land, pick up its language and culture, and become better for it; some should intervene into a potentially disastrous home life situation. Chances are, this isn’t you, and you should follow your basic instincts instead of an e-celeb who doesn't even know who you are.”
(https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...)
15. There are three levels of Self-knowledge. The lowest is where the True Self is entirely disconnected from oneself and he is Self-ignorant. This amounts to a shallow personality, unprincipled behavior, a reactive and trend-following attitude. In short, a sheep.
The second and intermediate level is where one is Self-aware but not Self-actual. That is, one can see his inner nature and understand how his wounds impair him but the process of healing has not yet advanced enough to produce a significantly positive character. This amounts to an often jealous or contemptuous personality where one is eager to condemn the “shallowness” or “fakeness” of others while forgetting he has been in their place himself.
The third level is the fulfillment of the Self-actualization process where one lives as the embodiment of his highest values and therefore has sympathy and understanding for those at the lower levels. Except, of course, when sympathy or compassion do not comprise one’s “highest values”. See Thus Spoke Zarahustra.
16. As much as it may seem righteous to condemn and ostracize people belonging to the class so-called ‘toxic abuser’ (the name is self-explanatory; includes psychopaths and narcissists), there is the more pertinent realization to be made which is that those abusers have successfully gotten involved with us, which calls for further introspection into our behavior patterns that allowed it in the first place, so that it doesn’t happen again. It is possible to empathize with the wounds of such abusers, while keeping them at a distance.
17. Children who suffer parental neglect never develop their inner world and grow up to be emotionally illiterate. This emotional deadness manifests in adulthood as nihilism and it is particularly pernicious in those with an intellectual bent.
“The heartless intellectual uses his own intellect to remain set against himself. When a feeling arises he will always choose to use some system or method of ‘handling it’ like a dirty diaper, the way his own emotions were once regarded as a child.
[...]
Living among warring and competing societies and ideologies can have a dissociating effect on us. We begin to admire public intellectuals for their clever ways of outpacing the symptoms of the dying West and become their cultists.”
I would like to point out that there is an obvious and time-tested remedy for these existential woes that Mr. Franssen forgoes to mention.
20. This subchapter, lesson 20 out 100, ends on page 58 out of 375, and this is where I decided to stop the analytical reading because I realized it wasn’t worth the effort invested and I was just getting frustrated at the anti-wisdom presented. I conclude the review here but I will read the book to the end at a faster pace while skimming over the bs. This review will cover only what I have read analytically up to page 58 but my final star rating /5 will be based on reading the whole book.
Anyway, subchapter 20:
The subsequent stage to rebelling, after having lived reactively for a while, is to build a structure on which to base our living. “The foundation of our life’s structure is made up of our basic beliefs. [...] Out of our own basic beliefs spring our principles.”
And how, pray tell, does one acquire their “basic beliefs”? So much for universal ethics, I suppose. The idea of life structure advocated here is to continually refine into principles a set of behavioral patterns that we constantly test against their outcome. The problem with this way is that it is not possible to pay off for the average person, let alone the below average.
By the definition of average, the average person is confused, weak-willed, unprincipled, ignorant, and too dim-witted to construct for themselves a refined model of the world that can serve them reliably with positive life outcomes. Franssen expects everyone to be their own little scientist and their own little philosopher but insofar he pushes this book to a general audience he is telling everyone to reinvent their wheel, against better, existing alternatives. As one can observe by simply looking around, the belief systems of the average are unrefined and tend to syncretism. They are necessarily moderate. In contrast, a pure ideology cannot be but extreme, for it takes a penetrating intellect to deconstruct it down to the metaphysics and solve all contradictions. But the average 100 IQ, cash-register-working person has never even heard of the word “metaphysical” or if they did they have no clue what it means. If you don’t believe me go ask your mom or your aunt.
Review continued in the first comment . . .
December 16, 2020
Not mere plebeian self-help but an enquiry which reverts humanities, above all psychology, back into a grand, classical, philosophical system. A return to tradition; know thyself!
Franssen sovereignly takes hold of several reductionist fields and intertwines them in relation to the relevant facts and a general view of modern civilisational decay.
Franssen sovereignly takes hold of several reductionist fields and intertwines them in relation to the relevant facts and a general view of modern civilisational decay.
July 31, 2023
Trumpian Big-think. Uniquely powerful.
April 3, 2017
Today I received my physical copy of ‘’Make Self-Knowledge Great Again’’ (MSKGA), written by Steven Franssen.
I finished the kindle version of it yesterday/day before yesterday. It took me a few weeks to get through it. I read it in doses. It is a powerful, profound read. Both deep and wide in content.
This is the real deal folks. This is Self-knowledge on steroids. Steven takes us through the basics but also gives us an advanced course on the art of knowing thyself.
‘’What do I do after I have healed myself?’’ is a question I have asked myself before. Steven gives us that answer.
The answer is to fight nihilists and leftists.
Why?
To secure a better tomorrow for our offspring. And because we hate evil.
Stevens book on Making Self-Knowledge Great Again is comprehensive, profound and unique. It is a call to arms.
Pick up your sword, and jump into the fray. We got a people to save.
I finished the kindle version of it yesterday/day before yesterday. It took me a few weeks to get through it. I read it in doses. It is a powerful, profound read. Both deep and wide in content.
This is the real deal folks. This is Self-knowledge on steroids. Steven takes us through the basics but also gives us an advanced course on the art of knowing thyself.
‘’What do I do after I have healed myself?’’ is a question I have asked myself before. Steven gives us that answer.
The answer is to fight nihilists and leftists.
Why?
To secure a better tomorrow for our offspring. And because we hate evil.
Stevens book on Making Self-Knowledge Great Again is comprehensive, profound and unique. It is a call to arms.
Pick up your sword, and jump into the fray. We got a people to save.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews