The Rawness

If I was to take my writing to the next level and self-publish, what would you most be interested in seeing me write based on what you’ve read of my blog so far? Nonfiction that expands a specific topic I’ve discussed on this blog? Or nonfiction that touches a variety of topics like a collection of essays? A piece of fiction that illustrates the type human behavior principles I tend to discuss? Something else altogether?

Feedback is appreciated. That includes all you lurkers who never comment.

Thanks.

This is a new regular feature I’m doing because I constantly get emails asking what I’m currently reading or the last few books I’ve heard. So whenever I start a new book from now on, I’ll just post it here so that people won’t have to email me to ask anymore.

What I just finished reading:

The Iliad (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)

This is the translation of the Iliad done by Robert Fagles. Fagles’ translations are great because rather than just going for literal translation, he kept in mind that books like the Iliad and the Odyssey were originally oral traditions, meant to be performed aloud to audiences. So in his translations, he tried to capture the spirit of the original and create a modern English translation that was rhythmic, captured the swagger, pomp and aggression of the original spoken ancient Greek text, and was suited to being read aloud on a stage.

It flowed so well that I sometimes caught myself reading some of the dramatic passages aloud.

What I’m Reading Now:

Our Kind of People: Inside America’s Black Upper Class by Lawrence Otis Graham. This book was highly controversial when it was first released for violating the omerta of the black upper-class. Black people can be very classist, but because of their history of being discriminated against they are very averse to being outed as classist, hence the whole “keep it real” mentality.

Graham’s book aired the dirty laundry of the black community by showing the level of classism that exists among the little known social registries and elite groups of the black upper class. It’s a level of snobbishness many have no idea exists in the black community. It also discusses things like the “paper bag test” where admission to black social events would be determined by whether your skin color was lighter than the color of a brown paper bag. If it was darker, you couldn’t gain entry.

A description of the book from Graham’s own website:

Debutante cotillions. Million-dollar homes. Summers in Martha?s Vineyard and Sag Harbor. Membership in the Links, Jack and Jill, Deltas, Boule, and AKAs. An obsession with the right schools, families, churches, social clubs, and skin complexion. This is the world of the black upper class and the focus of the first book written about the black elite by a member of this hard-to-penetrate group.

Lawrence Otis Graham?s controversial bestseller, Our Kind of People: Inside America?s Black Upper Class, was selected by the Book of the Month Club and landed on the bestseller lists of The New York Times, Los Angeles Times and Essence Magazine. The book traces the history of black America?s well-to-do, going back to the first black millionaires of the 1890s. The detailed book explains why one needs to have more than money and celebrity to be accepted by this exclusive old-guard black elite crowd. One needs to have the right parents, school credentials, fraternity, club memberships, summer house, profession?and in some cases, the right physical features.

Written by a Harvard-educated lawyer who grew up in many of the oldest black elite organizations, Graham is best known for his undercover work as a busboy at an all-white Connecticut country club, where he exposed its social practices of exclusion.
Graham?s controversial book not only profiles some of the most prominent black names and institutions in twelve different U.S. cities, but it also gives the inside scoop on such by-invitation-only black society groups like Jack & Jill, the Links, the Boul?, the Girl Friends and the Guardsmen. After his six years of research, Graham shares information on the right fraternities and sororities, the right black boarding schools, the right black churches in each city, as well as which prominent black families continue to give back to the black community and which now exploit their light complexions to ?pass? as white.
A second-generation alumnus of the Jack & Jill children?s group, a member of the 90 year old Boul? and the son of a Link, Graham offers a perspective that only an insider would have.

I’m only one chapter in so far, but it’s pretty fascinating, and it seems pretty accurate so far. I can also see why so many black people hated this book, as it’s pretty brutally honest about how pervasive ans rampant classism is among educated, well-to-do blacks. Another reason is that while well-to-do blacks take much pride in being superior to the “bad” blacks in the ghetto, there is also a tendency among them to simultaneously feel guilty for their success at times, as if they’re selling out or renouncing their blackness by embracing such lifestyles. A sort of “survivor’s guilt” is the best way to describe it, I’d say.

The table of contents is as follows:

Table of Contents:
Chapter 1 The Origins of the Black Upper Class
Chapter 2 Jack and Jill: Where Elite Black Kids Are Separated from the Rest
Chapter 3 The Black Child Experience: The Right Cotillions, Camps, and Private Schools
Chapter 4 Howard, Spelman, and Morehouse: Three Colleges That Count
Chapter 5 The Right Fraternities and Sororities
Chapter 6 The Links and the Girl Friends: For Black Women Who Govern Society
Chapter 7 The Boule, the Guardsmen, and Other Groups for Elite Black Men
Chapter 8 Vacation Spots for the Black Elite
Chapter 9 Black Elite Life in Chicago
Chapter 10 Black Elite Life in Washington, DC
Chapter 11 Black Elite Life in New York City
Chapter 12 Black Elite Life in Memphis
Chapter 13 Black Elite Life in Detroit
Chapter 14 Black Elite Life in Atlanta
Chapter 15 Other cities for the Black Elite: Nashville, New Orleans, Tuskegee,
Los Angeles, Philadelphia
Chapter 16 Passing for White: When the ?Brown Paper Bag Test? Isn?t Enough

Recommended Reading:

Introduction
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3

Today I’m going to discuss two areas I still have problems with occasionally:

Raise Your Bragging Threshold and Stop Fishing for Compliments

A lot of guys brag and fish for compliments about the flimsiest things. It broadcasts horrible insecurity. No one likes that guy who looks for an excuse to brag about the same story every time you see him.

The level of events you’re willing to brag about or fish for compliments about also becomes the level at which you being to feel disappointment when things go wrong. For example, say you brag when your boss gives you a compliment about your work. By bragging about something so insignificant, you have given that event a strong value in your mind. So now, if that event doesn’t happen, or worse the opposite of the event happens and your boss makes a negative comment about your work, you’ll play it over and over in your head and become despondent. If you fish for compliments about your looks or brag every time someone compliments your looks, you have made such physical recognition a major event in your mind. Now if someone doesn’t compliment your looks, or worse says something negative about your looks, you make a big deal about it and get depressed. If you fish for compliments about your car, you’ll feel like a loser when no one notices your car. If you brag about every time you get a girl’s number, you’ll be depressed whenever you don’t get a number. If you brag about your job title, you’ll get flustered, embarrassed and erratic whenever someone gets it wrong. The lower and more insignificant your bragging threshold, the easier it will be to shake you and throw you off your A-game.

The other thing bragging does is create sticking points. When you brag about an occurrence, you give your subconscious mind the message that something significant and noteworthy has just happened. And as a consequence, you are training yourself to become satisfied with that occurrence whenever it repeats itself. You won’t feel much of a drive to surpass it. For example, when I was young, I would brag about getting numbers. I’d get a phone number and I’d act like I just scored a threesome with Raquel Welch and young Mia Farrow in their prime. I was creating a mindset in myself that phone numbers were a big deal, to the point they subconsciously became my endgame. As a result, once I got a number or two, I’d start to slow down because I already accomplished bragging rights. I subconsciously felt like I did all I needed to do. It wasn’t until I stopped bragging about such silly things and started treating phone numbers as no big deal that my game moved up to the next level.

The Patrick Ewing Knicks were the same way. They’d celebrate after every single basket they made. Patrick Ewing would do a layup and he’d literally be doing pirouettes down the court. Someone would dunk and the whole team would run around like idiots doing chest bumps in the first quarter. As a NY Knicks fan, I found it embarrassing. And unsurprisingly, they’d never win championships. They’d choke a lot. Michael Jordan and Bulls were different. He rarely stopped to celebrate prematurely. A basket was just a basket. He’d make it, maybe smile at most and just move on. He just treated it like the norm and it became commonplace. After a while, he even made championships seem commonplace.

What you are willing to brag about reveals the limits of your past accomplishments, you current ambitions and future expectations. So broadcast that all three of those things are high by raising your bragging threshold accordingly.

Avoid Screening Your Calls As Much As You Can

Society and technology makes it easier than ever to postpone or avoid confrontation. First the answering machine made it easy to screen calls. Then Caller ID made it even easier, as you knew who was calling from the moment the phone started ringing. This was huge for me, and I would screen all my calls for no reason. I would especially screen calls from numbers I didn’t recognize.

What I grew to realize is that the extent to which you screen phone calls is the extent to which things in your life are incongruent and out of whack. When every aspect of your life is in place, from your job performance to your personal finances to your love life to your friendships, you don’t have to screen calls. Think of the times in your life when you were most obsessed with screening phone calls. You were probably juggling multiple women and pretending you weren’t. You were probably bad about paying your bills and had a lot of creditors and collection agencies calling you. You were routinely overpromising and undelivering to friends and employers and as a result had to dodge them until you caught up on the things you promised them. And so on.

Routinely resorting to call screening puts you in a comfort zone where you allow these dysfunctions to never get fixed, or even worsen. That’s why you have to set a goal for yourself to never screen calls again. Now of course there are times when you won’t pick up your phone, like in a public library or a business meeting, but this is not the same as call screening as you would avoid that call no matter who was calling, because the timing is inconvenient and it would be offensive to people around you if you picked up at that moment. That’s fine. It’s the selective avoidance of phone calls you want to eliminate.

When you resolve to not screen phone calls anymore, this is what happens: You find yourself making sure your bills are paid, because if your creditors call, you’re going to be forced to speak to them. You start being honest about what you want from relationships, and you tell women you want to break up with them honestly rather than just avoid their calls until you hope they get a hint. Dodging them is no longer an option. Or you start honestly telling them you don’t want to be exclusive to one woman rather than secretly juggle multiple women. You start underpromising and overdelivering with your personal and professional obligations, because you know you aren’t planning to avoid the consequences later on. You start living with integrity and realizing a lot of people are more understanding than you think. When you take away from yourself the option of dodging future consequences, you suddenly find yourself acting with more character and foresight in your current transactions.

In the old days, avoiding people was harder. Especially because people lived in small towns where everyone knew everyone else, life was much less anonymous, people knew when you were home and would call on you, and people ran into each other more because of engagement in public and civic life (bowling leagues, church, etc.) We have so many elements in our life to create distance, anonymity, isolation and screening that personal accountability has gone out the window. But not for you. Not anymore.

How many cliches can you cram into one promo?

“A hardcore cop who’s a total control freak.” WHOAAAA!!!!

But even crazier, he’s a single dad with a precociously sassy adult-acting daughter with wisecracks!

A longer promo:

“Ray Castle is the bad boy of bestsellers?” Did they seriously just say that without a hint of irony or self-mocking?

I have a crazy notion. I think maybe the two lead characters are going to be total opposites: an uptight control freak who does things by the book, and a wild and crazy wisecracking rake, yet despite their differences they’re going to find…opposites attract! I haven’t seen anything this revolutionary since the show “Bones!”

Seriously, what the fuck? Did ABC commission some screenwriters to just cram as many cliches into a show as humanly possible? Looks like crap. Someone should be punched in the cock full force for inflicting that on the world.

I can’t take credit for coming up with this. I wrote it down after hearing it someplace else. I have a tendency to write down and save any good advice I hear at any time and keep it in a drawer for future reference. These four steps for making decisions are great, but I can’t remember for the life of me where I first encountered them. If anyone recognizes them, please let me know and I’ll edit the post to give credit where it’s due.

1. Ask yourself “What’s the worst that can happen?”
2. Ask yourself “What’s the best that can happen?”
3. Ask yourself “What’s most likely to happen?” (This is the “risk factor”)
4. If the risk factor from step 3 is acceptable to you, than ask yourself “Am I willing to live with the worst case scenario for a shot at the best?”

I know many people will think this sounds too common sense to make a big deal about, but I firmly believe (1) the best advice is often the most basic and common sense advice, and (2) I think common sense is not as common as we like to think it is.

UPDATE:

Mr. Pilkington in the comments says that this four-step evaluation appears in the book The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich, but doesn’t know if the author came up with it himself or stole it from someone else. I never read the book myself, but I figured it was worth putting in the “Recommended Reading” section below.

If anyone can trace back the source even further, let me know in the comments.

Recommended Reading:

On my trip to Europe, what impressed me the most was the beauty of the architecture and urban planning that I noticed. It amazed me how much the architecture was tied into the history and identity of each country’s culture. When I returned to NY, I noticed how our constant quest for progress and the excessive creative destruction that arose from that quest gave us impersonal and sterile architecture that had no history and did nothing to inform us of our identity. There was no connection to the past, to the culture, nothing except a new, shiny building.

This is not true for all of New York. We do now have our landmarks and there are parts of New York that date back to colonial times, but unfortunately New York did not have a true landmark preservation program until the late 20th century, and by then most of the damage was already done in the name of progress. We lost more than we preserved.

Another thing that really struck me was the vibrancy of the “third places” you find there. You can click here to see a definition of what a third place is.

The third place is a term used in the concept of community building to refer to social surroundings separate from the two usual social environments of home and the workplace. In his influential book The Great Good Place, Ray Oldenburg (1989, 1991) argues that third places are important for civil society, democracy, civic engagement, and establishing feelings of a sense of place.

Oldenburg calls one’s “first place” the home and those that one lives with. The “second place” is the workplace ? where people may actually spend most of their time. Third places, then, are “anchors” of community life and facilitate and foster broader, more creative interaction. All societies already have informal meeting places; what is new in modern times is the intentionality of seeking them out as vital to current societal needs. Oldenburg suggests these hallmarks of a true “third place”: free or inexpensive; food and drink, while not essential, are important; highly accessible: proximate for many (walking distance); involve regulars ? those who habitually congregate there; welcoming and comfortable; both new friends and old should be found there.

Commenter Jonathan S. put me on to Ray Oldenburg, who you can read more about here.

I think that’s a major reason why Cheers was such a popular show. It was a TV series about just such a third place, and watching the show gave Americans a virtual third place that they were sorely lacking in their everyday lives.

That’s why this video by James Howard Kunstler is so compelling to me. He so clearly elucidates many of the feelings I had after my European vacation about ugly and impersonal American architecture and lack of good third places and ties them together into one very interesting speech.

In defense of New York though, I must admit that some parts of Brooklyn are becoming very effective at creating third spaces, although with the new luxury condo explosion we’re undergoing with the metal and glass monstrosities that look like parodies of postmodern thinking, we seem to be failing the architecture test Kunstler discusses.

Recommended Reading:

To review prior installments:

Introduction
Introduction explaining the premise of the series
Part 1 in the series
Part 2 in the series.

Find Good Role Models and Study Them

Misery loves company, so people often have a tendency to pick friends who share similar problems, are enables and reinforce their negative traits. Another problem with picking toxic people is that they encourage you to hate successful people. This is poison to your subconscious, because anything you actively hate, you train your subconscious mind to keep out of your grasp. You are telling your subconscious mind to keep you from ever becoming that type of person.

You’ve never seen someone who actively believes money and power are evil ever becoming rich and powerful. Even politicians who rail against the rich and powerful to get votes, if you examine their pasts, have often spent their lives pursuing status and power. Their words are just for rallying votes. But it goes for anything, if you truly grow to hate something, you will never become that thing because your subconscious mind will keep you from that goal. And your subconscious mind will do this because it feels it is doing you a favor.

If you want to be richer, study and learn to admire rich people (but those with good character of course). If you want to be popular, study and learn to admire popular people. If you want to be good with women, study and learn to admire people who are good with women. Petty, bitter whiny people instead tend to surround themselves with other petty, bitter whiny people to use as an ongoing pity party and together they spend their time actively hating the people who are experiencing success. Is it any wonder they stay stuck in a rut?

At the other extreme, don’t take it to worship level either. They’re just people. Worship is another defense mechanism of the weak. By worshiping and being overly reverential of the successful, that is yet another way people put success out of their grasp. They put the successful on a pedestal, which is another way to make them unattainable, as they achieve almost diety-like status. And people get creeped out by those who worship them, which pretty much guarantees they’ll never respect them, much less mentor them.

Find role models, study them, and if possible befriend them. Learn what you can. And don’t be a leech or a user, find something you can offer in return. Bring something of value to the table. For example in high school I had a friend Stan who was the most popular guy in school, the best player on the basketball team with lots of alpha male swagger and swimming in girls. I remember I’d occasionally see him hanging out with this chubby Indian kid who was really nerdy. Sometimes we’d meet up after school and I’d see him parting ways with the guy before coming over to us. Eventually he introduced the guy to us. His name is Marshall. I figured if Marshall was cool with Stan, he must be cool too, so the rest of us occasionally started talking to him as well.

As the months went on, Marshall seemed to get less nerdy. Whenever he did something socially awkward, Stan would immediately check him, firmly but in a reassuring way. Stan would mock him on some of his clothing choices, but in the way male pals bust on each other (that’s how guys constructively criticize, especially at that age). The social proof seemed to help the kid out too, as I started seeing him with more and more friends every month.

One day I remember asking Stan how he even started becoming friends with Marshall in the first place, as he seemed to have nothing in common with our circle of friends. Marshall’s main circle of friends always remained a small group of somewhat geeky but nice guys. Stan told me “He offered to tutored me and helps keep me on the team. He’s a cool guy.” I was surprised because of how they related in public. You’d never know Marshall was tutoring Stan. They seemed totally at ease with each other and acted like equals. At that moment, I understood Marshall’s hustle and really admired the hell out of it. He didn’t just hate on the popular guy from the sidelines, but when he got an in with him, he didn’t kiss his ass either. He got the mentoring and the social proofing, while keeping his dignity and self-respect, and reaped the social benefits from it. He learned a lot and his confidence shot up too.

Now if you can’t find living, breathing role models for whatever reason, use movies, TV, books, autobiographies and interviews as a substitute until you can find some real life ones. Minimize your exposure to any media that saps your testosterone, like an NBC sitcom or a Judd Apatow movie. Don’t cut them out, just don’t make them the bulk of your entertainment. Your mind absorbs that. Don’t immerse yourself in those “nice guys finish first while bad boy jerks always lose” fairytales that movies have become.

Watch as many old movies and TV shows and books as you can. Read biographies and interviews with old school guys. Old movies kept it real. They weren’t obsessed with assuaging the egos of losers. They gave hard life lessons. Although leading men were becoming more sensitive and vulnerable since the 60s, they were still expected to have some swagger as late as the 80s. Even 80s movies like Revenge of the Nerds were funny precisely because they were supposed to be taken as so outlandishly unrealistic. No one was expected to aspire to be a nerd the way movies today try to seriously sell Michael Cera’s characters as someone who goes from hot girl to hot girl just living his life as a socially awkward hipsterish nerd. In the 80s, his counterpart was the lead from The Last American Virgin or Corey Haim in Lucas or Ducky from Pretty in Pink. Painful to watch, yes, but they taught a valuable life lesson: More often than not, life is unfair and the weak, ugly and socially awkward lose more often than they don’t. Being your best is the key, but character and perseverance are also important.

Today though, and I think it started with John Cusack movies but hit critical mass in the late 90s onward, we got the glorification of the slacker, the geek, the wuss and the shlub. And they aren’t even losers who are good, hardworking people with character. They’re losers who are immature, petty, lazy slackers with zero ambition. We are supposed to root for them to win against the bad boy and get the girl simply because they’re losers, as if that is their redeeming factor. Is it any wonder we have so many twentysomething whimpsters who feel entitled to a girl whose out of their league and filling up websites like this one? Nice Guy Entitlement Syndrome is out of control with young men now, who feel they deserve a 9 or a 10 just for having never been an ax murderer.

So what old movies. Go to your DVR and check out the offerings from American Movie Classics, Fox Movie Channel and Turner Classic Movies and start recording right away. Don’t just look for movies you still currently hear a lot about, go for movies you never heard of in your life with names you don’t recognize. In fact, don’t even read the synopsis for some of them, just go by what has a title that grabs you. Just start recording random movies, and when you watch them, note the years they were made. Then note how the men act, how the women act, what generates attraction, what inspires men to follow other men, who the role models are supposed to be, what are held up as good male values and bad male values. Look at how the alpha males and the beta males are portrayed, and how things turn out for them. Engage it critically, not slavishly. What do you think works? What do you think doesn’t? Also, as you watch more and more of these movies, always keep in mind the years they were made and try to form an overall cultural narrative in order to trace the evolution of gender roles in media portrayals. I’ve found, in my opinion, the first very dramatic shift occurred in the 70s.

The primary purpose of this exercise is to develop more role models. Also, it’s to expand your definitions of what men can be besides just the archetype of today’s post-feminist man, and to figure out the strengths and weaknesses of each era’s male expectations. And finally, it helps you realize how so many of our current culture’s mindsets that you take for granted are very, very recent developments…ongoing experiments actually that we still don’t know the results of.

It also works with old books, like those by Ernest Hemingway, Raymond Chandler and Henry Miller.

This old movie and old book assignment was something I discovered by accident. I started watching old movies because I wanted to try a new hobby, and all my favorite series like The Wire and The Shield were ending. And after immersing myself in these movies for months I started noticing all types of things. For example, if you think I’m exaggerating about the state of men, ask yourself this: who is a current American actor under the age of 35, not including black/ethnic guys, athletes or rappers, who can convincingly pull off a tough guy role? The only guy I can think of right now is that new actor Channing Tatum. The rest are just prettyboys or wusses. Even the ones with muscles aren’t convincing tough guys, they just look like vain pampered gym rats. Deniro and Pacino for example never had huge muscles but came off way tougher than some of today’s musclebound actors. My friends and I have been rattling off names and every guy we think of turns out to be over 35 or foreign. It’s reached the point where we’re using Matt Damon as our generation’s ultimate action hero. Shia LeBeouf is being groomed to take over the Indiana Jones franchise. Shia LeBeouf, the Disney guy! We import most of our tough guys now, like Jason Statham and Christian Bale.

Is it any wonder that we’re action-hero starved to the point where we’ve seen the likes of Harrison Ford, Bruce Willis, and Sylvester Stallone brought out of storage to resurrect old franchises like Indian Jones, Die Hard, Rocky and Rambo. Or Clint Eastwood in the recent Gran Torino. And for the two of those movies that did have young guy sidekicks, who were they? Justin Long, the smug, hipster douche from Mac commercials and Shia LeBeouf, the nebbish kid who became famous from a Disney Channel knockoff of the old sitcom Boy Meets World called Even Stevens.

You get the point by now, but in closing, let me link to two brief, great interviews with older men that are very inspiring. First is an article of quotes from Clint Eastwood where he describes what he’s learned in his life. Next is one from Michael J. Fox where he does the same. I highly suggest reading both in their entirety, they’re quick and worthwhile reads.

People often ask why so many intellectuals and elites become so enamored with socialism and are opposed to capitalism.

One of the most compelling hypotheses I’ve seen put forward is from Robert Nozick in his essay “Why Do Intellectuals Oppose Capitalism?” Summarizing or giving excerpts from this great piece wouldn’t do it justice, so I instead decided to just link to it directly.

Another good article is “The Intellectuals and Socialism” by F.A. Hayek, although it is not at all an easy read. especially in comparison to Nozick’s simpler prose.

Peter G. Klein‘s “Why Intellectuals Still Support Socialism” is also a good read on the subject.

If you have to read just one though, I’d recommend Nozick’s. It remains my favorite.