The K-Selected Introvert

"Superior people need to rule inferior people or else inferior people will cause problems for each other and for their betters. Superior people need to be more free. Inferior people cannot handle freedom, need supervision, discipline, and control. Inferior people need to be substantially less free." - Jim's Blog

When I entered the seventh grade I ran across people I didn't consider quite human. Loud, stupid, trouble-makers, picked on the weak, ran from the strong. They appeared to have something wrong with their brains.

Years later I realized they were extroverts, and many of them I still consider a lower form of human. Almost all prisoners are low-IQ extroverts, and ambitious high-IQ extroverts can become narcissistic/psychopathic politicians who murder hundreds of millions.

Is there any wonder why I consider them subhuman?

Extrovert trouble-making even extends to families and reproduction.

There are two mating strategies: r-selected and K-selected. R-selected is what rabbits do: produce a lot of off-spring they don't take much care of. K-selected produce few off-spring and invest a great deal in their upbringing.

When it comes to people I use the movie Idiocracy as an example.

The smart couple are K-selected and the dumb ones are r-selected. Introverts versus extroverts.

R-selected are usually low-to-moderate IQ and K-selected tend to be high-IQ. You can look at Africa as an example of an example of r-selected - and the place is a catastrophe.

There are additional problems with the r-selected. They are almost always extroverts, which means they gain energy from other people (no matter who are they) and generally don't have an interior life. As far as I'm concerned, extroverts can't really think. They are the perfect example of what John D. MacDonald sneered at in his The Green Ripper as "herd animals, social and imitative." I consider them the Borg.

Extroverts imitate each other, because they cannot think. In the Manosphere, anyone who spouts terms such as Alpha, Beta, Sigma, Omega, rationalization hamster, hypergamy, "Alpha Fux and Beta Bux," and really believes it, is a low-to-moderate IQ, imitative extrovert. They got those ideas from someone else, and don't have the intelligence, imagination, concentration or sensitivity to see the flaws and criticize them.

Extroverts are promiscuous. Introverts are far less less promiscuous and almost always find promiscuous sex meaningless.

Extroverts generally blame their problems on other people, since having no interior lives, everything that happens to them comes from the outside. So to them it's other people's fault when they have problems. The true narcissists and psychopaths are always extroverts.

The defining characteristic of the narcissist is envy. Logically, envy is then one of the defining extrovert values. And envy has caused more problems in the world than anything else. Extroverts are far more envious than introverts because to an extrovert everything good comes from the outside.

Let's look at the story of the Garden of Eden as an example. Adam blames his transgression on Eve and Eve blames hers on the serpent, which is a symbol of envy and hate, Adam is easily influenced by Eve and Eve by the serpent. To me both Adam and Eve have to be extroverts. They show every sign of it.

The story tells us that evil is brought into the world because of envy.

Extroverts are the true destroyers. They start the wars and kill hundreds of millions of people. I like to use the example of George Bush, an unimaginative man who never used what brains he had, who started two unnecessary wars, wasted a few trillion dollars, and damaged America's freedoms.

Some extroverts have what appears to be an instinctive dislike of introverts. It's related to extroverts trying to blame their problems on people, and introverts are so different some extroverts see them as Outsiders to be blamed and scapegoated. Of course, introverts understand extroverts a better than extroverts understand introverts - whom, for all practical purposes, they don't understand at all.

Cain, the first murderer, had to be a low-IQ, impulsive, envious extrovert who blamed his problems on Abel. I call Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel the first dysfunctional family, whose sickness has spread planet-wide.

All the truly destructive political philosophies - communism and socialism being the worst ones - are based on envy - and all are leftist (so is democracy, for that matter). That means they are extrovert philosophies. Feminism is a leftist, destructive, envious extrovert belief system.

Feminism is almost pure r-selected. As for not taking care of your kids and considering them disposable, the feminist support for abortion is a perfect example of it.

The Manosphere, to the extent it denigrates women as gold-digging whores and promotes the r-selected PUA lifestyle, it is an extrovert philosophy and will not work - because it is destructive. It is based on men's envy of women, just as feminism is based on women's envy of men.

Extrovert "Game" certainly will not work for introverts.

Extroverts can't help but be destroyers. That's why they must be ruled by introverts and their values - liberty, self-responsibility, political and economic freedom. Again I'll repeat: leftism, war, murder, destruction are extrovert values, because they blame their problems on other people. And the story of the Garden of Eden tells us that blaming our problems on other people is what brought evil into the world.

For that matter, all the crazy cat lady spinsters? Extroverts, of course.

The Manosphere Isn't a Religion. It's a Cult.

"I am holier than thou, therefore I should command thee."

"By a pharisee, I mean people who claim that they know more than others, therefore should be obeyed, that they are more virtuous than others, therefore should be obeyed, are holier than thou." - Jim's Blog

One of the main characteristics of a cult is that it has an arcane private language that doesn't have much to do with reality, although the members are convinced it is reality. Think of Scientology and its bizarre concepts.

Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, "Alpha Fux and Beta Bux," hypergamy, rationalization hamsters...these are concepts without much in the way of referents, which means they are words that don't "point" to much in reality. Example: I've had people tell me that men who murdered children and women are "Alphas." That's just plain bullshit. They're murderers, plain and simple.

The more our concepts conform to reality the better they work. "Jumping out from a plane without a parachute and floating down to earth" is a concept that does not work, just as "Women are hypergamous untrustworthy whores who look for Alpha Bux and Beta Bux" is a concept that not only does not work, but will also poison a man's soul.

This private language allows the possessors of it to feel superior to Outsiders. "I know the Truth, and they don't! How superior I am!"

It also allows the deluded to define themselves as Alphas and Sigmas ("How superior I am!") and the heretics/blasphemers as Omegas, Gammas, etc. It's called scapegoating, and it's the basis of human sacrifice. Unbelievers cannot be tolerated and must be attacked, ostracized and expelled.

Then there are cult leaders. There are always the cult leaders. Their acolytes believe they possess the Ultimate Truth and so their followers gather around, memorize their beliefs and then imitate them. Think of Roissy, who is a nihilistic destroyer.

Everyone has a philosophy of life that they live by, whether or not it's conscious, whether or not it's articulated. Many of the ideas in the Manosphere, not-good ideas, have been articulated so the simple-minded can memorize them.

A religion is supposed to refine the beliefs and make them simpler to understand. Cults go the opposite way.

When a belief system becomes ossified it's all over for it. It will ultimately be replaced. The Manosphere is already ossifying with its cult language and cult beliefs. The believers in its concepts already cannot change their minds, since they are convinced they know the Truth. And nothing can change the mind of anyone who's already convinced they know the Truth.

And a lot of the Manosphere, with its bizarre ideas, disgust the smarter, and drives them away.

See Dick. See Jane. See - ARGH! Clang! Clang! Clang!

I was considered a not-normal kid. My head was shaped like a light-bulb, for one thing. A Filipina I know once gasped when she saw a picture of me at nine weeks old. "American babies have big heads!" she told me, the implication being she hoped to never squeeze out such a deformed thing. I think she half-believed me when I told her my parents bought me a little toy wagon so I could roll my head around in it, and that there was a well-known American fairy-tale about a village idiot who had a huge potato for a head, which caused him to keep falling out of his father's cart.

Then there were the problems with the robot and submarine and rocket launcher. Parents used to ban me from their yards. The rocket launcher was what did it. If I had just launched rockets from a pad on the ground, straight up into the air, perhaps that would have been acceptable, even if it was in my backyard. Launching them from a cardboard bazooka on my shoulder was not, especially since I figured out the fins on the rocket were supposed to be angled, which caused the projectile to spin, thereby increasing the distance and sending it across several yards. They're lucky I never figured out how to put an M-80 fire-cracker grenade in the nose. These days, the cops probably would Taser me, followed by the courts sending me to some sort of Brave New World "therapy" that would involve the modern-day Soma that goes by the name "Ritalin."

It's pretty obvious I wasn't a good fit in school. This occurred to me in the first grade, when I was introduced to Dick and Jane and Spot and Pony. "See Dick. See Jane. See Spot. Run Spot run!" I daydreamed about sticking firecrackers up Spot and Pony's noses, which I thought would make huge gouts of smoke blow out of their nostrils, like dragons. That would have made them run, by golly. In some ways I was an awful kid, even if I didn't look like one.

I spent most of my time in school daydreaming, and as a result, my report cards were full of comments from the teachers. I still have those reports, even today. One consistent comment was, "Bobby is not paying attention in class. . .and he has such potential!"

No, I certainly wasn't paying attention. Instead, at six years old, I was dreaming I was Commando Cody, who was a pre-Rocketeer with a helmet, a way-cool black leather jacket with controls on his chest, and a jetpack on his back. If I remember correctly, he even flew to the Moon once in that getup. And he had a pistol, a .45, I believe.

To this day, I believe those Dick and Jane readers are mostly what did me in. I did not like to read back then, and I think it was because of them. They were not only boring, they were excruciatingly boring, and so was nearly everything else throughout my years in school. Not liking to read is a little odd, because I started to teach myself to read when I was four.

Fortunately, when I was 11 years old, I found a tattered, falling-apart ACE 1963 copy of Edgar Rice Burroughs' A Fighting Man of Mars ("Hidden Menace on the Red Planet"), and boom!, just like that, I was changed forever. I immediately understood the importance of imagination, and how the purpose of school is to, however unwittingly, destroy it.

I remember thinking, whoa, what is this book? Gigantic Martian-eating apes, with six arms?! Cackling Mad Scientists? Huge spiders, with fangs? Heroes, villains, damsels in distress? Sword fights, disintegrator rays, invisibility cloaks? Battles galore, in warships floating in the sky? Wow! I was in a tizzy. I had never experienced anything like this. I was in awe, a condition I describe as a combination of love and wonder and fear. And I liked it.

Why, I wondered, wasn't I given stuff like this to read when I was six, instead of Dick and Jane? I don't care if they went on adventures with Spot and found a toad in the bushes, that was nothing compared to Tan Hadron of Hastor using his sword to defend the woman he loved from the insane cannibals of U-Gor!

Years later, when I started reading fairy tales, I was surprised to find the ones that aren't bowdlerized (which are the ones most people are familiar with) are blood-thirsty horror stories. In the unexpurgated "Cinderella," for example, her sisters cut off parts of their feet to try to make them fit into the slipper (which points out what greedy people will do for money and power and fame). You'll never see that in a Walt Disney film -- and Walt admitted he knew he was altering the original tales. Cinderella was, of all things, a very feisty girl, one who would never give up.

I was puzzled about these old children's stories. These are what adults in the past read to kids? And I got Dick and Jane and their boring white-bread lives in the suburbs, with their parents dressed like Ward and June Cleaver in a suit and tie, and pearls? But weren't kids supposed to be kept innocent as long as possible? Weren't they supposed to not know about awful things like violence and battles and swords and guns and death and destruction and romance and even - yuck - kissing? Wouldn't these terrible stories give them nightmares and permanently damage their tender six-year-old psyches?

Well, it seems to me that Dick and Jane and all the rest of those innocent boring stories are what damaged me. Those blood-thirsty stories with the swordfights and all the killings not only didn't damage me, they introduced me to a world of wonder I didn't know existed, one so amazing I actually felt grateful about my luck. And if there is one (actually three) thing(s) I am absolutely convinced is an inherent component of happiness, it's gratitude and appreciation, and the humility that comes from those two qualities.

What's worse -- being bored all the time as a kid in school, or having an occasional nightmare, if that nightmare is the price of being introduced to wonder and amazement and awe? Personally, I'll take the nightmare. I'm an adult, and I still have nightmares. Only now, the only regular one I have is about being stuck in high school on the last day and not being allowed to graduate. They're so bad they wake me up. I've never woken up from the Mad Scientist Phor Tak chasing me with a disintegrator pistol, or a huge spider gnashing its fangs and running after me down a valley. Not yet, at least.

If stories for kids are boring, kids certainly aren't going to want to read. And if they don't read, then they can't take much advantage of all the knowledge available in literature. That's saying bye-bye to all the accumulated wisdom of the human race. So, in order for children's stories to be interesting and exciting, they have to contain all that "awful" stuff. On top of that, kids like the stuff.

As an experiment, read some dumbed-down stories to young children, and then read some of the real fairy tales, and watch how they react. I've done this many times. They quickly get bored with the first, but always remain fascinated by the second. And they want more, even if they don't fully understand everything.

I remember the first time I read "The Little Match Girl" to some kids who were less than five. I've never seen such looks on their faces before. They learned about pity and mercy and horror from that story, about how lucky they were to have parents and a home and warmth and enough to eat, unlike the Little Match Girl. And such things are why those stories are so important, because kids learn to deal with all sides of life in the safety of their imaginations.

Bruno Bettelheim, in The Uses of Enchantment, claimed fairy tales and similar stories were necessary for children because they allowed them to work through various feelings they all had. I won't go so far as to agree with his Freudian interpretation, but I understand his point. I am reminded of that modern-day mythic movie, A Christmas Story, in which Raphie has to deal with bullies, boring school, a nutcase for a little brother, a harried mother, a goodhearted but somewhat dense father, and the various problems all kids have to deal with.

Eric Rabkin agrees with Bettelheim, commenting upon the importance of the storytelling function in his book, The Fantastic in Literature. He explains that the cruelty in fairy tales indeed can be beneficial to children because "they can see danger handled safely and symbolically and thus, their own fears can be mastered."

We are never going to see truly interesting and educating stories for kids in the schools. If kids came home and told their parents about about those great stories they were being told - the old fairy tales - some of them would throw fits and call the schools right then. To which I say: bah. You have no idea what you're doing.

I see no solution to any of these problems except to get rid of the government schools. Unfortunately, private schools aren't going to be any better if they imitate the government schools. But at least they'll stand a chance, something that's never going to happen in do-gooder-feel-good bureacracy-crushed schools run by the gooberment.

It has now become a truism that every time the government gets involved in something, it doesn't make it better; it makes things worse. These days, nearly everyone complains about the schools, and what all these schools have in common is that they are "public" - read "government run" - schools. Most of these schools seem to have become masters at making kids hate them. Most kids see their time in them as a prison sentence to be served. I sure did, which is why about the only thing I learned in high school was how to make a bong out of a coffee pot. What kids learn is to dislike school, and, quite often, reading and learning.

As for me, if I could go back and do it over again, I'd take the wonder and awe and fear and cruelty instead of Dick and Jane and Spot chasing that stupid toad. I think most kids would, too.

The Wonderful and Amazing Intellectual/Moral Explosion of the Scottish Enlightment!

The reason I write intellectual/moral as I do is because you cannot separate them.

I have for years been puzzled by the Scottish Enlightenment. Here was a small country that exploded onto the world a group of men whose influence continues today. How did this happen?

Here is a list of the men of the Scottish Enlightenment:

Robert Adam (1728–1792) architect.

James Anderson (1739–1808) agronomist, lawyer, amateur scientist.

Joseph Black (1728–1799) physicist and chemist, first to isolate carbon dioxide.

Hugh Blair (1718–1800) minister, author.

James Boswell (1740–1795) lawyer, author of Life of Johnson.

Thomas Brown (1778–1820), Scottish moral philosopher and philosopher of mind; jointly held the Chair of Moral Philosophy at Edinburgh University with Dugald Stewart.

James Burnett, Lord Monboddo (1714–1799) philosopher, judge, founder of modern comparative historical linguistics.

Robert Burns[52] (1759–1796) poet.

Alexander Campbell (1788–1866) early leader in the Restoration Movement.

George Campbell (1719–1796) philosopher of language, theology, and rhetoric.

Sir John Clerk of Eldin (1728–1812) prolific artist, author of An Essay on Naval Tactics; great-uncle of James Clerk Maxwell.

William Cullen (1710–1790) physician, chemist, early medical researcher.

Adam Ferguson (1723–1816) considered the founder of sociology.

Robert Fergusson (1750–1774), poet.

Andrew Fletcher (1653–1716) a forerunner of the Scottish Enlightenment, writer, patriot, commissioner of Parliament of Scotland.

Sir James Hall, 4th Baronet (1761–1832) geologist, geophysicist.

Henry Home, Lord Kames (1696–1782) philosopher, judge, historian.

David Hume (1711–1776) philosopher, historian, essayist.

Francis Hutcheson (1694–1746) philosopher of metaphysics, logic, and ethics.

James Hutton (1726–1797) founder of modern geology.

Sir John Leslie (1766–1832) mathematician, physicist, investigator of heat (thermodynamics).

James Mill (1773–1836) late in the period - Father of John Stuart Mill.

John Millar (1735–1801) philosopher, historian, historiographer.

Thomas Muir of Huntershill, (1765–1799), political reformer, leader of the Scottish "Friends of the People Society."

John Playfair (1748–1819) mathematician, author of Illustrations of the Huttonian Theory of the Earth.

Allan Ramsay (1686–1758) poet.

Henry Raeburn (1756–1823) portrait painter.

Thomas Reid (1710–1796) philosopher, founder of the Scottish School of Common Sense.

William Robertson (1721–1793) one of the founders of modern historical research.

Sir Walter Scott (1771–1832) lawyer, novelist, poet.

John Sinclair (1754–1835) politician, writer, the first person to use the word statistics in the English language.

William Smellie (1740–1795) editor of the first edition of Encyclopædia Britannica.

Adam Smith (1723–1790) whose The Wealth of Nations was one of the first modern treatises on economics.

Dugald Stewart (1753–1828) moral philosopher.

George Turnbull (1698–1748), theologian, philosopher and writer on education.

John Walker (naturalist) (1730–1803) professor of natural history.

James Watt (1736–1819) student of Joseph Black; engineer, inventor of the Watt steam engine.

Many of these men ended up in Edinburgh, which at that time had about 25,000 people.

Here are some of the main characteristics these men shared.

For one, they got together in clubs in which they could discuss anything. You can't do that today because of PC, and if you form a club your meetings will be attacked by fascists/leftists, who believe in Thoughtcrime. George Orwell predicted this with uncanny accuracy.

What these men were doing is playing (which is a serious thing) and as Stuart Brown and other scholars have proved over and over, play is essential. They also had to engage in what Mihály Csíkszentmihályi called Flow: the "mental state of operation in which a person performing an activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and enjoyment in the process of the activity."

Said Brown about play: "...an adult who has 'lost' what was a playful youth and doesn’t play will demonstrate social, emotional and cognitive narrowing, be less able to handle stress, and often experience a smoldering depression."

The intellectual life of that time revolved around these clubs, which had names such as the Political Economy Club, the Select Society and The Poker Club.

All of these men were the recipients of a liberal education in the original definition, not the modern perverted left-wing one.

What created these men and their accomplishments is freedom. They had the freedom to read any book, to think any thought, to discuss any idea.

If you want to create another Enlightenment the first step is to get rid of the public schools. Children should not be in school for 12 years. There is no reason for it, except for babysitting while their parents slave their lives away. Public school dulls their minds and destroys their creativity and curiosity. They can't follow their own natural interests because sometimes they don't even know what they are. They can't be imaginative (daydreaming) because teachers (education majors have the lowest IQs of all majors) don't understand what is happening.

There is little play and little Flow in the public schools. For all practical purposes, none.

Another eight or more years to get a Ph.D.doesn't help either. These people are schooled but not necessarily educated. All these degrees are filters to get rid of those who aren't drones and grinds.

And, of course, getting together in clubs is essential. It's also essential that these clubs not be attacked in any way.

Since public schools are a large part of the problem, home-schooling is also essential. I'd live in a hobbit-hole in the country that I built myself before I'd send my kids to public schools.

I know enough about myself to know that I am a creative, imaginative, high-IQ introvert. I suspect most of these men, if not all, were the same. Adam Smith, for example, used to go for long walks in the cool of the evening to think and imagine (he once fell into a ditch, as I have).

The only time I enjoyed school was the summer I was in the gifted program, right before I turned 12. Two classes, each about half-an-hour, with a hour break in-between, which I spend in the library. The rest of my school career was a boring semi-prison that I daydreamed away.

The sad fact is, our entire society is set up to prevent another Enlightenment.

The Madonna and the Whore

"Knowing that a woman does not belong on a pedestal is not synonymous with believing that she dwells in a sewer." - Athol Kay

I have pointed out before there are a lot of inaccurate, indeed dangerous, concepts in the Manosphere.

Some of them are the concepts of Alpha/Beta. An Alpha supposedly see the truth about women, that they are hypergamous gold-digging sluts who want "Alpha fux and Beta bux" and who are run by their rationalization hamsters. That they'll always dump their husbands if they can trade up, that they are always attracted to Bad Boys, that they have no self-awareness whatsoever of any of these things.

Betas are supposed to put women on a pedestal and Alphas see them as whores. Even though the "theoreticians" in the Mansphere can't seem to figure it out, these are just the old ideas of the Madonna and the Whore.

The split didn't come from Christianity but was identified by it. I'm sure it was identified before Christianity, since this split is created by our inborn narcissism, i.e., our ability to split people into all good and all bad. Good Madonnas and bad whores.

Our narcissism is what influences us to see ourselves as good and others as bad. What of the worst things about it is that inherent in it is scapegoating, or projection. "Since I am good and you are bad, you are the cause of all my problems, so I will degrade you, humiliate you and often try to kill you."

For women it is supposed to be idealizing Alphas and despising any man who's not. However, that's what men think they are.

The Manosphere hasn't yet figured out how to heal this split because they don't realize it was healed in the past - to the extent it can be healed.

For on thing, there are two "Alphas," not one. The one who sees women as Whores is the Cad, and my experience has been Cads don't even like women. The one who is the Patriarch/Protector is the true Alpha, not the Cad. The term Alpha only confuses. It does not clarify.

One thing figured out by Christianity - and the Hebrews before it - is the meaning of the story of the Garden of Eden. The serpent is a symbol of envy and hate and like all the envious wants to bring the envied down, even if the envier destroys himself.

Adam blames Eve and Eve blames the serpent. It what I mentioned before: it's scapegoating or projection. The denial of self-responsibility and the casting of problems onto innocent people.

The story is telling us that putting someone down is almost always based on envy. Feminism is based on the envy of men, which is why feminism will destroy men even if it destroys itself - which is what it is in the process of doing.

The Cad sees women as whores, which mean they degrade women out of envy of them, and Cads will destroy women even if they destroy themselves - which is what they do.

To the extent the Manosphere puts down women as hypergamous gold-digging Alpha-cock-riding whores, it based on the envy of women and so will destroy them even if it destroys itself. It turns women into whores, and any man who sees women as whores is courting a boatload of psychological problems.

Any man who sees them as Madonnas is also seeking that same boatload.

There is a lot of wisdom in the past. If only people pay attention to it.

Cowardice Is Its Own Punishment

"A coward is much more exposed to quarrels than a man of spirit" - Thomas Jefferson

I didn't learn everything I need to know in kindergarten, but middle-school was pretty close. The one thing I remember more vividly than most everything is that cowardice is is own punishment.

There were three things that happened, and of course I don't remember the sequence. But I think I was 12 when all three occurred.

The first is that I read a story by Gordon R. Dixon called "Call Him Lord." It was about a boy, about 20 I suppose, who was to inherit the mantle of Emperor of the Galaxy. He was sent to be tested by a man who belonged to the family that had tested all the potential emperors for a few hundred years.

The boy turned out to be a bully who attacked the weak but ran from the strong, and in the end the man who tested him had to kill him. When the boy's teacher asked where the boy had failed, the answer was, "Lord, he was a coward."

The boy was a bully, and like all bullies he was a coward. And his cowardice was its own punishment.

The second concerns a boy named Greg. Greg was a genetic catastrophe. He walked with his head sticking forward, sort of hunchbacked I'd say, had grey skin, mousy brown hair, had a mouth than hung open all the time, and had these thick glasses that magnified his eyes and make them fuzzy. Even without all that he would still would not have been good-looking.

I was in the bathroom when a boy I did not know walked in with a big cocky grin on his face. He was followed by Greg and a few other boys.

Apparently the boy with the cocky grin had been picking on Greg and thought he was be easy pickings because of the way he looked.

He wasn't.

The fight seemed to last about five seconds. Greg tried to rip his kid's face off. He made some sort of claw with his hand, got the guy in a headlock - and tried to rip his face off.

The kid collapsed and started begging Greg to leave him alone.

I was impressed.

The third thing that happened concerned a bully named Don. Don made the mistake of picking a fight with a wrestler named Phil, who only weighed maybe 115 pounds.

Phil got Don in the corner and just pounded him. And Don collapsed and started begging, "You kicked my ass! Leave me alone!"

I was impressed.

Since that time, every time I've seen someone stand up to a bully the bully has collapsed. If someone shows spirit the bully will back down. If not, they'll spend years being picked on.

It's doesn't surprise me that one of the Four Cardinal Virtues is Bravery. The other three are Prudence, Justice and Self-Control. If you don't have one of them you don't have any of them.

Bullies lack bravery and so lack the other three. A bully who picks on someone because he thinks they are weak, and finds out they aren't, certainly isn't prudent. Or just. Or has any self-control.

I am, as always, reminded of the scene in The Maltese Falcon when Sam Spade (Humphrey Bogart) needles Wilmer the Gunsel (a tiny man carrying two large .45s) with the comment, "The cheaper the hood the gaudier the patter."

The bigger the blowhard, the bigger the coward.

"This Boat is my Home"

"The mass of men serve the state thus, not as men mainly, but as machines, with their bodies...." ~ Henry David Thoreau

When "Firefy" first appeared on TV in 2002 I missed it completely. I had to buy the series on DVD. Some of the themes in it really struck me.

What impressed me most can be summed up in what Mal Reynolds said about his ship (significantly named "Serenity"): "This boat is my home."

Many of the episodes can be summed up in that comment, because the main themes in the series are about freedom, home, and community. Which is something everyone wants, except the natural-slave types.

The crew members are a family, and they eat communal dinners together. Just as a family is supposed to do. When Jayne Cobb tries to betray the family Mal tosses him in an airlock, intent on dumping him in space, but when Jayne begs, "Don't tell them what I did" (meaning he's concerned, even on the point of death, what the family thinks of him) Mal relents and lets him live.

The cultures on the planets (some cultures, at least) are portrayed as true communities. In one episode River Tamm encounters some people doing an Irish jig and delightedly joins in (why is it every time I see the most fun dancing in a movie they are always doing an Irish jig? - see Soldier and Titanic).

It is significant that River is crazy, because the State fucked up her brain to make her a bioweapon, and at the end of the series she becomes whole, in large part because the members of the ship accepted her into their family.

River is the most intelligent, sensitive and intuitive person on the ship - and she is the one the Alliance went out of its way to destroy.

Joss Whedon said the series was based on Michael Shaara's novel about the Battle of Gettysburg, The Killer Angels, which was the turning point in the War Between the States (if only Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain had realized he was on the wrong, Union side).

For that matter, the bounty hunter in "Firefly" is named Jubal Early.

The Alliance is supposed to represent the North and the Browncoats, the South.

Here's where things get interesting concerning a theme I see all the time: the Machine State versus the Natural State.

The Alliance represents the Machine State and the Browncoats the Natural State. The Alliance is mostly military and everyone dresses the same, since they are cogs in a machine. They aren't free, no more than the stormtroopers in Star Wars are free.

There is little portrayal of any home, family or community in the Alliance, just fear of the meddling State. Mal, a smuggler who bought his ship to escape from the Alliance, kills its agents without a second thought.

Mal is actually a patriarch/protector, and his crew is his family. He is brave, resourceful, and confident.

You can see the same Machine State/Natural State theme in Star Wars, in which Darth Vader, who is half-man/half machine (Joseph Campbell called him "a bureaucrat") represents the Machine State (as does the entire Empire) while the Ewoks represent the Natural State. You can also see it in H.G. Wells' The Time Machine in which the Morlocks represent the Machine State and the Eloi the Natural State.

What the series is telling us is that the purpose of the State is to turn you into a machine and take away your freedom, your home, your community - in fact, to turn you into a replaceable cog in a machine. It means to take away the meaning and importance in your life and replace with allegiance to the State (which the deluded call "patriotism").

Your meaning and purpose becomes what the State says it is - mostly die in wars (see the aforementioned Soldier, with Kurt Russell).

You can apply the Machine State/Natural State theme to everything. Public schools? Cosmodemonic Transnational Megacorporations? Do I really have to explain?

What I will explain is that the State is about fear and slavery, and as Roy Batty told Rick Deckard in Blade Runner, "Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it means to be a slave."

"The family is fundamental; religious affiliation, ethic solidarity and other associations provide emotional support, meaning and interaction/relationship building based on shared experiences and values." - DayKoons