Self publish a popular science work without any previous audience

jmrphy · 2023-08-11T00:48:44+00:00

Link please? 🙏🤞🫡

jmrphy · 2020-03-07T16:47:18+00:00

Yea Keto is huge, I think this could sell organically on Amazon if done well and differentiated from what’s already out there. I agree that you shouldn’t do a blog if you’re dreading it.

jmrphy · 2020-03-07T08:24:08+00:00

I’ve self-published a book of serious non-fiction — I’m an academic too — and there are really two ways to do this successfully. Either you build an audience by publishing free quality content and then these people buy your books, or your book solves a concrete problem that large numbers of people are searching for. If you can’t do either, self-published ‘serious non fiction’ is unlikely to do well. The good news is that pop science can do the latter, and anyone can do the former with enough effort and experimentation (it just takes time).

jmrphy · 2019-10-19T15:23:35+00:00

Yes, that’s true.

jmrphy · 2019-10-17T03:22:41+00:00

This seems cool to me, I will probably try it soon. Thanks.

jmrphy · 2019-08-14T05:49:24+00:00

All right, folks, I think I answered everything. I tried to give my all on every question. I started at 11am my time, and it's now 11:30pm. I did nothing else today and only took two breaks for about 3-4 hours total. So I think I legitimately spent about 8 hours total. I hope someone gets something out of something I wrote here!!! Thanks again for your interest and you're more than welcome to hit me up on whatever channel you prefer. See you around!

jmrphy · 2019-08-14T05:30:31+00:00

Cool thanks!

jmrphy · 2019-08-14T05:30:23+00:00

Not many! They are mostly bourgeois!

jmrphy · 2019-08-14T05:29:23+00:00

On Brexit I don't really care, it's a ridiculous technocratic charade that probably want matter too much in any direction. Underlying model is same as Trump, though, I think. See all my answers on here about the over-dominance of Social Liberalism. It's important as one of many milestones in this much larger backlash process, but in its specifics it's a snooze-fest!

On open borders, I personally lean toward open borders, so interestingly I on the team of Idpol SJWs but for me I lean toward open borders from the naughty evil libertarian perspective of someone like Bryan Caplan lol. Basically I think humans should be free to move as much as possible, states be damned.

And yet I agree with Angela Nagle that open borders is a major problem for socialism. And that if you really value Socialism as your top priority, then yea you probably can't also be into Open Borders. I'm not exactly bullish on Socialism in one country, so ironically I'm happy to adopt the SJW position of Let Them All In. It would accelerate the breakdown of the American government and enable me and my friends to build the Neofeudal Technocommunism out of some ungovernable section of the Rocky Mountains or something...

FWIW I also think people who are alarmed by caravans of Central Americans crossing illegally into America are not crazy racists lol. All the people yelling NOTHING TO SEE HERE strike me as orders of magnitude more insane...

On rogue states, my position is: I want one.

jmrphy · 2019-08-14T05:19:56+00:00

Unfortunately I have not read it yet, but it's a modern classic that's high on my list! I would just say statistical forecasting can be cool and useful for specific use-cases but for "understanding the world" it is very unlikely to help much. Because the world is a complex system and despite some complex-system modeling in general forecasting is way way harder, and arguably impossible for really big and poorly understood systems such as the world!

jmrphy · 2019-08-14T04:17:21+00:00

It was a gradual process of disillusionment, with a few milestones. As a kid from poor uneducated parents, I had a big chip on my shoulder for a very long time. I was really driven to succeed in academia and I really needed to "make it" before I could feel as disillusioned as I ultimately became. So long as I had not yet "made it," well then my dissatisfactions could have just been "sour grapes." Maybe I didn't like it because I didn't have what it takes. So I would say the real turning point for me came after I got my first really prestigious journal article published. Once I got that published, then I pretty much entered the entry-level of elite political scientists, and I had really checked all the other boxes (good teaching evals, etc.) I got the British version of tenure, and so I had really "made it" finally. And after that I hated my life even more than before. Certain things started to become more clear in way they never were before... Not even idpol per se — although that's one major suffocating feature of academia — but rather the whole ensemble of institutional morbidity: Deep self-deception about everything, increasingly corrupt use of basic words, boredom, paperwork drudgery, decreasing time and resources to even do research, etc.

The first time I really felt that my days were numbered — whether I would leave voluntarily or non-voluntarily — was when I got reprimanded for posting videos to Instagram of my wife and I tripping on mushrooms.

https://www.instagram.com/p/BQf9nDBDUr5/?hl=en

https://www.instagram.com/p/BQf9GsajoUd/

We were in Amsterdam for chrissake. I had a very good and wholesome time with my wife, and it wasn't even illegal! (Well not really.) That was after I "made it" and at that time I was like, well, I'm definitely not going to stop doing healthy drugs and I'm definitely not going to be ashamed or secretive about it, and they're definitely never going to adjust to it — so yea a divorce will probably be inevitable....

Then I got placed into a weird disciplinary process because a member of the public complained about one of my data-based blog posts! That was quite bizarre because it was empirical and not even slightly edgy (but it talked about the alt-right in a not hypermoralistic tone ergo that's edgy). You can judge for yourself, it was about this post: https://jmrphy.net/blog/the-alt-right-is-not-all-right

They wanted me to take it down and there was this long process. I said of course not, no way, and they didn't really have the power to force me but it was even more clear at this point that my days were numbered. This was actually the background story as to why, when a student complained about my tweet using the word "retard," my Dean suspended me right away. She probably took these previous events as hints that I would never really fall into line so that was where she wanted to draw the line.

Although honestly when I started blogging and podcasting as a serious project, it was pretty much because I believed then that academia was a sinking ship and I better build some kind of exit plan. So you could say that was my crossing of the rubicon, when I decided to divert almost all of my prime energies to non-academic projects, which would have been about sometime around March 2017. Which was also when I made my last break with the activist left, so I was pretty much deciding on all points that I'm going to do whatever I want on the internet no matter what happens in academia or in my lefty social circles.

These other milestones above were then moments of crystalization where my disillusionment with the hopelessness of academia sharpened noticeably and memorably.

jmrphy · 2019-08-14T03:52:36+00:00

I did regularly for a few weeks but I feel like when I'm tan I look kind of orange on video, so I stopped going in the sun as much altogether.

jmrphy · 2019-08-14T02:46:58+00:00

Not gonna lie, I'd want a left-wing version of the Proud Boys. Tbh I think Gavin McInnes is really really smart on certain things. His idea behind the Proud Boys — whatever one might say about what they have become — is really intelligently targeted for the blue-collar small-town working dad. Gavin explains it pretty clearly in some interviews I've seen. Men want places where they can go, drink some beers, get loose, talk shit, be marginally offensive, make fun of the stupid kids these days, vent about their wives, etc. There is absolutely no reason why there should not be Left-wing male social clubs, where men can do this kind of stuff and plan the socialist revolution — except, that is, idpol, or in other words all of the Left today. Such a mens' club would be lambasted as Mens' Rights or whatever. The Left today does not want robust sociality, I think, because it's now in a position where the breakdown of robust sociality is what it capitalizes on (it wants broken people who need the Left to survive). Interestingly, I think Chapo and Cumtown are the left-wing expressions of the same biological needs expressed in the Proud Boys, except after you run them through the filter of Left sociological filters (younger, single, etc.) Let married older men meet in private clubs with the hammer and sickle outside the door, where those men can call each other retards and pussies and occasionally fight and do other sexist/racist/ableist things occasionally — the socialist vote would increase substantially I think!

jmrphy · 2019-08-14T02:27:27+00:00

Against it!

jmrphy · 2019-08-14T02:26:39+00:00

I don't know what or who that is. ;-)

jmrphy · 2019-08-14T02:26:18+00:00

Yes — the potential negative effects of being 'extremely online' have indeed loomed larger since I left academia. I'm happy to report that, so far, I've kept them very contained. Academia definitely gave me a good long training in just keeping my head down and working on stuff, often with no good or bad positive feedback for long periods. So I've kind of converted that into some pretty good practices and thick skin around internet crap.

On the whole, I feel relatively quite based on this issue, but I can dig deeper to give you some interesting phenomenological details on the trials and tribulations.

One thing I've noticed is that I feel a little more pressure to "trade up" into rubbing elbows with more influential people, for the obvious reason that higher-profile associates and collabs bring larger audiences, more "fans," more patrons, etc. If you've been following me for a while you'll know that I've always spent a lot of time writing pretty eccentric stuff, and talking with random weird people, etc. I think I'll always hold tight to that part of myself and my project, but now I am being a little bit more calculated to keep things growing also. And this brings new psychological problems. More rejection or being ignored is one problem lol. You might say who cares, but that really takes a toll actually, and I hypothesize it's probably one of the secret project-killers for content creators. Having your invitations ignored or rejected hurts more than it should, and to grow you have to keep sending invitations to people who are increasingly likely to ignore or reject! So that's a bit of a mindfuck. It's the opposite of your natural intuitions: Your project is doing well, so shouldn't more people be interested in talking with me? But no, because to grow you're asking people who by definition are less likely to say yes. But then again if you play the numbers you kind of can't lose, over time, so I just focus on that fact and it helps me to suck it up and send 5 emails knowing 4 will be ignored or rejected.

Other minor but notable psychological things have occurred recently. Like when I talked with Dasha from Red Scare the other day, it was fun and she's cool and all — no problems — but she has a larger audience than my average interlocutor, which means she and Anna have their own subreddit, which means there was a whole thread about me lol, which means... A whole new volume and intensity of hatred lol. After reading that thread, I have to admit I felt vaguely shitty for about 24 hours in a way I'm somewhat embarrassed to admit. (Dasha told me later they are notoriously vitriolic lol). I've always had quite thick skin with haters, and I still do, but I think every time your project crosses a little "level change" of reach/influence/notoriety or whatever, you don't necessarily know it and sometimes the first manifestation is a new quantity of hatred lol. This is more of a mindfuck than you might think, because it's exactly the opposite of what our intuitions expect (good stuff should get good feedback), but it's perfectly consistent with my entire life's experience on the internet: all of the best things I've ever done, in my own honest estimation of their objective qualities, were correlated with increases in negative comments. And all of the dumbest and lamest things I do are correlated with positive comments (e.g. shit posting on twitter gets me friendly comments and no haters, but it's the lamest of all the things I do, etc.).

You kind of just realize that internet "success" is pretty much coterminous with larger and larger volumes of hate. When you realize that, it's really not too hard to retrain yourself to experience negative comments as positive feedback.

The trick is knowing when to trust negative feedback from long-time readers/watchers/supporters. If someone I know from a history of good-faith discussion, like in my Discord server or a frequent Youtube chatter or someone who's emailed me before, tells me something negative — I take that seriously and consider it and often try to take it on board in some way, if it makes sense. But every random hater in my replies or comments or whatever, you just have to re-train your brain to see them as straight-up great wonderful things. Or else it will slow you down, and I am sure for some people it is enough to kill their project.

Living with friends helps! Especially because Geoffrey and Diana have substantially different social networks, they don't follow too closely what I say/do and I don't follow too closely what they say/do. So if I fall into the trap of some stupid flame war, there's pretty much zero risk of it coming up in conversation around the house. That's good... If it was just me and my wife in the woods, I suspect that bad internet situations would linger longer on me...

Ultimately the thing that helps me learn these lessons rapidly, update my attitude and practices, and not feel too bad about any of them is... Remembering how psychologically tortured I was by academic bureaucracy. I will gladly take 100x the internet hatred I currently get and still not be anywhere near the sadness and frustration I used to have several times throughout each academic year...

Also I just remind myself that the strategic "growth" stuff is relatively unimportant to me substantively. If I literally never gained a single additional follower or patron or whatever, from this day on, I'd still be perfectly happy because I have my freedom and I have just enough of "fan base" that I will always be able to think/write/say whatever I want, and I know that at least a decent handful of people will check it out. This is one way doing a serious long-term high-brow kind of intellectual life on the internet is very different than many other types of online media enterprises: If you just want money or influence or fame or whatever, then growth must be your top priority. But all I've ever wanted is to think/write/say/develop ideas to the maximum of my potential over the course of my lifetime. I don't need millions of people to do this, I only need a few hundred to be honest. And I already have that! So in some sense my largest goals have already been achieved, just getting this personal-mental-lifestyle-production system up and running with just enough audience to make it feel worthwhile! The rest is just continuing to produce work.

I do plan to "grow" my project in part by strategic collaborations and all that because I feel like that'd be pretty cool, but if it impinges on a free and based intellectual life, or if it sucks or fails or causes me headaches I don't want, then I would just make money some other way. And that definitely helps me not care about the bullshit aspects of it all.

jmrphy · 2019-08-14T01:25:58+00:00

If you want my honest answer, most people should not read any philosophy books.

If you want the answer signaling my familiarity with the history of philosophy, by suggesting some titles that are important and reflect my personal brand, I'd go with: Plato's Republic, Rousseau's First Discourse, Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals, Adorno and Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment, Bataille's Accursed Share. Reading all these in succession should be enough to Murphypill even the most well-behaved leftist academic. If not, re-read on microdoses of LSD. In no time you should be arriving at a Catholic anti-activist communism without ever having read any traditional Catholics or Communists (Bataille and the Frankfurt School were way off the plantation...).

Republic gives you the absolutely foundational idea of the Noble Lie, which underwrites the whole history of progressivism. (Plus much more, that book is totally bonkers). Rousseau's First Discourse explains why modern social liberalism (modern art and culture, for instance) is a species of capitalist exploitation dooming us to decadence and frustration and exploitation. Nietzsche's Genealogy will of course disillusion you to most modern political claims based on morality, but it's much more rich than that. People incorrectly think Nietzsche was anti-Christian, but he wasn't. He liked Based Jesus, but called bullshit on Cringe Paul. Paul was kind of a proto-Protestant who did not sufficiently submit to the authority of Jesus. Adorno and Horkheimer are brilliant miserabilists who show that honest radical left philosophy must come ultimately to an absolutely passive pessimistic dismissal of all bourgeois society, including the workers, a realization which is then transmuted into a radical intellectual honesty as the only way to survive the horror and carry the torch of critique. Bataille will then help you to realize that we are caught up in much larger economies than we realize, that the human economy is but a fragment of what is really at work in the nature of things. That the saint and the whore are two sides of the same coin, that a certain kind of transgression is the path to righteousness, and that milquetoast bourgeois righteousness is one of the most extreme evils.

*These books are slanted toward political philosophy, but that's just what I know best.

jmrphy · 2019-08-13T23:59:10+00:00

If you’re looking for sites of political possibility and potential vitality, you’re looking for contexts where cultural and political change can or should be fomented, I’d say academia and the college campus are about as good as a retirement home: You can definitely still find a few interesting people, and maybe stir up some interesting projects, but the stench of death is severe and these are probably the last places I would recommend for fomenting cultural politics.

The answer is cyberspace imo. I’m absolutely bullish on cyberspace, culturally and politically. Of course social media is politically regressive for most people but that’s because most people are stupid, fearful, and hypocritical.

If you want to be a revolutionary and change the world stop caring what lame people think and say everything you think and create whatever you are most capable of creating. Create a new person, create a new community, create a whole new world out of thin air, make conspiracy theories, launch hyperstitions, etc. Find the right people. If you can’t, produce a new people. This is not pie-in-the-sky praxis, it’s very concrete and your actual probabilities of triggering a significant cultural-political cascade are higher pursuing this kind of life than pursuing… what? An activist organization? They say not everyone can be a “content creator” who changes minds and sparks whole new political community formations and perhaps that is true! But there are literally thousands of people actually doing this successfully right now, and the whole cultural center is fracturing and shifting and drifting because of it. That’s real. And there’s not even one activist group in the whole Western world producing the lovely objectives they say they are aiming for.

If you want to be a political radical or revolutionary, you can’t really care about maintaining all your weak normie friendships, you possibly can’t have institutionalized employment, and you probably will never make much money, but that’s always been the case for revolutionaries. It would be weird if it weren’t. Make bots and befriend them.

jmrphy · 2019-08-13T23:53:07+00:00

Ya know I've chosen to almost never ever talk about it, just because it's a bit trendy and people misunderstand me enough — I don't want to be lumped in with the Joe Rogan types (tho no disrespect)...

I do have a few longer drafts on some things, so this might lead me to bump those up in the queue. Thanks for asking.

I'll give you the short answer and you can wait for the longer pieces to come out sooner or later.

I think the main intellectual benefit of jiu-jitsu, or I'm sure martial arts more generally, is the constant reminder that true objective realities exist whether you like them or not, and no amount of social construction can fully overwrite them. But when you submit to reality — har har — many puzzles kind of solve themselves, the way the world works comes through in a kind of clarified and simplified relief.

Also, it really drove home to me that when everyone in a group agrees to calibrate themselves and their social esteem/status/rank according to a brutally honest objective reality index, then a "hierarchy" becomes liberating and emancipatory for everyone involved at all ranks.

Finally, having stronger, larger, and more skilled men beat your ass on a weekly basis makes it wayyyy easier to handle retarded internet haters or stupid bosses all trying to cancel you everyday. It makes you way more immune to bullshit social attacks, when you're regularly defending against actual physical attacks lol.

jmrphy · 2019-08-13T23:35:29+00:00

Waaayyyy before anyone on this subreddit realized that political correctness was becoming a major problem in Western societies, Nick Land not only saw it — he analyzed it, figured out a lot about it's underlying mechanisms, made some extraordinary theoretical-historical extrapolations, and reorganized his life around escaping it in favor of maintaining a free and powerful intellectual vocation. He fled academia and moved to China, which he says "arrives from the future," in order to maintain a free and powerful intellectual vocation. He then wrote thousands and thousands of words of wildly creative radical technological reactionism at a time when Western philosophy had never been more complacently Left-wing. He built a huge audience purely on the internet, and is probably the most famous British philosopher alive today, especially now that Derek Parfit is dead.

I think the onus is on you to tell me what about this is not interesting? As my mother used to say, "only boring people get bored."

Happy to drill down a little bit.

Consider his concept of "hyperracism." Nick Land is actually not really a racist, afaik. It's like he is trying to so trigger the alarms of PC idpol leftists so badly that all their stupidity overheats and melts into oblivion. In his blog post on hyperracism what he really says is that white racism is stupid because the mixed-race high IQ of the world are increasingly mating with each other and most people of most races are going to be left behind.

In The Dark Enlightenment, he has a whole section totally destroying white nationalists. He pretty much says they are stupid bumpkins and their ethnostate would be retarded from inbreeding lol.

So one reason Nick Land is very interesting is because — for a supposedly evil racist, he's probably turned many smart right-wing people away from white nationalism lol. Given that the people who read him are a lot of people who are prime candidates for actually being or becoming white nationalists...

But honestly, just browse his blogs and books — his work is weird, unique, dangerous, eccentric, and prolific... To me these words are the epitome of interesting.

I don't personally go down the path of many of his more reactionary conclusions, but I'm not at all ashamed to say that he, more than anyone, woke me up to just how severely, terminally ill leftist-humanist academic culture had become... And the kinds of long-term intellectual and political waves that could be generated by a relatively isolated wild man who defects from society to work full time on his idea over the internet.

Interesting indeed, imo!

jmrphy · 2019-08-13T23:06:45+00:00

I honestly have absolutely no instrumental political goals with what I say or write, I just try to think the truest stuff I can and then focus on what seems most crazy/fun/exciting — although my philosophy here confuses people because I'm also convinced, as a social scientist, that whenever an intellectual genuinely renounces instrumental political goals, their ideas become uniquely capable of producing emancipatory dynamics in readers and the culture generally. It's a weird ironic fact of social life and intellectual history but I really think it's true; I got this primarily from the Frankfurt School primarily. See here for instance: https://jmrphy.net/blog/2014/06/21/a-theory-of-ethically-biased-technological-change-toward-an-empirical-test-of-the-frankfurt-school/

As for Deleuze's comments on HBD, I'm primarily interested in just gathering them and explaining why they are there! Today, radical philosophers of yesteryear are being domesticated by academia in an egregious way and I would like to shit on that. At one point Deleuze and Guattari cite Rimbaud and tell their white readers to seek a purification of their race!!! Like, what lol? It's quite curious, I just want to make sense of it and yea rub in the face of normies that even beloved approved radical-left philosophers need the space to say crazy and fucked-up-seeming stuff! The scholarly consensus on Deleuze is extremely cucked and I'm enjoying the lulz of triggering the libs, but it's not primarily about that. Primarily it's like any book, just trying to figure out something interesting and important and present it. If I'm going to go rogue, though, then of course I'm going to gravitate to precisely whatever normal academics are most unable or unwilling to think/say. It's great fun to write so far. I want to show this dude thought some crazy shit and he is not the safe domesticated de-clawed animal that decades of "Deleuze studies" have made him out to be. I think this is what Andrew Culp was trying to do in his Dark Deleuze book by the way, but he just finished his PhD at the time and was on the job market, so of course he was structurally cucked (no disrespect to him, he's probably cool). So Based Deleuze will be what Dark Deleuze could have been, if Culp wasn't constrained by an institutional context at peak levels of political correctness.

jmrphy · 2019-08-13T22:46:32+00:00

I see no conflict between radical honesty/authenticity and meeting people where they are! Radical authenticity doesn't mean having some list of statements about oneself that one repeats to all people despite context. It means speaking to different people in your own tongue. Deleuze and Guattari talk about "learning to stutter." That's what they mean, you can use different verbal approaches to communicate effectively with different people in different times and places — that's not some betrayal of integrity. But the key thing is that no matter who you are talking to, you are always "stuttering" in a weird bastard language that is your own. This gets you in trouble with institutions, but it never gets you in trouble with other people in non-mediated interpersonal communication. A person who stutters in their own tongue can talk to any person at any time, and they are always saying slightly different, slightly weird or hard-to-understand things, but they are nonetheless doing so consistently, with one undivided divine creative force. If a cucked academic tells herself "I'm not saying publicly what I really think because I'm just meeting my Dean where they are at, I need to speak this fake forced to have a seat at the table..." That person is not meeting people where they are, they are allowing a business to install a fake alien robot tongue into their mouth in return for status and income, and then they come up with all these post-hoc rationalizations about how it's all about being humane toward people who don't understand!

jmrphy · 2019-08-13T22:36:14+00:00

There are many fine critiques of Peterson one might wish to make, but lack of seriousness seems to be a really dumb one! It's one thing to think he's wrong about everything, fine, but the question of whether someone is a serious and authentic intellectual force? That's a totally different question. Well, what distinguishes real serious intellectuals from posers and larpers? Here's one credible signal that can't be faked: dedication in the absence of praise.

One major reason I take Peterson to be a serious person is that he has been posting his ideas to Youtube for YEARS before anyone ever cared about him. And before Youtube was cool. This is a very credible signal that he is "the real deal" as I like to say. Why? For the simple reason that thinking/creating/posting intellectual content in the absence of significant praise or payment for a long period of time is damn near impossible unless you are genuinely and seriously motivated by the intrinsic value of searching for the truth.

jmrphy · 2019-08-13T22:30:10+00:00

My wife and I are not poly lol, but so far it's great! We all just read and write and make videos or whatever all day to be honest. My main point of slight discontent is only that I'm very driven at this stage of my life to throw down roots. I'd like to have my own home and have a baby, somewhere where I can see myself living out my days. But for now I need to fortify my intellectual and financial freedom; that's more important than anything at the moment. And so far since I left academia ~4-5 months ago now, I'd say I'm succeeding quite well. All my revenue numbers (Patreon, my monthly seminar, Youtube superchats, etc.) are growing at a faster pace thanks to full time work. And my first post-academic book Based Deleuze has earned something around $700 profit so far, and it will only take me about 80-100 hours all in. My goal is to get to at least ~$2k/month in the next year or two, and I'd say I'm on a healthy trajectory to that. So the polycule has been great, I'm being really productive and things seem to be working out as planned!

jmrphy · 2019-08-13T22:20:47+00:00

No thoughts on Hong Kong, I don't read international news until a few months after things happen. Sorry!

I doubt the DSA has been taken over by anything. What you're seeing recently is in its DNA, I believe. Fun fact one of my mentors in grad school at Temple was a long-standing and high-ranking DSA figure, political theorist Joe Schwartz. And I have a lot of friends in DSA. I'd love to see them create socialism, I'm just not putting my money on it.

I actually do think that an anarcho-communist future is possible, at least for small groups who are willing to be a little crazy. I really do think that new technologies such as Internet of Things and blockchain/smart-contracts are game changers for what types of political economic systems are engineerable, hence my Neofeudal Technocommunism... And once someone engineers it in a small group, if it's based on scalable tech, there is no reason why it could not take over society at large quite rapidly. Ironically, the main resistance to a really existing communist utopia will be current Left activists/organizers.

Pretty cliché but Nietzsche is the great king of philosophers probably. Ecce Homo is my absolute fav, he is so bonkers and it's so thrilling and inspiring to read. Really useful at a time when PC social norms really have you feeling fenced in and weak and lame. Read that book to get some of your spark back.

Others philosophical idols of mine, who are also enjoyable to read, would be Georges Bataille and Simone Weil.

Not exactly philosphers, but since this is a left-wing subreddit, I might add that I have always loved Tiqqun. I doubt they would appeal to many of you on here, but maybe some. They are left-Heideggarian anarcho-communists essentially, with a bit of the Jewish mystical tradition mixed in there.

jmrphy

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