Table Of ContentFOREWORD (in two parts) BY AN ANONYMOUS FELLOW, June 2020
Part 1 – Brief introduction and rationale.
This 2016 book by Mark Manson has been slightly re-edited by an Anonymous Fellow. It is a useful
book, with some decent thinking about the woes of our current culture and how one might better deal
with them, some excellent practical advice for acting and thinking a little more wisely and responsibly,
and so on. Unfortunately, apart from the fact that it also contains a lot of happy-clappy nonsense, much
of it is very badly written. It sets one’s teeth grinding with its revoltingly trendy, mass-market style, and
it seems that the author and publishers are convinced that absolutely nobody will read the book unless
it is stuffed with vulgarity and thuggish manners of expression from the first page to the very last. The
word f*** for example is used as often as fanatic Muslim terrorists say bismillah [‘in the name of
Allah’] and Allah akhbar, and seems to serve much the same purpose – that is, to announce that
whatever accompanies it is to be taken like, really really serious, dude.
The word shit is also grossly overused, but generally, people find it a bit less offensive. In any case, I
have changed all instances of f*** to frig, and many instances of shit to shite, which I hope most
readers (at least outside the British Isles) will find less unpleasant. (I hope the occasional use of bullshit
in Part 2 of this foreword will be acceptable; it really is the perfect word for certain things.)
I have also changed instances of tasteless, politically correct, generic ‘she’ back to good old-fashioned
‘he,’ as in something like, “A person with a plan becomes a bit more serious, as he now has a purpose.”
I encourage all of you to learn document-editing software and do the same whenever you have the
opportunity.
Much of the book is still vulgar, tasteless, and revoltingly trendy in all the worst senses of that word,
because it is evident that the author and publishers are vulgar, tasteless, and revoltingly trendy. A
complete rewrite would be necessary to totally remove the stink of the common herd, and the book is
certainly not worth that kind of time. But if you hold your nose, I hope you will find my small effort
here less annoying than the original.
I find a great deal of the content of this book objectionable, and the concluding chapter (no. 9) contains
the worst offenses against rationality. My research and criticisms appear below in Part 2.
Perhaps the most charitable view of this book’s nauseating style is that the aim is honestly to get the
message across to the greatest number of readers possible. For myself, I suppose some might find me a
bit of an educated snob, but I would not attempt to deny this book’s genuinely valuable wisdom to
anyone. What is more, I need the advice in this book as badly as any uneducated, maladjusted
troublemaker you’ve ever met. I have only tried to make this book a touch less off-putting to those with
a bit of culture, many of whom simply cannot stand the ways in which ordinary people of our time
express and entertain themselves; and this overall poor taste extends, nowadays, right up to where it
pervades much of the middle class.
Part 2 – My comments and opinions. [Who am I and why am I writing this? Let me simply say that I
have pretty much the same outlook as the great George Carlin. His Preface to his 1997 book Brain
Droppings is one of the best things he ever wrote, and I have reproduced it at the end of these
comments, in an Appendix.]
I think that anyone who wants to start reading The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*** (hereafter TSA)
from a really sober, rational, and mature perspective should first read two books by South African
philosopher David Benatar: Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence (2006)
and The Human Predicament: A Candid Guide to Life's Biggest Questions (2017). This will help train a
brave reader to more efficiently detect and destroy Oprah’s (oops, I mean, Manson’s) unconquerable-
Jedi-spirit-warrior bullshit which, despite his claims to the contrary, forms the intended core message of
this book, as is made crystal clear in the wretched final chapter. Even for those who don’t fully accept
Benatar’s ideas, I still believe the only realistic, feasible aim that any genuinely honest and principled
self-help book should have is the same as that described back in 1895 by Sigmund Freud as the best
that could be hoped for from therapy (my emphasis):
…much will be gained if we succeed in transforming your hysterical misery into common unhappiness. With a
mental life that has been restored to health, you will be better armed against that unhappiness.
(from Studies on Hysteria)
The REAL Ernest Becker
The second section of Chapter 9, "Something Beyond Ourselves," begins with a brief overview of
anthropologist Ernest Becker’s career and of his 1973 book, The Denial of Death. I despised almost all
of this chapter for various reasons, but I will limit my comments to things connected with Becker.
Something told me I should look into him more deeply, especially after I read Manson’s assertion that
the Pulitzer-Prize-winning DoD
[became] one of the most influential intellectual works of the twentieth century, shaking up the fields of
psychology and anthropology, while making profound philosophical claims that are still influential today.
(TSA, Ch. 9)
Ernest Becker was never a scientist. He was an academic anthropologist, which means that he read a lot
of books, chatted with a lot of people – including the occasional real scientist –, took long walks
pondering the meaning of life, probably watched a lot of documentary films, and wrote a lot of stuff.
He is given a cold shoulder by the scientific community, and that includes psychologists who take a
firmly scientific approach to their discipline; unfortunately, many so-called ‘psychologists’ are and
have always been purveyors of intellectual trash, as may be easily seen from any issue of Psychology
Today past or present. I mention all this because DoD (The Denial of Death) wants very much to be
taken with the same seriousness as real science, but it mainly deals with ‘the meaning of life,’ which is
a topic that scientists avoid like the plague for the sake of their professional reputations; and the
principal writers Becker cites are psychologists. (It is still worth a quick read, however; you can find it
on archive.org – make sure to get the 1997 edition with added foreword by Sam Keen.)
According to one Jack Martin of the Department of Psychology at Simon Fraser University,
During [Becker’s] lifetime and after his death, he and his work have been mostly ignored by
psychologists. Such neglect is perhaps understandable in that Becker was a cultural anthropologist by
formal education, and his somewhat unique blend of social pragmatic, analytic, and existential thought
never held much interest for mainstream scientific psychologists.
Martin adds, in a footnote,
The website of the Ernest Becker Foundation (http://www.earnestbecker.org/) describes Becker’s
intellectual career “as a quest to come to terms with what is enduring in the philosophical anthropology of
Freud and Marx.” Although overly simplified, this description itself is enough to send most psychologists
in search of cover.
(Martin, 2012)
Ernest Becker’s little fan club may be convinced that he wrote “one of the most influential intellectual
works of the twentieth century” and so on, but few others have been. As for Pulitzer Prizes, I invite you
to look at the lists and note the goodly number of goofball winners and nominees (Ta-Nehisi Coates,
Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou, etc.)
In fact there is another aspect to Becker which is even more repellent to anyone who believes in the
value of a genuinely rational outlook on things, as we shall see.1
I started off by reading the final section of DoD. Right away, on page 256, I found the most refreshing
bit of wisdom from Sigmund Freud, who wrote the following when he was 62:
... I have found little that is "good" about human beings on the whole. In my experience most of them are trash, no
matter whether they publicly subscribe to this or that ethical doctrine or none at all. .. . If we are to talk of ethics, I
subscribe to a high ideal from which most of the human beings I have come across depart most lamentably.
(Freud, correspondence of Sept. 10, 1918)
Amusingly, Becker doesn’t like this one bit, and writes a lot of complex stuff attacking Freud for his
elitism. But he doesn’t actually attempt to refute the point. It must have haunted him, however, or he
would simply not have mentioned it; and most interestingly, he is totally silent concerning the far more
notorious comment that Freud made about ‘common unhappiness’ reproduced above.
Here is the context of the ‘trash’ quote: Freud was corresponding with a preacher, one O. Pfister, about
a book that Pfister was about to publish and had allowed Freud to read. Some letters had already passed
between the two when Freud wrote to Pfister:
I have now read through your little book…[some politely favorable comments follow, then:] Well, praise can
always be brief, but criticism has to be more long-winded. One thing I dislike is your objection to my ‘sexual
theory and my ethics.’ The latter I grant you; ethics are remote from me, and you are a minister of religion. I do not
break my head very much about good and evil, but I have found little that is "good" about human beings on the
whole. In my experience most of them are trash, no matter whether they publicly subscribe to this or that ethical
doctrine or none at all. That is something that you cannot say aloud, or perhaps even think, though your
experiences of life can hardly have been different from mine. If we are to talk of ethics, I subscribe to a high ideal
from which most of the human beings I have come across depart most lamentably.
The above makes clear that Freud was talking specifically about the ethical thinking and behavior of
human beings, and giving his general evaluation after four decades of professional and personal
observations. Personally, I would be very surprised if a man who wrote such a thing would have
anything good to say about ‘human beings on the whole,’ but I have not read all of Freud; and it is
worth bearing in mind that from time to time, he may have found it expedient to flatter the masses.
A search of DoD finds 556 occurrences of Freud, which might alarm anyone who knows how deeply
discredited the great man’s kookier teachings – that is, the psychoanalytical voodoo of Oedipal
complexes, ridiculous dream interpretations, phallic symbols, etc. etc. – have become since his death in
1 Becker was working on a follow-up book when he died; it was completed by his wife and publisher and appeared in
1974 as Escape from Evil, and it may be safely ignored.
1939. By 1974, when Becker – a noted ‘post-Freudian’ – died, the kooky stuff was just starting to
become embarrassing. There are tens of thousands of pages by Freud on other matters, however, and he
still stands as one of the great observers of and wise commenters on homo sapiens.
I happen to agree completely with Freud’s judgement, and I have long accepted that I myself am the
kind of worthless trash that Freud had in mind. But it’s a harsh word (and none of the German words
for ‘trash’ seem any less harsh). How about simply coming to terms with the idea that you are of
precisely no more worth than any of the billions of forgotten, utterly inconsequential people who have
ever lived or will live? That only the tiniest fraction of human beings are even the least bit special –
and that you are certainly not one of them? It’s the truth; and it’s a bit less nasty-sounding than ‘trash.’
The very final paragraphs of DoD flit confusingly around one of history’s oldest designs for controlling
societies: the Noble Lie. Wikipedia’s entry on the topic has a perfectly adequate definition which I urge
you to memorize:
In politics, a noble lie is a myth or untruth, often, but not invariably, of a religious nature, knowingly propagated by
an elite to maintain social harmony or to advance an agenda. The noble lie is a concept originated by Plato as
described in the Republic.
Authoritarians of all stripes – religious, political, etc. – absolutely love this idea and have always put it
into practice with bloodthirsty enthusiasm, as everyone knows. That is perhaps the reason why Becker
broaches the topic so gingerly. He cites thinkers, whom he obviously respects very much, who are
pretty clearly recommending this sort of thing (my emphases):
Modern man is drinking and drugging himself out of awareness, or he spends his time shopping, which is the same
thing. As awareness calls for types of heroic dedication that his culture no longer provides for him, society
contrives to help him forget. Or, alternatively, he buries himself in psychology in the belief that awareness all by
itself will be some kind of magical cure for his problems. But psychology was born with the breakdown of shared
social heroisms; it can only be gone beyond with the creation of new heroisms that are basically matters of
belief and will, dedication to a vision. [Robert Jay Lifton, in his 1968 book Revolutionary Immortality: Mao Tse-
Tung and the Chinese Cultural Revolution] has recently concluded the same thing, from a conceptual point of view
almost identical to Rank's. When a thinker of Norman Brown's stature wrote his later book Love's Body, he was led
to take his thought to this same point. He realized that the only way to get beyond the natural contradictions of
existence was in the time-worn religious way: to project one's problems onto a god-figure, to be healed by an
all-embracing and all-justifying beyond. ...[Otto Rank] saw that the orientation of men has to be always beyond
their bodies, has to be grounded in healthy repressions, and toward explicit immortality-ideologies, myths of
heroic transcendence.
(Becker 1973, pp. 284-285)
You don’t have to be a Christian to see the wisdom of the saying, popularly (but incorrectly) attributed
to G.K. Chesterton: “The first effect of not believing in God is to believe in anything.”2 In other words,
when the masses stop believing in God, they will instead believe in any other kind of nonsense,
including potentially dangerous nonsense. Remember that great old saying, “The devil you know is
better than the devil you don’t.” I am an atheist myself, but I surely do like the idea of the ignorant
masses going back to the good old days of being firmly controlled by the Church – as long as they all
left me alone, of course. Oh well.
2 It seems that Chesteron never wrote any such thing, although his writings strongly suggest he would have agreed with
the idea. A full and fascinating account of how this saying came to be firmly thought of as Chesterton’s is here:
https://www.chesterton.org/ceases-to-worship/
Speaking of dangerous nonsense, it is well known that the Communist Mao Tse-Tung’s use of ‘new
heroisms that are basically matters of belief and will’ was of the greatest use in convincing people to
help him to murder tens of millions of innocent Chinese, either directly or through starvation, because
he felt they might be in his way. You may have heard of such other Noble Lie virtuosos as Stalin,
Hitler, Pol Pot, Francisco Franco, the Catholic Church, the government of North Korea, and various
historical Caliphates to name a few; and I hope you also see that whether or not the lie’s purveyors
believe in it themselves is really of negligible practical or ethical significance. When they do believe it,
perhaps one could describe the situation as “the Noble Universally-Endorsed Bullshit Which
Conveniently Keeps the Elite in Power.”3
Becker’s book first appeared in 1973, but a twenty-fifth anniversary edition was brought out in 1997
with a new foreword by his old friend, writer Sam Keen. A careful reader, once having gone through
the austere and mostly sober-sounding DoD, will notice something rather odd about this foreword,
particularly this passage (my emphases):
Becker, like Socrates, advises us to practice dying. Cultivating awareness of our death leads to
disillusionment, loss of character armor, and a conscious choice to abide in the face of terror. The
existential hero who follows this way of self-analysis differs from the average person in knowing that
he/she is obsessed. Instead of hiding within the illusions of character, he sees his impotence and
vulnerability. The disillusioned hero rejects the standardized heroics of mass culture in favor of cosmic
heroism in which there is real joy in throwing off the chains of uncritical, self-defeating dependency
and discovering new possibilities of choice and action and new forms of courage and endurance.
Living with the voluntary consciousness of death, the heroic individual can choose to despair or to
make a Kierkegaardian leap and trust in the "sacrosanct vitality of the cosmos," in the unknown
god of life whose mysterious purpose is expressed in the overwhelming drama of cosmic evolution.
(DoD, Foreword by Sam Keen, p. xv)
Cosmic heroism? Sacrosanct vitality of the cosmos? Unknown god of life whose mysterious purpose is
expressed in the overwhelming drama of cosmic evolution? If that sort of thing doesn’t sound like a
whopping new quasi-religious Noble Lie to you, then you have no business reading this.
How on Earth did Keen manage to pull this wild medicine-man’s magic-mushroom dream out of
Becker’s writings? Further investigation led to the answer. As he mentions in the 1997 foreword, Keen
(who really is, as you might suspect by now, some kind of neo-religious bastard) privately interviewed
the cancer-stricken Becker just days before his death in 1974; he then published the results in
Psychology Today as "The heroics of every day life: A conversation with Ernest Becker by Sam Keen."
Becker finally revealed what had really been motivating his life’s work. Here are the money quotes:
Becker: As far as my work is concerned, I think its major thrust is in the direction of creating a merger of science
and the religious perspective. I want to show that if you get an accurate scientific picture of the human condition, it
coincides exactly with the religious understanding of human nature.....I think I have delivered the science of man
over to a merger with theology.
Keen: ....Your personal philosophy of life seems to be a stoic form of heroism.
Becker: Yes, though I would add the qualification that I believe in God…. What makes dying easier is to be able to
transcend the world into some kind of religious dimension. I would say that the most important thing is to know
that beyond the absurdity of one's life, beyond the human viewpoint, beyond what is happening to us, there is the
3 Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man and Age of Reason contain especially well-written condemnations of that enemy of
liberty, the church established by law.
fact of the tremendous creative energies of the cosmos that are using us for some purposes we don't know. To be
used for divine purposes, however we may be misused, this is the thing that consoles. I think of Calvin [John
Calvin 1509 - 1564] when he says, 'Lord, thou bruises me, but since it is You, it is all right.' I think one does, or
should try to, just hand over one's life, the meaning of it, the value of it, the end of it. This has been the most
important to me. I think it is very hard for secular men to die.
…I came out of a Jewish tradition but I was an atheist for many years. I think the birth of my first child [nine years
previously], more than anything else, was the miracle that woke me up to the idea of God, seeing something pop in
from the void and seeing how magnificent it was, unexpected, and how much beyond our powers and our ken. But
I don't feel more religious because I am dying. I would want to insist that my wakening to the divine had to do with
the loss of character armor…. When you finally break through your character armor and discover your
vulnerability, it becomes impossible to live without massive anxiety unless you find a new power source. And this
is where the idea of God comes in.
(Keen, 1974)
Conclusion: Becker was another religious bastard, and he wasn’t even all that “neo” about it.
Manson may or may not have read the deathbed interview, but it doesn’t make any difference. It is
obvious enough that he got absolutely and permanently drunk on Keen & Becker’s magic potion.
Classically, the Noble Lie was something used by an elite – itself believing or not, remember – to
bamboozle and control the masses; it was directed, if not actually created, by a central authority. This
kind of thing is still in force to varying degrees in many countries today. But the modern, therapeutic
twist – as exemplified by Manson, Keen, and practically all other “meaning and purpose of life”
salesmen of the last 75 years or so – is that one is supposed to be both the creator and swallower of the
lie! It is really quite incredible, the more you think about it.4
If you try it for yourself, and fail to convince yourself of your own bullshit, I suppose you are meant to
shop around amongst all the other meaning-of-life fantasies until you find something you can believe.
The vast majority of people, it seems, are successful at both of these strategies nowadays, even
repeatedly.
A Few Random Complaints about TSA
A passage I like:
I believe that today we’re facing a psychological epidemic, one in which people no longer realize it’s okay
for things to suck sometimes. I know that sounds intellectually lazy on the surface, but I promise you, it’s
a life/death sort of issue.
(TSA, Ch. 1)
Manson is here referring to people’s personal issues – but another manifestation of this modern disease
is the social justice warrior, who, with the backing of practically the entire culture, projects her
personal problems onto the outer world and makes no end of unnecessary trouble for decent people.
4 In fact the idea of making up your own belief-system to live by, no matter how irrational, goes back at least as far as
Nietzsche, who stopped writing in 1888. There may be even older precedents, for all I know.
Consider these further words from Sam Keen’s 1997 foreword to DoD:
[Becker suggests that] the best we can hope for society at large is that the mass of unconscious individuals
might develop a moral equivalent to war. The science of man has shown us that society will always be
composed of passive subjects, powerful leaders, and enemies upon whom we project our guilt and self-
hatred. This knowledge may allow us to develop an "objective hatred" in which the hate object is not a
human scapegoat but something impersonal like poverty, disease, oppression, or natural disasters. By
making our inevitable hatred intelligent and informed we may be able to turn our destructive energy to a
creative use.
Ladies and gentlemen of 2020, meet Karen, typical twenty-one-year-old holder of the world’s first
undergraduate degree in Social Justice, now offered by [some sad American degree mill]! Becker’s
ideas have come true: As any mature observer knows, these young social justice warriors are
thoroughly ordinary people – drawn from the mass of unconscious individuals – who almost always to
fail to disguise their true motivations of guilt and self-hatred; mainstream academia, Marxist from its
toes to its eyeballs, has been succeeding for many years now in objectifying the hatred of such people
for dubious political and social ends. Hatred, as you see, will always have its defenders, facilitators,
promoters, and virtuosos; it worked fantastically for the Nazis, and now it is working for Social
Justicers.
Manson’s ideas on the usefulness of pain (physical and psychological) are commonplace, but still a
useful reminder. Yet I can’t help feeling that every exposition of this basic idea that I’ve ever heard
suffers from a grievous omission: The experience of pain, especially of the psychological variety that
may or may not ultimately enhance character and development, often comes with a lifelong cost.
Consider the case of the many war veterans who never fully recover from what is now called post-
traumatic stress disorder. That is an extreme and often particularly tragic scenario, but the old saying
“Make one mistake, and you pay for it the rest of your life” is not a joke; it can be just as true of any
terrible psychological experience. Having such an experience, based on a mistake or otherwise, is often
not the end of the matter, but the beginning of a new one which is just as bad or worse, and lasts much
longer.
Here is a typical bit of contemporary self-help flim-flam of the kind that Manson affects to despise: As
he recounts, the American heavy-metal guitarist Dave Mustaine was kicked out of the band Metallica in
1983, just before its steady rise to rise to enormous success during which they eventually sold over 180
million albums. Mustaine went on to form his own famous, beloved, and critically lauded band,
Megadeath, but it only ever reached about one-seventh the album sales of Metallica. Despite the
accolades and still-very-respectable album sales, Mustaine admitted 20 years after his firing that he still
hadn’t gotten over it and considered himself essentially a failure.
Now for the pop-psychology flim-flam (my emphasis):
Despite taking a horrible event in his life and making something positive out of it, as Mustaine did with
Megadeth, his choice to hold on to Metallica’s success as his life-defining metric continued to hurt him
decades later.
(TSA, Ch. 4)
This is pure Oprah. Manson is really saying:
Poor Mustaine, you didn’t have me at the time to inform you of the staggering secret information that all
you have to do in such a situation is to choose not to be unhappy. Decide you’re not going to be unhappy
about something in your life that you can’t control, and voila! What? You say you tried, over and over
again for twenty years, and failed? Sorry you’re such an intellectual, moral, spiritual and philosophical
failure and coward, dude. Don’t mention to anyone that you ever met me, all right? There’s a good sport.
Perhaps that is a bit harsh. I do not believe it is utterly impossible for anyone to succeed at a huge
mental, emotional, and personal re-programming task of the kind Manson is talking about here – but I
do think that its degree of difficulty depends very much on individual differences. We have all read or
heard about famous high achievers who have done such things, and Manson has fallen into the habit of
thinking, “Just do as they do!” The unfortunate fact is that some will succeed, and some (probably
most) will fail, at least for much of their remaining lives. For a lucky few in situations such as
Mustaine’s, there really is a clear, conscious choice to be made and acted upon; for most others, even if
they accept the idea, things are just not so simple.
Dave Mustaine may be no rocket surgeon, but he clawed his way to long-term success in one of the
most ruthless and unforgiving institutions in modern society – the popular music business. You don’t
have to appreciate his music in the least to give him credit for being determined and intelligent enough
to overcome the endless, immense hurdles that stand between an obscure, impoverished, uneducated
young man and rock-and-roll fame and fortune, especially in a sub-genre (so-called “thrash metal”) that
has never had anything like the mass global appeal of, say, Whitney Houston. Along the way, Mustaine
overcame his substance-abuse problems, learned to manage the business aspects of his career in
admirable fashion, and stayed married to the same woman from 1991 to the present. The couple has
two children, now adults, who turned out healthy and sound.
Mustaine is clearly cut from good cloth. His confession of 2003 could also be taken as an example of
what I mentioned above: that for most normal, healthy people, even demonstrably competent and
resilient ones like Mustaine, some traumatic incidents incur psychological costs of very long duration,
even life-long. If everyone could simply make and act on choices to deal relatively quickly with life-
affecting trauma, wouldn’t we all be doing it? Why does Manson seem to suggest that this concept has
remained some sort of secret available only to a few intrepid spiritual-intellectual searchers?
The answer is to that last question is discouraging: There is a book to be marketed and profits to be
made, the truth be damned.
Manson then recounts the story of ex-Beatle Pete Best, who, like Mustaine, was kicked out of a band
just before it rocketed to worldwide success. By all accounts – not just Manson’s – he really did
(slowly and painfully) reach a point where he was no longer tortured by the past; however, Manson
fails to make clear that the process cost Best at least a quarter-century. At the twenty-year mark, he
might have been still feeling exactly like Mustaine did.
Manson concludes from these and his other stories of recovery from personal trauma:
These stories suggest that some values and metrics are better than others. Some lead to good problems that
are easily and regularly solved. Others lead to bad problems that are not easily and regularly solved.
(TSA, Ch. 4)
Simple, right? Change your bad ‘values and metrics’ into good ones and your problems will be ‘easily
and regularly solved.’ Do you think that Dave Mustaine or Pete Best would say, upon reading this
book, “Damn! Wish I’d known this trick when I was in my twenties!”
There is no question that ‘values and metrics’ can sometimes be consciously changed, but Manson is
committing a fault of reasoning known as a category mistake. Here is a dictionary definition: “[It is] a
mistake in which something is said or believed to be in one category or group, when it fact it belongs to
another.”
Every person has values and metrics, whether or not they are consciously aware of them and can
express them articulately. But some people can change them consciously and perhaps relatively easily,
and whereas for others, it is as difficult as permanently getting from obesity down to normal weight.
This is because for the first type of person, things are as Manson describes, but for the second type
(probably the norm), we are dealing with something far more profound – in fact, with deeply rooted,
fundamental aspects of character and personality, which to a casual observer, may seem like nothing
more than chosen, changeable ‘values and metrics.’ Manson seems always to fall for mere appearances
in this regard, which constitutes his category-mistake.
If every terrible psychological problem could be “easily and regularly solved” by changing the ways
one thinks about and views it, then everyone would be doing it! The concept itself is simple, and it
would require a lot of first-class, peer-reviewed evidence to convince me that it has ever been some
kind of semi-secret knowledge available only to a chosen few.
Consider the many accounts of attempted recovery from various kinds of serious addictions. Read
enough of these and you will find that for many addicts, depending on the psychological and not just
purely physical strength of the individual addiction, the real struggle is the necessity of changing their
personalities, their very identities, at the most fundamental level; which is typically an immensely more
difficult task than accepting the initial and necessary idea that some of their ‘values and metrics’ are out
of whack. Of those who succeed (many never do, it must be remembered), of course it is almost certain
that their values and metrics will change along the way – but that is only the tip of the iceberg of all the
profound psychological tearing-down and rebuilding that must take place.
If there is one consistent theme in stories of successful recoveries from those addictions which have a
large psychological component, it is that, in the estimation of both the addicts and those who know
them, a rather different person has emerged. The former addict’s new values and metrics are just one
small facet of his changed character. (Actually, in many cases, this is a result of nothing more than
simply getting older.)
Here for laughs are a few examples of problem passages in TSA which could easily be fixed:
...I see practical enlightenment as becoming comfortable with the idea that some suffering is always
inevitable—that no matter what you do, life is comprised of failures, loss, regrets, and even death.
Because once you become comfortable with all the shite that life throws at you (and it will throw a lot of
shite, trust me), you become invincible in a sort of low-level spiritual way. After all, the only way to
overcome pain is to first learn how to bear it.
(TSA, Ch. 1)
Suggested rewording:
Because once you become somewhat resigned to all the shite that life throws at you (and it will throw a lot
of shite, trust me), you become more resilient in a sort of low-level spiritual way.
Another clunker:
Happiness is not a solvable equation. Dissatisfaction and unease are inherent parts of human nature and,
as we’ll see, necessary components to creating consistent happiness.
(TSA, Ch. 2)
That is yet another example of the mass-marketing Oprah-stench which permeates this book and makes
much of it such a painful chore to wade through. Rewrite:
Happiness is not a solvable equation. Dissatisfaction and unease are inherent parts of human nature and,
as we’ll see, unpleasant but unavoidable components in the effort to reduce hysterical misery to common
unhappiness.
Manson himself might or might not be able to stomach this, but the marketing department would never
stand for it. So, throughout the book, we are promised consistent happiness, or true happiness, power,
invincibility, and so on. (I am reminded of the Evangelist missionary who promised that my accepting
Jesus Christ as my personal savior would fill me with jet fuel.)
Not infrequently, Manson manages to mix good sense and Oprah-style claptrap together in the same
sentence:
The point is to nail down some good values and metrics, and pleasure and success will naturally emerge
as a result. These things are side effects of good values.
(TSA, Ch. 4)
Gee, thanks for the tip, pal. Pleasure and success, yahoo, here I come!
The marketing department naturally would never have permitted a rewritten version which would be
more acceptable to a mature and rational mind:
The point is to nail down some good values and metrics, which will somewhat increase one’s
chances of avoiding unnecessary trouble, and perhaps make the common unhappiness of life a little
easier to bear.
It is time to end this foreword. I could comment on many more things that I find irritating about
Manson and his work, but enough is enough. So here is the most charitable scenario I can imagine for
how Manson chose to end the book. Pretend that his publisher is Harvey Weinstein, and Manson brings
in a draft that has an acceptably rational conclusion about the real meaning and significance of human
life – certainly not one based on magical thinking. Weinstein hits the roof and yells, “Whattya mean wit
dis depressin’ shit? Nobody’s gonna buy dis! Ya gotta write an ending dat makes da readah feel dat da
cosmic meanin’ of life, AND da afta-life, is like a supah-hot chick and da readah’s soul is gonna get ta
hump her and hump her and hump her and hump her and hump her and hump her f’r all etoinity! Now
don’t show ya face here again til ya write me sumpin’ like dat!”
And without too much trouble at all, Manson does.5
5 This is inspired by actual directions given by Weinstein to actor Hayden Christensen on the set of the film Factory Girl.
See the account of Canadian filmmaker Barry Avrich at https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/features/a-filmmaker-s-
saga-harvey-890231
