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What we're doing here, please consider becoming one of the. I recently appeared on several other podcasts and was asked what I thought about a few prominent people in our culture. Some are prominent only at the fringe, or should only be there, but of course, the fringe is now everywhere, courtesy of social media, every part of culture, science, public health war, economics, the lives of famous people. Conspiracy theories: About everything and nothing, all information is in the process of being macerated by billions of tiny mouse and then stick back again and leaped up by others. So it is in fact, mostly digital format. This point is being spread everywhere and celebrated at some new form of nutrition.

For there. People who we probably shouldn't, know about, but do and their pay who should have no influence at all, but their influence has enormous. One of these people is andrew, tate and another is donald trump both of these men. Assholes, and I said as much on these other podcasts. However, many people appear confused about what it means to be an asshole. The fact that many, these confused people are themselves assholes is perhaps unsurprising surprising. Many people believe that calling someone like tate or tromp an asshole says very little about them and all too much about the person making the allegation. Such a person is believe just doesn't like tate or trumps style. He finds their brash nests offensive and taken offensive. Brash. Nice is just a sign of weakness. Only someone who doesn't feel strong himself could find and others arrogance, or by

best threatening. There's a word for such a person waiting deep into the vomit torreon, now right of centre where tate and tramper truly kings. Such a person is very likely to be called if this word is unknown to you, will then congratulations. But this rests on a fundamental misunderstanding. Being an asshole, is not just a matter of style. It's a matter of substance because to be an asshole is to care about the wrong things is to not have one's priorities, of course. Many of us don't have our priorities quite straight, but only an asshole is inclined to celebrate this failure in public to be an asshole to mistake, ones vices four virtues is to fundamentally misunderstand what it means to live a good life and to encourage this misunderstanding and others is to mistake shamelessness for integrity and a furious self absorption for

strength and ass, all is not just some one who wax civility or attacked. In fact, assholes can be superficially charming and probably must be to succeed the problem is never just on the surface. Whatever can be seen, there is at the core of the problem with assholes is it, though they might occasionally appear to care about other things and other people the only truly care about themselves, whatever causes they attach to just inflate. The cell whatever love they express is instrumental. Of course, we are all assholes some of the time all have our moments of pettiness and vanity and duplicity and carelessness. The task of living examined life is to know as these moral failures as failures and transcend their logic, the purpose of becoming a student of human wisdom,

And an honest observer of one's own mind is to become less of an asshole more of the time. Tom, reserving the term asshole for the sort of person who simply doesn't care that this project exists. The committed asshole, the unrepentant one, the one who wears his lack of wisdom like a crown. This is the sort of asshole I'm talking about. It seem strange to say it, but even the worst assholes never seem to lack for admires what people admire about them, above all, is their shamelessness. Many people's struggle with feelings of shame. Shame is among the least pleasant of human emotions, and it might be the most disempowering, Shame is generally surmounted not by growing insensitive to it, but by living in such a way that it has few causes to arise, but assholes are proof that another strategy is possible when

can simply declare the offending organ, vestigial and tear it out and then can live? However, one wants and never feel shame again. The gospel of the asshole is simple, There is nothing in your selfishness that you need to overcome, there's nothing to judge and no place from which to be judged by others. No one is better than you and those who pretend to be better are actually worse. Every one is a selfish. Asshole is just as some of us are courageous enough to be honest about it. You can hear the cynicism at the core of this self worship and assholes would become the centre of a movement managed to communicate this quasi religious absolution of shame and celebrate of cynicism, moralist continuously by their living example. In his way, every asshole beckons us to return to childhood or any appeal

So the ongoing project of moral improvement can be shirked and derided as mere pretence. Again trump is, the whole avatar of our age say whatever you went about him. The man is simply impossible to shame. He cannot be held to any standard of decency or moral seriousness because he hold him afternoon. Anything that can be noticed about him, which have noticed about an person would destroy their reputation within the hour can be neatly parried by the childish phrase. So what may imagine discovering the trumpet plagiarized one of his speeches So what were committed along string of business frauds? So what friendly with members of organised crime again. So what.

Absolutely no one who admires him would care. There is no and from an instance of his being a good person that matters because he's not even pretending to be a good person he's a total asshole and everybody knows it. His fans, don't love him in spite of the fact that he's asshole, but because he is from gives his fans permission to go on a moral holiday and to live there. If they choose, if or else he may communicate, hatred of elites, casual bigotry, scientific ignorance, disdain for norms and institutions. The subject is always the same: deliver a thrill to everyone sensitive to its frequency and the sub taxes. This is so kay

in fact, far more honest, even noble, really to just be an asshole body and soul and there's almost a colonel of truth to this. Because, whatever their faults, there is one common moral failing of which all true assholes are perpetually innocent hypocrisy. You can't be a hypocrite if you have no standards by which you can be discovered to have fallen short. If you are content to be selfish and dishonest and uncharitable, and be seen to be this way by others. You achieve a kind of malignant buddha hood. You are free in some deep sense to just be who you are and that degree of comfort in one's own.

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