"Ennui Fills My Days"

One of my posters wrote that perhaps this German pilot suffered from accidie, which is generally considered mental sloth. It's more than that. It's ennui, boredom, meaningless, hopelessness, not being connected to anything. I read years ago that some people committed suicide out of boredom. That's accidie.

I use the example of insomnia. When you can't fall asleep, can't think of anything to do, you are bored and things seem meaningless...that's the beginnings of accidie (Stephen King once wrote one of his typically enormous novels about a man suffering from insomnia. It was of course called Insommnia.)

This suicidal pilot, to me, appeared to be envious ("If I can't be happy no one can, so I'll take 150 innocent people with me"). But perhaps he also considered life meaningless, so he decided to go out in a blaze of glory. Hubris and accidie? Perhaps. It's not as if you can suffer from just one.

I use the Seven Deadly Vices and Seven Cardinal Virtues to explain people. They have been around for thousands of years, and came from the Greeks and were adopted and expanded by Christianity. They're not "religious." It's more like practical, useful psychology that can be applied to everyone.

'Accidie has always been considered a sin, although, as I have written many times, "sin" means to "miss the mark."

When you suffer from accidie and hubris people don't seem real anymore. They're just props in your personal play. Instead it's all about you, and it doesn't matter if people live or die. Or if the suffered lives or dies, either.

Three Things You Should Have

A library, a garden and a dog. Working in the garden and walking the dog are forms of meditation.

If Women Gave Birth to Many Babies Like a Cat or Dog

I've seen several cats and dogs give birth. Rarely it's just one but usually several. I sometimes wondered what would happen if women gave birth to six or seven kids.

If this had happened a few thousand years ago it would have been impossible to support that many kids, so I'm positive all of the kids except one would have been human-sacrificed to whatever pagan god was believed in. You know - rolling the kids into the fire in Moloch's stone belly.

These days, however....it'd be leftists wanting to off these kids. After all, they act as if abortion is a sacrament and now they're calling for the euthanasia of the old, the sick and the deformed. And if we have too many newborns? Well, call it post-abortion.

The value of children would drop tremendously due to oversupply. Leftists could use that as an excuse to cull tem - "overpopulation," you know.

Leftists ultimately desire the destruction of everything, so thank God women don't have that many kids.

Going Out in a Blaze of Glory

Dr. James Gilligan, a retired psychiatrist out of Harvard, spent his life studying murderers and why they did what they did. Sometimes they engaged in mutilations of their victims - like flying planes into mountains, the way this German pilot did.

What Gilligan found, in every case, was that the perpetrators suffered from unbearable feelings of humiliation, which they attempted to erase by killing people. He found many of them had fantasies of going out in what they considered "a blaze of glory," taking as many people with them as they could.

He said if you wanted to understand why people murdered, then look at the story of Cain and Abel. Feelings of humiliation followed by revenge. Murder.

As for trying to shove these people in boxes of "Beta rage" and "Omega rage," go right ahead. You're wasting your time, and you'll never understand why this guy did what he did.

You're better off understanding what Hubris is (the Greeks considered it a form of grandiose insanity, in which the sufferer cannot tell the difference between right and wrong). The Bible calls it Pride. And what follows them? Nemesis...destruction.

On Being Raised Blue-Collar

Both my parents were high-school dropouts, although they later got their GEDs. My father was a general contractor and my mother the night admitting clerk at the local ER. I was raised working-class blue collar.

I knew nothing about white-collar until I graduated college, and when I found out about it I was not impressed. Jobs weren't really about what you know, but who you knew. Connections. The Old Boy's Network really does exist.

I couldn't stand the politics and backstabbing. A lot of these people were not adults but children.

You didn't even get promotions based on competence. It was on who liked you. It was astonishing.

I found first-rate people hire first-raters. Most of the bosses I worked for were second-raters, who hired third-raters, who hired fourth-raters. I have seen catastrophes because of this.

I would never hire an MBA. My experience has been many aren't even worthless. They're dangerous.

Bill Gates dropped out of college, as did Stephen Jobs. Henry Ford was an auto mechanic. Andrew Carnegie didn't go to college, either.

To this day I still get along better with blue-collar men. And don't think they're stupid. They're not, not even close.

Many college degrees are worthless. Education degrees? Ugh.

If I had my way, people would start at the bottom and work their way up, like Jimmy Olson, cub reporter (my father started out as a cub carpenter).

I cannot recommend college anymore, unless it's a real degree like engineering. You're better off getting a six-month certification in computers or being an auto mechanic or a plumber. The days of getting a degree and a good job and working your way up? They've been gone for a long time.

I've said this before; wages stopped going up in January, 1974. This means you're on your own. And believe me, that's not such a bad thing, because it means you're free to do as you please. For good or bad.

The Real Omegas

I've already read articles that claim this German pilot who crashed his plane, killing himself and all his passengers, was an "Omega" with all his "rage." That's ridiculous. No one knows why he did what he did. It might come out in the future.

These people don't even know what Omegas are. I've mentioned I was raised with some really Bad Boys, not the pretend ones of the Manosphere. We called them what they were - white trash. They dropped out of high school or barely graduated, made their living at crime (especially selling drugs), were drug abusers and alcoholics. They were in an out of prison. They were generally murdered or died of drug overdoses. The women they got were trash like themselves and they were never "Alphas," even though they were Bad Boys. That's another Manosphere hallucination, that these lowlifes are Alphas and get all the women.

Sometimes I hear them referred to a Dalits, a word out of India which refers to their version of white trash, even if they aren't white.

These people are the scourge of society.

The Arrogance of Criminals

I was raised with a lot of criminals. Most of them are now dead or in prison.

One thing I noticed about them is that none of them were all that smart, yet, paradoxically, they were arrogant. They thought they were smarter than others, that they could get away with anything, and they would never get caught.

I knew one guy who thought he could consistently rip off people on drug deals. Stupid? Yes. Also arrogant. He ended up dead and dumped in the stockyards in hope the pigs would eat him and leave no evidence.

Another thought he could go after any women who took his fancy. He ended up blown off his Harley. The shooter got life in prison.

I've seen this stupidity and arrogance over and over and over. The ancient Greeks called it hubris and the Bible refers to it as Pride. Hubris as in "followed by Nemesis." The same applies to that Biblical Pride.

All of these guys, to use Manosphere terms, were "insanely confident." Notice the "insanely" part. That's what they were. Insane - and now dead or in prison.

The opposite of that Hubris/Pride is humility, as the Greek concept of Sophrosyne, which means to know your strengths and weaknesses. Because, after all, no one is perfect. In fact, not even close, for all of us.