Values
Values are what determines what universe of strategies are acceptable to us.
Say your desired outcome is prosperity.
If your values allow for murdering, drugging, and stealing, then invading a foreign country with lots of oil and poppy fields, murdering their people, stealing their oil, and getting people all over the world addicted to heroin, is a perfectly valid strategy.
It achieves the stated objective. Win!
However, most of us people would probably say that’s not okay. (Not the people in power, obviously, since these are things they’ve actually done.)
So values matter. We have to agree on a set of values.
Every company worth their salt has a set of core values. For example, my software company Simplero has these core values:
1. Make it simpler(o)
2. Always be optimizing
3. Real talk
Even though this book is not about Simplero the software, you can clearly see these values reflected in my thinking about politics too.
There are lots of other values that companies typically don’t articulate, because they’re taken as given. These are things like honesty, integrity, team work, etc. As a country, we do need to specify these too.
We might not fully agree on all of the values, and different groups within the country may weigh them differently, but in order to have a functioning society we need rough agreement on a base set of values.
In fact, it’s one of the big challenges with immigration. If you import people who have different values, it destroys societal cohesion. They might be wonderful people, their values might be wonderful too, but two different sets of values just don’t mix well, and you go from two cultures that both work well to one that doesn’t.
In the introduction, I proposed this first approximation of values:
● I’m for integrity and forgiveness
● I’m against physical violence, theft, and adults having sex with children
● Normal people must take care of themselves
● Individual agency and private business are preferred, government is a last resort
Integrity
Integrity, truth, and courage are not just important, they’re critical.
One of the big problems we have right now is how easy and cheap it is to bribe people in key positions. Let me tell you a story of one.
OxyContin is an opium drug that allegedly got over 2 million people addicted, killed over 500,000 of them, and made its producer Purdue Pharma $35 billion in revenue.
Curtis Wright was the guy at the FDA that approved the drug based on the false notion that it was not addictive because of a time-release mechanism. I’m not a mind reader, but my hallucination is that he knew that was a pretty shady decision when he made it.
What was his reason? Again, I’m not a mind reader, but I do know that he got a job at Purdue a couple years later at a pay of … wait for it … $379k/year.
That’s how cheap it is to bribe someone when the culture has abandoned the value of integrity.
Half a million people dead, $35 billion in revenue, for less than $400k/year.
That’s why I believe creating a culture of integrity is key to creating the world we want to live in.
It’s like the old story of the man who asks a lady if she’ll sleep with him for ten million dollars.
She thinks about it. “Yeah. For ten million I would.”
“Great, let’s go!” he says and hands her a $20 dollar bill.
“Who do you think I am?!?” she asks, indignantly.
“Oh, we’ve already established that, now we’re just haggling over the price.”
We’ve become a society of prostitutes.
Whether it’s paid in dollars, fancy vacations, sex, drugs, threats, or blackmail, their conscience is for sale.
I learned about integrity breaches from my mentor Gay Hendricks.
Not speaking the truth, breaking agreements, not taking full responsibility, hiding feelings, failing to maintain boundaries, and not working to pay down your debt, are all breaches of integrity.
He invited me and my wife to commit to each other to speak any relevant truth at the earliest possible moment, and to always be willing to hear the truth from the other.
We did, and at first, it almost broke us apart! Both of us had to reveal the same thought: “I’m not sure you’re the one I want to be with.” That’s a shocking truth to speak and hear. It was disorienting, yet freeing. And here we are 12 years later, more passionately in love than ever.
I’ve also done things that I wasn’t proud of and that violated commitments I’d made, and my initial reaction was to keep it to myself, to hide it. “Whatthey don’t know can’t hurt them.”
That’s total BS.
Integrity breaches cause leaks that drain our vital life force energy and block the energy from flowing through your system, and it creates distance between you and your spirit, and you and other people. It’s an awful feeling.
But it gets worse, because the feeling is compounded when what you did is something you feel guilty about or ashamed of. When we feel shame or guilt, for sure we don’t want to reveal it to anyone, because then they’d surely reject us. And so we just close off. It’s awful.
So what’s a man to do?
Addiction is the most common answer.
Addiction is anything you do to change your feelings temporarily that causes long term harm. Drinking. Sex. Drowning ourselves in work. Endurance training. Drugs. Prescription meds. Violence. Anything that alters your mood. Oftentimes it’ll be more of the very thing that we did originally that caused the guilt or shame to begin with. And thus goes the vicious cycle, and it’s deadly.
That’s why it’s imperative to me that we teach our young men and women to live in integrity.
I didn’t grow up understanding the value of integrity. It’s something I’ve learned. And now that I’ve experienced both being in integrity and out of integrity, I will never go back to living out of integrity.
The cost is way too high. It’s like being sleep deprived, out of shape, regularly consuming alcohol. You don’t know how much it’s hurting you until you stop it and you notice how much better you feel.
Courage
Courage is not the absence of fear. Courage is feeling the fear, and doing it anyway.
Churchill said that “courage is rightly esteemed the first of human qualities...because it is the quality which guarantees all others.”
I agree.
Courage is speaking your truth when there’s only downside.
Courage is doing the right thing despite fear of what it might cost you.
Edward Snowden revealed some very inconvenient truths about the US surveillance machine, and it cost him his life in the US. No whistleblower protection for him.
Julian Assange revealed some very inconvenient truths about the so-called war on terror, and spent seven years living in a small office in the Ecuadorianembassy in London.
That’s courage. You may disagree with their actions, but you cannot deny that it took great courage for them to do what they did. And they paid a price.
When you stay silent because you’re afraid of offending someone, that’s not courage. It’s cowardice. Cowardice makes people easy to control.
The good news is that courage is contagious. When you demonstrate courage by a nonviolent act of civil disobedience, other people see that, and it gives them the courage to do the same. The more people do it, the more it spreads.
Courage is worth it for that reason alone. As a signal to others that it’s okay.
There’s safety in numbers. If enough of us do this, it’s game over for the bad guys.
Erica Chenoweth found that there’s never been a case where a nonviolent civil resistance movement that got the active and sustained participation of 3.5% of the population has not successfully toppled the sitting regime, no matter how dictatorial and totalitarian.
In the US that would be about 12 million people. That’s still a large number, but it’s doable.
How the Blob Blackmails People
Integrity is especially important, because the main way the man behind the curtain operates is by getting people to bend.
Jeffrey Epstein and Sean Combs (aka P Diddy) were allegedly in the business of getting important figures in politics, business, music, Hollywood, and culture to commit sex crimes on videotape for blackmail. There are some very powerful people on the Epstein flight logs, including Bill Clinton and Bill Gates.
On November 8, 2023, the FBI announced that they’d raided a high-end brothel that serviced elected officials. The same day the House of Representatives voted for $300M for a controversial new FBI headquarters.
Coincidence?
Here’s what Wikipedia has to say about COINTELPRO:
COINTELPRO was a series of covert and illegal projects conducted between 1956 and 1971 by the FBI aimed at surveilling, infiltrating, discrediting, and disrupting American political organizations that the FBI perceived as subversive.
Mind you, this was run by J. Edgar Hoover, the first director of the FBI.
According to ChatGPT, Hoover:
…collected extensive files on politicians, celebrities, and influential people, often related to their personal lives, including extramarital affairs or other compromising details. He reportedly had files on figures like John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., and Eleanor Roosevelt. These files were sometimes used to blackmail or intimidate individuals to prevent criticism of the FBI or to control political outcomes.
So from the very start, the FBI did covert and illegal activities to further their own agendas, against the interests of the people they’re being paid to serve and protect and their elected leaders.
Do we really believe that they found Jesus and suddenly stopped? I have doubts.
So we know people all over the world, especially men, are being blackmailed, sometimes with money, often with sex. Men are incredibly susceptible to manipulation by sex. It’s so hard for most men to resist—women are just so delicious, and our sex drives are so strong. That’s no excuse, it’s just a fact.
Men are going to step out of line and do something out of integrity. It’s a given. So what do we want to do about it?
What’s worse for society? Men straying, or men in important positions of influence being blackmailed into doing bad things for the rest of their lives?
There has to be a path to redemption. A way to share what you did without being excommunicated.
Your wife might still leave you. If you committed a crime, you will still be prosecuted and you might go to jail. But from a moral standpoint, we have to forgive people who strayed, who got seduced into something bad. We must offer them a way out.
Stop the damage. Prosecute and punish according to the law. Forgive the human.
We need to be able to forgive people for their sins. I don’t believe people do evil deeds unless evil was done unto them.
We’re all innocent children at heart. If I believed what you believe, I’d do the same thing. Never forget that.
Violence
Physical violence includes murder, bodily injury, and destruction of property.
I don’t agree with the notion that speech is violence.
The reason people say speech can be violence is that people’s feelings can get hurt. I get that. I get my feelings hurt too. It’s not fun.
The problem is that your feelings are a result of your beliefs and the meaning you give to an event. It’s not a result of the event itself. Two people can experience the exact same thing and have wildly different feelings about it, like we saw when we discussed clips of Trump.
When we make policy, it’s best to stick with things that are objective and measurable. It’s the only way we can know whether we’re achieving our outcome.
As for underage sex, the specific age limits for what constitutes underage sex can be debated, but the current laws seem reasonable to me.
It’s important to mention this uncomfortable topic because I’ve learned first hand through family, friends, and second-hand through media that there’s a lot more of this going on than meets the eye, and it looks like there are elements in our society that very much want more of this.
In part because they’re broken people (only hurt people hurt people), and in part because it’s a useful way to control people (Jeffrey Epstein, Sean Combs).
Children are not able to consent. Even if they say yes. Their brains are not developed enough to understand what they consent to, and it is deeply traumatizing. Yes, it can be healed, but it takes a lot of deep work, and can we all just agree not to do it or allow it, please? Thank you.
Normal People Must Take Care of Themselves
Calvin Coolidge was the 30th president of the United States. About ten years ago, I took his first name.
The name my parents gave me was Lars Holger Pind. I never felt fully at home with my name, and when I moved to the US at age 25, nobody knew how to spell it or pronounce it. So when my wife introduced me to numerology, I thought, why not? I saw a numerologist and decided to change my name.
Picking a new name was challenging, though. The idea of actually changing my name was so difficult to wrap my head around, I sat on it for a year. As I was looking through a list of possible names, I saw the name Calvin. Immediately, I knew that was me.
For many years in my late 20s and early 30s I was struggling so hard to figure out life. How to be a man, husband, father, son, entrepreneur, provider and protector.
During this time, one quote more than anything kept me going, and it was this one by Calvin Coolidge:
Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence.
Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent.
Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb.
Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts.
Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.
Every time I read it, I feel a surge of energy.
I decided that if persistence and determination were good enough to become Fucking President of the United Fucking States, then, by golly, they were good enough for me.
I’m so grateful to Calvin Coolidge for speaking those words, and for whoever captured and shared them so they could help me through my dark years.
This is a great example of the light we get to shine for others.
Only later, after I got bitten by the politics bug, did I study Coolidge more and discover how much I agree with his approach to politics.
One of his mantras was that normal people can and must take care of themselves. In a speech to the Massachusetts senate in 1914, he said “Government cannot relieve from toil. The normal must take care of themselves. Self-government means self-support.”
I love this. The notion that we need the government to take care of so many aspects of our lives is inefficient, it makes us weak, and when there’s this much money slushing around the system, it’s too easy for leeches to suck it out.
If people generally aren’t able to take care of themselves, then that’s a massive problem that we need to address first.
A corollary to that is that families and communities are best qualified to take care of each other. Let’s encourage them to do so.
Small Government
I’d love to see the government be as small as absolutely possible.
Why?
Because the government is by definition a monopoly built on violence.
I’ve mentioned this before in passing, but let’s doubleclick on it.
The government is the only entity that’s allowed to use violence to achieve its aim in its territory.
The police will use violence to put you in jail, or ultimately kill you if youresist and threaten their lives.
No one else is allowed to use violence to coerce others. It doesn’t mean they don’t, but they’re not allowed to. The government is allowed to do so.
Every single thing the government requires you to do is backed by that threat of violence.
If you don’t pay your taxes, show up in court, come with us when we tell you to, we will ultimately send guys with guns to get you and put you in jail. That’s always the implied threat. Always. That’s violence.
I’m not a fan of violence.
I recognize it exists. It’s a fact of life. I think it’s important that men be strong, skilled, and willing to defend the people they’re required to protect and provide for.
We need to be able to protect ourselves against others who are willing to use violence against us, whether inside or outside our borders.
But violence is a last resort. We want as little of it as possible.
You may think: “that sounds terrible, why have any government at all?”
There are at least four essential functions of government that cannot be handled by private actors: National defense, policing, legislation, and justice. So we need some government. But as little as possible. It’s gotten way out of whack.
Government doesn’t just have a monopoly on violence, they also have a monopoly on anything else they want to have a monopoly on.
Every government monopoly means no choice for you, and no competitive pressure for them to be more efficient. That’s no good.
Our government needs to be the most efficient organization on the planet, because it’s run entirely via threats of violence, and we as citizens have no alternative.
And that should be possible, because almost every single citizen has a vested interest in the government being efficient, so with the internet that now allows for crowdsourcing and open sourcing, we could leverage the intelligence of our citizens—heck of all citizens across the world—to improve efficiency.
Alas, we all know governments are the exact opposite of efficient.
Which tells you a lot about the goals of the people in charge.
The purpose of a system is what it does.
Small Business
I prefer as much of the economy as possible to be small, private businesses.
Why?
Because, unlike the government, a business only survives when it solves a problem and delivers an outcome for its customers.
Think about it. Anything you buy from any company, you buy because you believe it will take you from having something you have that you don’t want, to having something you do want but don’t yet have.
It could be from being under-caffeinated in the morning to having just the right amount of caffeine, sugar and fat in your bloodstream by buying that delicious latte.
Or from not having access to the internet, to having access by buying internet access.
From not having a vision for the future of humanity, to having a vision and a mission, by buying this book.
Whatever it is, companies only exist to solve problems for their customers.
If it’s not a problem you have or a problem you want solved, don’t buy from them.
If you don’t believe the company can solve the problem, or you don’t like how the company solves the problem, or you don’t like the company for whatever reason, don’t buy from them.
It’s that simple.
With the government, we don't have that choice.
Yes, some companies will lie to you, some companies will scam you. We’ve all heard of snake oil salesmen, and we get so incensed about it and scared it’ll happen to us.
But the fear of that is overblown. Here’s why.
First, your government is currently stealing so much from you through taxes, fees, inflation, pollution, and all the rest of it, and you don’t get nearly as offended over that, mainly because you don’t see it, because they also use that money and power to control the media and hide the truth from you.
And when the government does what it does, you have no choice in it, other than the very weak power of democracy, much of which is unfortunately illusory. You may think you have a choice of mayor or governor or president, but if the choice is between two equally corrupt candidates, what choice is that? And if after they’re elected, they do what’s in the blob’s interests, not yours, then what choice is that? This is our world today.
Second, unlike governments who can coerce by force, companies who sell based on lies never survive long term. And we already have checks in place to handle that, and we can easily do more. Credit card companies, for example, will absolutely vet vendors and freeze their assets if things look suspicious, because they’re effectively loaning the money to the business during the time between you buy the offer and the time you pay your credit card bill. So they look out for chargebacks and problems and address things early on. These types problems are easy to handle.
And even if you get scammed from time to time, at least it was your choice, and you can learn from it. If you got to keep 90% of the money you make, and the country was overall so much more prosperous because we’re all better and smarter and the government isn’t actively creating most of our problems, you’d have quite a bit of buffer to account for making bad decisions from time to time.
The Purpose of the Government
In my mind, the number one objective of a nation is to create the conditions for their citizens to thrive.
You cannot make them thrive, that’s up to them. But you can createconditions that enable them to thrive and remove barriers that get in the way.
Secondarily, we must be good stewards of the land we’re fortunate enough to call ours. We must leave it better than we found it. This is a sacred obligation in my mind.
Third, we want to be a net good to the world outside our nation. Or at least not a net negative. The best way to be a net good is to be honest, decent, a great example to follow, to open source all of our findings about what works, and to not murder their people, overthrow their governments, or otherwise meddle in their affairs. Let other people live life the way they want it, so long as they do not directly harm our people. Inspire their people to own their power and create the world they want to live in.
Fourth, we must be extremely mindful and efficient with all of our resources, including the money collected in taxes, money borrowed in the name oftaxpayers, natural resources, and any other resource. These are the people’s property, not the government’s, and in the case of the money, it’s their life force energy that we’re commandeering. We better be real careful how we handle that.
This is a good approximation of the values I would love to see us agree on. I’m not trying to make this a complete set, and I’m not saying we’ll all be able to agree on these.
The point I’m making is that this is the kind of conversation we need to have, and we need to come to some sort of agreement, based on logic and reason.
Once we know our desired outcomes and our values, then we can start to talk about how we want to get there.
Morality
When I read Jonathan Haidt’s incredible book The Righteous Mind, I knewI’d stumbled upon a critical piece to healing the political divide.
Jonathan studies moral foundations, and what the scientists have discovered is that human beings across all civilizations all have the same handful of what the calls “moral taste buds.” All human morality is composed of the same ingredients. The difference is in how they rank.
This is very good news.
It’s similar to how Tony Robbins and Cloe Madanes have discovered that all humans have the same six basic needs, but how we rank them makes a huge difference in our lives.
In terms of morality, these are the dimensions:
1. Care/harm – kindness, empathy, and protection from harm.
2. Fairness/cheating – justice, rights, and fair treatment.
3. Loyalty/betrayal – loyalty to group, family, or nation.
4. Authority/subversion – respect for tradition, order, and authority.
5. Sanctity/degradation – purity, sanctity, avoiding contamination.
6. Liberty/oppression – freedom from oppression or dominance.
The left tends to prioritize the Care/harm and Fairness/cheating foundations more strongly. They focus on compassion, protecting the vulnerable, and ensuring equality and fairness. These are seen as universal concerns and are often the most central to their worldview.
The right also value Care/harm and Fairness/cheating, but they place more emphasis on the additional foundations of Loyalty/betrayal, Authority/subversion, and Sanctity/degradation.
The right is more likely to value group loyalty, respect for tradition and authority, and concerns about moral purity and sanctity. They tend to see society as requiring order and cohesion through these moral dimensions.
The good news is that if we all have the same ingredients in our morality, then maybe we can find common ground by appreciating both our similarities and our differences.
It’s not that liberals don’t have any concern for sanctity, it’s just that they’re not as concerned about it as conservatives are.
By understanding and respecting that different people are wired to prioritize their moral components differently from each other and perhaps even at different seasons in their lives, and by recognizing that both ends of the spectrum are important for society as a whole, we can come together and create a world that works for all of us and which is greater than the sum of its parts.
Just like elders and youth both have something wonderful to contribute, so do people on the left and on the right.
Instead of making each other wrong, let’s appreciate each others’ valuable contributions and improve our world together.
Free Speech
Sharing ideas, especially “dangerous” ideas, is exactly how progress is made.
When Galileo suggested the earth revolved around the sun, that was a very unpopular opinion. But it seems now like he might have been onto something.
Shutting down dissenting views stunts progress. It’s imperative that even the most disturbing, most seemingly dangerous ideas are welcome into the conversation.
If they’re true, then we need to know.
If they’re not true, we need to know why.
It’s never truth seeking people who want to censor others.
I’m a big fan of the first amendment. I believe it’s one of the greatest contributions of the US, and I was recently reminded of this by some of my coaching clients in Norway who, like me, reject conventional Western medicine.
They told me that in Norway, it is illegal to say anything that challenges the medical orthodoxy, even to the extent that sharing your own personal journey of healing through non-sanctioned means, like diet, is against the law.
That blew my mind. The criminal medical industrial complex has too much
power. We gotta wake up.
A free and open conversation is how we learn, how make progress, how we discover what is true.
Remember that anything we currently believe is only our best misconception so far. That is true of medicine, it is true of politics, it is true of science.
When you limit what is permitted speech, you stop progress.
I didn’t quite get how important this is until I read Jonathan Rauch’s phenomenal book Kindly Inquisitors.
Free speech only matters when defending other people’s right to say things you vehemently disagree with. Nobody needs to be reminded to tolerate speech they like. It’s the speech you don’t like that’s important to defend. Hence the phrase “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”
There are two principal attacks on free speech: the humanitarian and the fundamentalist.
The humanitarian attack says that some people’s feelings might get hurt, and that’s why we need to put limits on free speech. “Free speech is good, but hate speech should be outlawed.” The problem with that is that people’s feelings are subjective and fickle. Essentially it means that anyone who chooses, consciously or unconsciously, to hear your words in a way that stirs up undesired feelings in them now has a right to censor you. That’s not workable.
Even if we at a policy level decide on specific criteria for what is hate speech, once that policy is in place, it’s very easy to expand the scope. You may agree with the party currently in power, but in 5 or 10 years, the government may have changed, and now it’s a very easy step for them to change the definition to, for example, anything critical of the government or their friends. The way governments increase their power is always one inch at a time. And they never let go once they have it.
The fundamentalist attack says that there are certain absolute truths that are not allowed to be contradicted. The problem with this is that absolute truth is unknowable. Every “truth” is always our best misconception so far. And similar to what we saw with “hate speech”, once the mechanism is accepted, the scope of what is considered an “absolute truth” can easily be expanded to suit the ruling party’s agenda.
No matter how you limit freedom of speech, you stifle progress. It is not a path we want to go down.
There’s a reason every totalitarian regime on the planet always starts with the same two moves: Limit free speech, and take people’s guns. That’s how you control a population.
