How to Create Your Own Philosophy

by Grow Up Conference | Dec 12, 2024 | Media Partners, The New Agora

How to Create Your Own Philosophy

By Gary Z. McGee

“The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.” –Nietzsche

In a world that is constantly trying to tell you who you are, it is vital that you have within you the capacity to push back and declare who you really are. Creating your own philosophy is a way to do that.

When you have your own philosophy, you are a force to be reckoned with rather than a thing to be forced. You live on purpose, with purpose. You’re a candle in the dark, or maybe even a blacklight in the blinding light. You put the world, the universe, even “God” on notice. Everything is put on blast. Nothing is off limits. Everything is put under the blade of your fierce inquiry.

Religions dissolve around you. Politics fall apart before you. Ideologies implode because of you. Philosophy itself is taken aback. Armed with your own philosophy you become a tempest, a force of nature first, a person second. You become the eye of the storm of the human condition. Everything is caught in your spinning vortex and found wanting.

Self-inflicted Philosophy:

“It’s impossible for a man to learn what he thinks he already knows.” ~Epictetus

There is no better method toward creating your own philosophy than Self-inflicted Philosophy. Self-inflicted Philosophy refers to the practice of individuals engaging in philosophical inquiry and introspection without formal guidance or external influence. It involves:

Personal Reflection: Deliberately pondering life’s big questions, ethical dilemmas, or personal beliefs independently.

Autodidactic Learning: Seeking out knowledge through self-study, drawing from various sources like books, online resources, or personal experiences rather than only structured education.

Critical Self-Examination: Questioning one’s own beliefs, biases, and assumptions, often leading to personal growth or changes in worldview.

Application in Daily Life: Using philosophical insights to navigate personal challenges, ethical decisions, or to better understand the human condition from one’s unique perspective.

This approach can be seen as a form of philosophical DIY, where the individual crafts their understanding and application of philosophy tailored to their own life’s context. It emphasizes autonomy in thought, encouraging people to think for themselves rather than adopting the philosophies of others wholesale.

Why “Inflicted”?

“What I understand of “philosopher”: a terrible explosive in the presence of which everything is in danger.” ~Nietzsche

The “inflicted” aspect of self-inflicted Philosophy underscores several key elements that make this approach unique and potent…

Active Engagement:

“Inflicted” implies an active, sometimes even forceful, engagement with one’s thoughts and beliefs. It’s not about passively receiving ideas but actively challenging, questioning, and shaping them. This active process ensures that the philosophy developed is deeply personal and reflective of one’s true self rather than just an echo of external teachings.

Self-Imposed Challenge:

Philosophy, in this context, is not just an intellectual exercise but a self-imposed challenge or burden. It suggests that delving into philosophical inquiry can be uncomfortable or demanding because it requires confronting one’s prejudices, fears, and ignorance. This self-inflicted challenge is vital for growth, pushing individuals out of their comfort zones to achieve deeper understanding and self-awareness.

Accountability and Ownership:

By “inflicting” philosophy upon oneself, there’s an inherent sense of accountability. You own your philosophical journey, including the mistakes and insights. This ownership fosters a more genuine commitment to the philosophical principles one develops, as they are not borrowed or imposed but self-crafted through personal struggle and reflection.

Introspection and Painful Truths:

The term “inflicted” also hints at the sometimes painful nature of self-discovery. Philosophical introspection can uncover uncomfortable truths about oneself or the world, leading to moments of existential crisis or profound change. This aspect is crucial as it’s through facing these harsh realities that one can truly evolve their understanding and philosophy.

Motivation for Change:

The act of inflicting philosophy on oneself can be a catalyst for personal change. When you decide to confront life’s big questions, you’re motivated to not only think differently but also to act differently, aligning your life with your evolving philosophy.

Resilience Through Struggle:

The process of self-inflicted philosophy builds resilience. Much like physical exercise strengthens muscles, the mental and emotional struggle of philosophical inquiry strengthens one’s ability to think critically, remain open-minded, and persist through intellectual and existential challenges.

Authenticity:

Finally, the “inflicted” nature ensures authenticity in one’s philosophical stance. It’s not philosophy for the sake of sounding wise or fitting into a particular school of thought; it’s philosophy born from a personal need to understand, to make sense of existence, or to live ethically. This authenticity makes the philosophy more relevant and impactful in one’s life.

In essence, the “inflicted” part of self-inflicted philosophy highlights the self-driven, often strenuous, yet ultimately rewarding process of creating a personal philosophy. It’s about taking responsibility for one’s intellectual and moral development, acknowledging that this journey might be as difficult as it is enlightening.

The Eight-Fold Path to creating your own philosophy:

“In the act of provoking people to think differently, philosophers make it clear that we are not fated to live within the often-stifling systems of thought that we inherit. We can change the subject.” ~Raymond Guess

To create your own philosophy using self-inflicted philosophy, follow these eight steps:

1.) Self-Questioning:

Begin by asking yourself fundamental questions about existence, morality, knowledge, and human nature. For example: What do I believe is the purpose of life? What constitutes a good life? How should I treat others and why? Do I have free will, or is it just an illusion? Is it worse to fail at something or to never make the attempt? Is there such a thing as a moral absolute or is morality relative? How do I square the circle of knowing I will die? Am I ready to accept that everything I believe is a lie? Document these questions and your initial thoughts to track your philosophical journey.

2.) Reading and Reflection:

Engage with a wide array of philosophical texts, but don’t limit yourself to traditional philosophy. Look into literature, science, art, and even personal narratives for insights.

Reflect on how these ideas resonate or conflict with your own views. Keep notes or a journal where you can argue with these ideas, agree, or expand upon them.

3.) Experience as Philosophy:

Use life experiences as case studies for your philosophical inquiry. Every interaction, decision, or event can be a source of philosophical insight. Ask how these experiences challenge or affirm your beliefs. For instance, facing an ethical dilemma in real life might push you to refine your moral philosophy.

4.) Critical Thinking:

Apply critical thinking to your thoughts and beliefs. Challenge your assumptions by asking why you believe what you do. Consider the opposite of your beliefs to understand their weaknesses or to see if they hold up under scrutiny.

5.) Synthesis of Ideas:

Start synthesizing your thoughts into a coherent framework. This doesn’t need to be systematic like traditional philosophy but should reflect your personal truth. You might find that your philosophy is eclectic, borrowing from various schools of thought while adding your unique perspective.

6.) Iterative Refinement:

Philosophy is not static; it evolves with you. Revisit and revise your philosophy as you grow, learn, and experience more of life. Engage in dialogues with others about philosophy to test and refine your ideas. This can be through discussions, writing, or debates.

7.) Practical Application:

Test your philosophy in daily life. How does it guide your actions, decisions, and interactions?

If your philosophy doesn’t serve you well or fails in application, adjust accordingly. Philosophy should be a tool for living, not just an abstract concept.

8.) Personal Manifesto:

Eventually, you might feel compelled to write down your philosophy. This could be in the form of a manifesto, a set of principles, or even a narrative that encapsulates your worldview.

By following this process, you’ll create a philosophy that is uniquely yours, one that reflects your life’s journey, your moral compass, and your understanding of the world. Remember, self-inflicted philosophy is about the journey of understanding yourself in relation to everything else, so be open to change and growth.

Image source:

Relics of a Mortal Past by Billelis

About the Author:

Gary Z McGee, a former Navy Intelligence Specialist turned philosopher, is the author of Birthday Suit of God and The Looking Glass Man. His works are inspired by the great philosophers of the ages and his wide-awake view of the modern world.

This article (How to Create Your Own Philosophy) was originally created and published by Self-inflicted Philosophy and is printed here under a Creative Commons license with attribution to Gary Z McGee and self-inflictedphilosophy.com. It may be re-posted freely with proper attribution, author bio, and this statement of copyright.

A Few Bananas Short of a Bunch

by Grow Up Conference | Dec 11, 2024 | Media Partners, The New Agora

A Few Bananas Short of a Bunch

By

Cognitive Dissonance

“You’ve been living in a dream world, Neo.” – Morpheus

“How did you go (morally) bankrupt?” Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.” ― With abject apologies to Ernest Hemingway and his “The Sun Also Rises”

“I reject your reality and substitute my own.” – Adam Savage from Mythbusters

I have this short-on-specifics, long-on-emotion memory of being young, around 9 or 10 years old, and in grade school during the mid 60’s. I was an introvert and thirsty for any knowledge that could help me better understand what to me was nothing less than insanity.

Even back then I instinctively knew the secret, though no one in their ‘right’ mind believed me when I voiced my concern. I was living in an insane asylum, populated by humans reasonably well adapted to close quarters and authoritarian rule. At least that’s the way it was in my house and just about every other home within walking distance.

Of course, the grand global collective, as diverse and culturally mixed as it claimed to be, pretty much followed similar directives. It did then, and in fact still does today. While it may be carefully concealed behind grand consensual governing concepts such as parliamentary rule, democracy or a representative republic, they couldn’t fool me. Whether by closed fist or pointed gun, it was pretty obvious to me the authoritarian few always ruled over the collective many.

I gravitated towards history (which at the time I believed was factual) and dove straight into the deep end head first. The good news was I wasn’t fully and properly indoctrinated yet, so there was a chance my young mind would survive somewhat intact now that some self-awareness was beginning to peek through.

The bad news was I had no effective way to filter out the propaganda, lies and distortions. One simply cannot fully discern truth without recognizing the lie for what it is and vice versa. It’s the contrast between the two that fully illuminates both.

A child’s mind has no more effective defense against deliberate and focused indoctrination than a child’s body has against a vicious rip tide. Both require treading water until either a path to shore materializes or exhaustion ends the struggle. Fully formed adults rarely possess the courage and perseverance to buck the trend and push back against the herd. What chance does a child have with far less experience and cognitive tools to work with?

Because my self-directed course of study was coloring way too far outside the lines to discuss openly and honestly with family or teachers, out of necessity I was a study group of one, the only one I could trust. Youthful innocence and naivete are both wonderful cognitive shields and deadly ankle weights. Without a buddy system for mutual support, it’s clear I wasn’t going to tread water for long.

I lived in a small southern New England town about halfway between the New York Yankees and the Boston Patriots, as they were then known. Roman Catholic theology was the general rule of the land, a time when the Lord’s word had equal or more weight than the ruling central government in DC. Or at least that’s what I was taught. It wasn’t just government mandated conditioning that was infiltrating my mind.

In my world history class, we were studying World War Two in general and Germany, Italy and Japan in particular, the so-called bad guys of that era. Let’s just say the text was not sympathetic to the other team and leave it at that. Any enemy of the Empire, vanquished and not yet vanquished, was presented to me as obviously a personal enemy of mine. The same ideological conditioning was used with presently favored friends of the Imperial Ideology. A friend of the Empire was most certainly a friend of mine.

While I mounted a mostly feeble and ineffective resistance to the rote training, exactly what portion of the firehose conditioning discharge do I not swallow? How do I not swallow? Resistance is, and was, futile without significant and continuous outside assistance, a crucial element I sadly lacked. My capitulation was not that far off.

As part of my personal exploration, I had already borrowed Hitler’s ‘Mein Kampf’ from the library (to this day I wonder why it was even in the elementary school library to begin with) and was ready to ask a few obvious-to-me questions.

That did not go over very well. Not well at all, in fact.

Until recently, there’s been one question about that period of time (the late 30’s, not the mid 60’s) that I never found a satisfactory answer for. How could all those people, average everyday people, not see how nonsensical and even insane things were becoming? From a big picture point of view, it was achingly obvious the planet had gone completely nuts and was headed towards self-immolation. The Planet of the Apes was quickly spiraling out of control.

I speak of all competing factions in that soon-to-be brutal and bloody conflict, including ‘We the People’. Notice how I didn’t conflate the US government with average Jane and Joe. The government, any government, is ultimately a fictitious entity supported, willingly or not, by the people. Jane and Joe, along with you and me, are ‘the people’.

Anything done in our name implies some, even minimal, personal responsibility. While I may not be personally bombing various other civilizations back into the stone age, washing my hands of any personal responsibility is a deliberately conditioned-from-birth reflex that enables the Empire to continue with its cold-blooded murder while I reap some of the benefits of being a citizen of the Imperium.

Expert behavioral conditioning is not only designed to be easily swallowed, but any contrary information must be immediately vomited up, spat upon and thoroughly rejected. Experiencing a cognitive dissonance can be emotionally disturbing and quite unsettling, compelling most people to do just about anything to make the pain go away. Triggering, combined with righteous indignation, usually fits the bill.

So why did we the people, both back during the late 1930’s as well as over the last 10 to 15 years, not see or do anything about the abject insanity quickly rising amongst themselves?

The answer, of course, is that we live in an insane asylum. Which by extension, means we are all verifiably insane. Assuming, of course, we could actually find a non-human expert (because how does an insane human correctly identify sanity) to conduct a study (government funded, of course) that would verify the inevitable findings as true and proper.

As previously noted, the issue back then was I had not yet been fully indoctrinated into the funny farm; therefore, I still retained some capacity to think clearly without the burden of full conditioning. This branded me as a deviant first class, a non-conforming irritant who refused to fully cooperate with the conditioning regime.

On a near weekly basis, I was a carrier pigeon for notes sent back home from indignant propagandists complaining to my keepers about my lack of servile prostration. I wasn’t ‘bad’ per se, just non-compliant. I asked awkward questions about delicate subjects polite society had decided weren’t discussed out in the open in our out-loud voice…and most certainly not from the mouth of babes.

I was the square peg who resisted conforming to the round holes everyone else insisted was true, correct and ‘normal’. While at the time I could not adequately explain what was wrong with ‘normal’, like former United States Supreme Court Justice Potter and pornography, I knew abnormal when I saw it. And it was everywhere.

Oh sure, by that age I definitely wore the burgeoning tramp stamp of Empire, enough at least to navigate and assimilate to some degree among the other inmates. But I still retained some unconstrained curiosity and desire to question fundamental assumptions and precepts. There were still a few more years before high school, where the final ‘sentient’ forming and molding would take place.

I failed to discover the answer to my question (essentially why were so many unaware of their own insanity) because I failed to understand the premise of my own question, completely understandable since I was already on the fast track to Imperial insanity. The final ingredient to the secret sauce is context and empathy, both directly derived from actual lived experience.

An understanding of my innate inner knowing was much more limited back then, mostly because I had begun to embrace the collective insanity as true and proper if for no other reason than to survive childhood in relative peace. Not only was my intellectual database small back then, but it was unregulated by experience in the form of empathy and perspective.

That’s what an education is supposed to instill in us; empathy and perspective. Primarily because the young lack direct lived experience, a proper education is supposed to partially fill that vacuum. At least that’s the theory anyway. In practice, our birth ignorance is viciously and ruthlessly exploited by those who cannot be questioned or named in order to create obedient cognitive cogs and compliant cannon fodder.

Just because the person administering the medicine might be pleasant and helpful doesn’t mean the medicine isn’t poison in disguise. Anyone who’s undergone chemotherapy and survived understands that concept all too well.

The bottom line is any Empire, any culture, any collective will create a shared reality by first creating narrative. And the primary directive of any narrative is to be self-affirming, at least to those within its embrace. Amateurs create narrative and shove it down our throats. Experts create narrative so compelling, interlocked and seemingly self-supporting, that we not only embrace it but ask for more.

Hence my interest in reading about how Hitler’s handlers massaged the people’s narrative. I wanted to know what they were told that compelled them to reject the obvious in favor of the insane. The thing about information warfare, aka propaganda, is the really good stuff, while walking, talking and acting like obvious propaganda to an outsider, is accepted as pretty much the truth (more or less) by the target.

My truth, that is. Your truth has a slightly different ingredient list and cooking instructions because both you and I ‘believe’ most, if not all, of our worldview is originally conceived. We ‘believe’ we are masters of our own unique universe and therefore act accordingly, meaning shockingly oblivious to any and all outside manipulation. Most importantly, it enables us to remain more or less in lockstep with other properly conditioned ideologues within our select group.

From the perspective of properly conditioned people, the only question that really counts is whether others are part of our ideological tribe or not. Either my cognitive gear set properly meshes with yours or it does not. When resources are plentiful, we collectively and individually can afford to be tolerant of deviants. When not, we are not. Guess which direction we’re headed these days.

In our current form and within the present collective reality, we are fully and properly conditioned to live in someone else’s reality. We no longer know how to create our own because our capacity to imagine, let alone perceive or manifest an alternative reality construct, is both mostly missing and actively suppressed.

Dangerously deviant thought will not be tolerated in any way, shape or form. Because reality flows from thought and belief (and not the other way around) deviant thought must be suppressed at all costs in order for an alternative consensus realty to be reliably groomed and directed.

Anything non-natural (meaning created by man’s hand) must first originate as an abstract thought and concept. Only then can it be fashioned by, and occasionally from, sinew and bone. I suspect I could even make a credible argument that all reality, natural or not, is a creation of man’s essential inner knowing and power.

I am reminded of Roger Banister, the first to run the four-minute mile. Once others realized the perceived impossibility of running a sub four-minute mile was actually quite possible, the extraordinary became ordinary and a new minimum standard was set. Perceived and lived reality is continuously created and altered by small nudges from you and me, the collective, and occasional large pushes by the grand masters.

Our cultural conditioning system goes so much deeper than ‘just’ government schools, social media, instant messaging and the 24/7/365 ‘news’ cycle. It’s composed of deeply embedded beliefs considered fundamental and static, handed down from generation to generation. After hundreds of iterations, and thousands of years of constant social, intellectual, political and religious conditioning, how could the end product be anything other than completely bonkers.

We no longer know what it is to be ‘human’ because there are so few living examples to interrogate, emulate and propagate. We are social creatures and much of our early learning is absorbed thru non-verbal communication often passively received. Suppress or remove a cultures central intellectual and moral influencers, apply stress and disorder, then shake vigorously, and society soon regresses to base instinct and emotion.

Sound familiar? Hell, my two cats are more intelligent, curious, compassionate and civilized than a significant slice of human beings these days.

I know we all wish to believe we broke thru the shell of our egg and progressed to adulthood fully charged, informed and functional. That we are all a product of hard work, self-actuation and perseverance established almost exclusively by our own ‘self’. But this is a self-deception of the highest order, desperately propagated by ourselves and like minded others in order not to upset our foundational conditioning.

In an insane world, structured order and predictability are critical to maintaining order among the unstable. Despite our lunacy, we can still maintain a semblance of internal cognitive order if we are provided plausible deniability we are insane. Introduce instability and the obvious becomes unmistakable. Chaos ensues.

We give far too little credit to our fundamental programming, our wetware BIOS or basic input/output system, which underlies and supports everything from basic human interaction to complex thought processes aka reality creation.

What comes first, the narrative or the fully formed self? In my opinion, the answer is obvious and self-evident. Humans are born into a mature collective narrative and are conditioned to conform and comply. To think there is no effect at all on us, or worse just a small influence, is to play directly into the hands of the master manipulators.

This all reminds me of a joke some people know to be true for others, but not for themselves, proving without a doubt how deeply immersed we are within the all-encompassing mind meme. It goes something like this.

Old man minnow crosses paths with two young self-absorbed minnows and booms a friendly greeting. “Good morning lads. The water is absolutely gorgeous today.”

The two youngsters, cocksure and full of themselves, ignore the old man as they pass, then hurl insults at his back. Once a decent interval has passed and the old man is no longer within ear shot, the younger minnow turns to his friend and asks “What’s water”?

Indeed, “what’s water” is the fundamental exploration we should all be pursuing. Until we not only ask the question, but thoroughly examine it for all its nuances and undertones, we remain just a few bananas short of a bunch. There’s no time to waste my friend. Bananas have a shockingly short shelf life, as do we mere humans.

by Cognitive Dissonance