part0011

Noble Beasts, mighty and wild, go forward always with a conquering eye! A raptor’s eye, sharp and sweeping, an eye that picks out prey on the most desolate plain. An ascendent eye, undaunted by loss, always looking for the next chance to win. An eye that recognizes responsibility — but never lingers on blame — for the Noble Beast has no time for the licking of wounds.

The Noble Equation describes the internal world of the Noble Beast; it describes how he sees himself. Propelled by the thrust of this self-turning psychic dynamo, he sees the world before him with the savage, dilated oculus of one whose intransigent gut craves conquest before comfort and cannot be satiated in submission.

Unbound by the moral valuations of whip crackers and wary of the jealous trap, he treks through the derelict hinterland of the soul carefully and deliberately, treading lightly, evaluating the consequences of his impulses, his desires, and the choices before him with lucid reason. When he encounters challenges, he approaches them with the eye of a conqueror — the terrible and tenacious eye of a beast who looks for triumph, for some kind of win, for some positive outcome, even in his dying moment. When the way forward is blocked, his eye seeks a way around or a way through. His is the motto of Hannibal: “Inveniam viam aut faciam .” I shall find a way or make one.

The man who wants his hand held, who wants to be led and coddled and caressed by empty compliments — this ignoble creature encounters problems and relents. He sees only the most obvious options and is quick to make excuses. He easily resigns himself to the half-full glass. Even when adequate solutions are presented or made available to him, he prefers to question the source.

The Conquering Eye evaluates every conceivable option, and selects the one most likely to work, no matter who or where it came from, because he wants to win! The Noble Beast wants the most effective weapons, the most efficient tools, the most talented and driven people at his disposal. Consider the source, but take the best that everyone has to offer.

So many motivational books popular with executives and entrepreneurs simply teach people how to think like winners — like Noble, Nietzschean beasts who believe they are worthy of success and who will themselves to become more powerful. One has only to brush aside the quaint moral parsley of managerial classics to find simple and effective lessons about how to think like a man who wants to win. Examples of reactive statements like, “There’s nothing I can do,” “That’s just the way I am,” “I can’t,” “They won’t allow that,” and “If only…,” are statements of the doom-and-gloom resignation that is generally accompanied by ressentiment. 13 Instead, ambitious men are encouraged to proactively look for alternative solutions and different approaches while controlling their own feelings and responses to challenging situations.

The Noble Beast, like the “effective” man, also approaches the world with an “abundance” mentality. He sees more than one way to win, and sees multiple opportunities for those around him to win as well. The ignoble, ineffective man sees that someone else has won, and resigns himself to being one of the losers.

To achieve his ends, the Noble Beast must also be willing to turn his keen eyesight inward. Not to feverishly examine himself for symptoms of festering psychological sores or constitutional handicaps — not to find excuses — but to find yet more obstacles that must be overcome. Nietzsche wrote, “The noble man honors in himself the powerful one, him also who has power over himself.”

Men are fond of hard and simple talk about “self-discipline,” and there is something to be said for simply being able to say “no” to your own immediate desires in the service of a superordinate objective. It is also important to be able to say “no” to others, which is more difficult than it sounds to anyone who was raised to be polite and accommodating. Expansiveness is a feature of masculinity that indicates strength and security, and while cultivating the habits and image of a “despiser of rings” or a “big man in the village” can be an effective leadership strategy, it can also become something of a vice that enslaves you to obligations and a tyranny of little favors that may distract you from more meaningful achievements. One must be able to say “no” to oneself and “no” to others selectively. If you never say “no,” as with women, men will never respect you, and the value of your “yes” declines economically.

The ability to say “no” to oneself is fundamental and necessary, but this sort of self-discipline is merely…disciplinary…and there’s a flavor of masochism to it that one really has to have a taste for. It can be heavy-handed and oafish when applied to every situation. The Noble Beast must be able to say “no” to himself, but a man who says “yes” to life cannot thrive in a world of “no.” There’s a slavish craving for punishment in this. Self-control is control, not abstinence or asceticism. Don’t love the whip too much. It is more advanced and far more interesting to learn when to say “yes” to oneself. What good is power if you never enjoy it?

To have power over oneself also means to have power over one’s story. People allow their stories to control them. They write narratives about themselves based on prior experience and allow those narratives to become self-fulfilling prophecies.

There’s this quote from a weird little novel by Fight Club author Chuck Palahniuk that’s stuck with me for years and years.

“When you realize the story you’re telling is just words, then you can just crumble it up and throw your past in the trashcan.”

The narrator in that particular story follows this by saying, “then we’ll figure out who you’re going to be.”

History itself is more or less “just a story,” or — especially when it comes to ancient history — a “just-so” story, written down as a parable years after events were believed to have occurred with the intent of justifying a current reality, inflating the reputation of a beloved figure or teaching a lesson. So many tales about ancient Greeks or Romans or historical figures like Ghenghis Khan are nearly unverifiable, just as “Biblical truth” is for the most part unverifiable. Most people who read these stories today are seeking some sort of inspiration or enlightenment. No one knows if Gaius Mucius Scaevola actually put his hand in an Etruscan fire and said, “Watch, so that you know how cheap the body is to men who have their eye on great glory.” No one knows if Hannibal really said, “Inveniam viam aut faciam ” before crossing the Alps with troops and battle elephants. These stories may or may not be factually “true,” but they are nevertheless inspiring.

People also retell their own stories, sometimes exaggerating their achievements with mythical pomp and flourish, but even more often, they retell these stories to explain their faults and failures. This likely increased in accordance with the deluge of pop psychotherapy which has for more than a century encouraged people to scour their own histories for signs of youthful emotional traumas that might explain their tendencies, neuroses, limitations and phobias. While it can be useful to evaluate the effectiveness and consonance of previous actions and psychological responses to events, these actions and especially one’s internal responses are ordinarily as unverifiable as the details of ancient history. Unless your previous actions or responses became part of a legal proceeding or some public record, almost no one will remember them when you are dead. Almost no one actually cares about the banal minutiae of your personal story, except possibly your mother, and she has her own version anyway. You are the one keeping these stories about your past alive by repeating them to yourself and to others. Are these stories inspiring, or are they limiting?

So many obstacles in life are fictions or questionable interpretations we write about ourselves based on a belief that our past necessarily determines our future. The fact that you did something once does not mean you are doomed to do it that way again and again and again. You do not have to be who you were as a child. You don’t have to be who you were in high school. You don’t have to make the same mistakes, or handle things the same way that you did years ago or even yesterday.

The highest form of self-control is to stand godlike above yourself and recreate yourself according to your own will.

If your story becomes an obstacle, find a way to crumple it up and throw it in the trashcan. Focus on the present. Write a new story about how you are going to handle challenges in the future.

Many of these narratives aren’t even based on past history — they’re based on lack of experience, poor assessment or bad information. However, people allow these snap judgments and erroneous beliefs to limit them, because these limitations become safe and comfortable. Preemptively identifying a handicap that prevents you from doing something protects you from both the exertion and the risk of embarrassment involved in trying and failing.

People, even smart people, even people who are working hard to learn something, very often talk themselves into failing at the very thing they are working so hard to learn. The saying, “get out of your own way,” applies here.

My favorite part of training with a man who is young or new to a particular discipline is recognizing that moment when he overcomes himself — when he overcomes his own narratives and instead of just forcing himself to try, he truly believes for the first time that he can. That he is capable. That he has the potential to not merely go through the motions of a thing, but to actually do well. To succeed. To do better than he ever honestly and viscerally believed that he could. That moment when he believes that he can win. When the switch flips, and a man who never truly allowed himself to believe that he could do something suddenly believes that he can — that’s something special. That is a spiritual experience — an instant when his narrative has opened up and almost anything seems possible.

Seek out this transcendent moment. Control yourself not merely by saying “no,” but also by challenging and conquering your own limiting narratives.

There is an inspiring tendency I’ve noticed in training alongside elite athletes, and it taught me a great deal about thinking like a winner.

Winners don’t focus on losing, even when they lose. I’ve watched men put themselves through months of grueling training, thinking every waking hour of every day about achieving a particular goal. Then I’ve stood a few feet from them at the moment of truth, rooted for them and given them all of the mental support a friend can give…and watched them fail. And —minutes later — I found that I was more crushed by their defeat than they were. Often, they were already planning their training for the next event, or trying to figure out the next big goal. They weren’t focused on losing, they were already looking forward the next opportunity to win. Of course they would, at some point, review their performance and try to figure out what they did wrong, but never to find excuses or someone to blame for their shortcomings — only to find opportunities to improve in the future.

We might call this tendency “golden laughter,” a phrase borrowed from a passage late in Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil. He believed that Noble men were unable, “to take seriously for any length of time their enemies, their disasters, their misdeeds—that is the sign of the full strong natures who possess a superfluity of moulding plastic force, that heals completely and produces forgetfulness.” 14

The takeaway here is this: when you are tempted to luxuriate in lamentation over some loss — and we all are, occasionally — start looking instead for the next win. Shift your focus forward.

The eye that seeks conquest cannot be distracted by hate.

The hateful eye is always looking backwards, up, around and over. The eyes of the conqueror — of the predator — are placed forward in the skull, always looking ahead. Always “on to the next one.” The leery, fearful eyes of prey animals, situated on the sides of the head, scan about nervously and hatefully for the snapping jaws of oblivion. The antelope hates the lion, but if the lion hates at all, he hates only other lions.

The Noble Beast is a maker of values, a chooser of virtues, and he certainly finds those who reject or fail to live up to his high expectations to be despicable in some way. As one who believes that he is and strives to be good, noble, mighty, beautiful and loved by the gods — he holds the weak ones, the craven and crafty ones, the perpetual victims, the ugly ones and the jealous souls who seem to hate beauty itself in contempt. He dismisses them with disgust or perhaps even observes them with some small passing measure of pity. But he cannot be moved or bothered to “hate” them. He looks down upon them and hold them in low esteem.

Nietzsche wrote that, “one does not hate as long as one disesteems, but only when one esteems equal or superior.” 15

To hate is to empower and, possibly, to submit. Hatred raises up someone or some group who has “wronged” — or bested — you in some way, and bestows upon them a supernatural power and primacy in your psychic world. To hate someone is to acknowledge them as an enemy, at the very least — a dangerous equal. To hate is to honor. And, to admit that you hate some foe because they have power over you, preventing you from doing something, exerting strength and thriving — this is not only a great honor, but an upturning of the hand. It is one thing to acknowledge an unfortunate set of circumstances and even to acknowledge that these circumstances are the result of another man or group of men pressing their interests through strength or cunning, but the passion of hatred glorifies. The most poisonous insult is the bitter fruit of jealousy and ressentiment.

The best historical example of this, and I think it’s worth mentioning here because Nietzsche seemed to have some conflicting opinions about it, is the question of “The Jews.” While Nietzsche attributed the transvaluation of values and even ressentiment itself to some group of Jews, he also seemed to have nothing but contempt for his anti-Semitic contemporaries. I’m inclined to think he encountered in his day what I have in mine — that the men who are most obsessed with “The Jews” are the men who are most thoroughly ruled by them. These men can’t stop talking about “The Jews” and ascribe fantastic, godlike powers to them that allow “The Jews” to control all things and oppress them with omniscient authority. One wonders how much better off the anti-Semites would be if they spent all of that time and energy working on improving their own circumstances or actually creating something — instead of complaining and “spreading awareness” about some Jewish conspiracy. There are small groups of Jewish activists who are obsessed with “exposing” people they call “neo-Nazis” and a small minority of white activists who are obsessed with “exposing” the “Jewish conspiracy” and I have found through experience that it is best to stay out of the way of both of them if you want to avoid the tornado of shit they both spin around them wherever they go.

It is reasonable to assess a person or a group of people and recognize that they have different or competing interests. In fact, in is reasonable to assume that almost every stranger has different and competing interests. Further, if you are not “in” a group, then that group may at some point advance interests that conflict with your interests or the interests of your own group. It is reasonable to observe the techniques and practices of other groups from a strategic perspective. This is very old and very natural — as old and natural as hunting and herding peoples competing over the best lands for hunting and grazing. This is basic human tribalism.

Hatred, however, is a distraction from winning. It’s a distraction from thriving and from the enjoyment of life. There will always be circumstances beyond your control. There will always be bears in the woods. Life is never fair and it was never easy. The conquering eye looks for ways to achieve positive outcomes in negative situations.

Hatred is a form of spiritual exhaustion, a passive masochism that relaxes into impotent submission when a man or a people have spent their will-to-power and creative energy resigning themselves to a purgatory of blame-seeking and comforting excuses. To escape the black gravity of this purgatory, the impulse to blame and hate must be overcome and replaced with the fire of visionary creativity and a renewed passion for life.