For reasons outlined elsewhere, one should not be surprised to see the ascendancy of forms of human self-organization refiguring capitalist incentive and governance structures, and animated by alternative localized mythologies combusting social energy into cultural and economic product. In other words, wired entities that incorporate the characteristics of companies, cults, and squads¹.

The internet increasingly becomes ‘hard communication’ or ‘hard socialization’, and just as hard money eats soft money, the Wired is already eating the Real as the most effective tool to build social networks². The shrewd young prince is incentivized to move his business and social life online by the obvious comparative advantages in immediacy, geographic-agnosticism, and algorithmic compatibility-matching, and governance.

As this phenomenon emerges, the premium on genuine friendship spikes, in precisely the era that it becomes punished (as friendship-based economic networks threaten state power, it is only natural that True Friendship, and True Fun³ has become practically illegal). In business, friendship finds its highest form, and dying concepts become essential once more.

Loyalty

Loyalty is a primary factor in determining fitness for friendship, a virtue without which all others become meaningless. This is because loyalty properly conceived is the application of personal virtue to the interpersonal realm. Loyalty, like generosity, stems from overabundance of energy— never from duty, unless a self-imposed duty to distribute the energies of one’s overabundant spirit.

The depreciation of both the significance and frequency in common parlance of words like Honour, Virtue, and Loyalty is an incalculable disaster for the quality of male friendships— the highest form of which has historically been something like a guild or an alliance, which now find their spiritual successor in business.

These terms are derided as outdated and irrelevant, but they represent values which have saved the world over and over, and will again— they arose as abstractions of extremely robust heuristics developed between mighty and capable men, as a heuristic for determining the few people worthy of trust.

Personal Virtue

All bad and good traits hang together, since they all spring from the same origin; an abundance or dearth of spirit. Where one sin is found, another is likely to be discovered soon. This is a truth which all people of worth acknowledge, and which nobody lacking in spirit and substance can ever possibly admit.

Weakness, incompetence, gracelessness and dishonesty are sins against God, against the self, and inevitably against others in their behavioural manifestations. These will poison a friendship. Sins of poverty, instability and vice are more nuanced and will be addressed below, but as a man grows older the persistence of these sins is a surer marker of spiritual decrepitude.

Those who are incapable and suffer too much cannot afford to forgive nor to trust, lacking the wealth and security of spirit to wager on uncertain reciprocity— they are too afraid of being stolen from, because they have so little to steal.

Energy

Broadly speaking, a worthwhile person keeps busy with activities which are productive and effortful, and are usually also productive outside of employment. The person who scorns discomfort, unfamiliarity, and effort is not worth knowing, unless taken on as a pupil out of a wealth of spirit.

Know that those lacking in energy are also more cruel, entitled and narcissistic, though these sins are often internally justified by imagining powerful and energetic people to be a lowlier species of unthinking busybodies, or status-obsessed zombies. If I were an idiot, they muse, If I could bring myself to sacrifice for such trivialities, then I could thoughtlessly occupy myself with pointless activities of the busybody zombies, and be as happy as they are.

This is a narcissistic nihilism for the weak and incapable, insecure and spiritless. They become duplicitous and spiteful, because their desired and projected self-image differs so egregiously from their genuine soul. There is no way for a man to escape spite except through virtue and worthiness; failing that, through death.

Mental Illness (Socially-Validated Sin)

In a vast majority of cases, long-term negative emotion, malaises, paralyzing pessimism, etc, are actually the result of habitual indulgence and concessions to vices of thought, minimisation of agency through self-pity, and weak externalisation of blame. A person who practices wallowing in self-pity and incapacity becomes good at it.

This is why ketamine and nicotine assist in curing depression alongside intervention; depression is a complex of neurological pathways formed by habit.

Read a more developed discussion discussion of depression here.

Romantic Success

Involuntary deprivation of female company proceeds directly from various forms of weakness, and those who are deprived act in much the same way as those incapacitated by sin. In most cases, their psyches are dominated by the spectre of their incapacity, and they suffer from the dissonance between being deprived of something which they feel they are worthy of, and the obvious truth that this very deprivation is proof of their unworthiness.

This domination of the psyche precludes all true loyalty, since dedication to a friend or a shared mission is inevitably subjugated to a scarcity-minded weakness to female temptation; their loyalty is contingent on the mission’s compatibility with their pursuit of the imagined wholeness which comes from female respect.

The tragedy of the man rich of spirit is that he has only one life to give; therefor his triumphal deliverance is in unity with a woman, in whose womb lies a portal to eternal life, and to eternal magnanimity.

They will always be loyal to something lower, and will betray you or themselves once the choice between women and friendship is presented. Their mistake, of course, is that the respect and love of women is an effect of precisely the virtue which they cannot attain unless they were to forsake women for a higher goal.

Luck ( = Agency = Energy)

Lucky people are lucky because they make their own luck. This phrase of course denies the colloquial conception of luck as the domain of happenings outside one’s control, but the truth is that people who consider themselves lucky have a high level of agency, and that luck is an emergent phenomenon proceeding from the life of a highly agentic, energetic person. When a person considers themselves to be unlucky, they are making a veiled admission to the belief that they are dominated by external forces to the detriment of their life— that is, that they lack agency.

In searching for a ceiling on the amount of agency one can accrue, one will die before they find it.

1. A person has access to as much agency as they are willing to seize.
2. To seize agency one must believe that agency can be seized, lest an outcome be psychologically relegated to the domain of ‘bad luck’.
3. A belief in one’s own ability to seize agency proceeds from energy and competence: competence is the power to harness causality by locally reversing entropy, and energy is the boldness to exercise this power.
4. The extent to which one has captured causal factors, snatched them from the jaws of chance and spirited them back to the realm of agency is the extent to which one experiences lucky outcomes.

To determine whether a person is lucky, you can simply ask them. A person of high energy inevitably seizes agency and gains competence, drawing more factors into the realm of their control. Though it is possible for a person to actively self-sabotage, a healthy person rarely uses their own agency to lessen the quality of their outcomes.

An astrologer foretells that the king will die in one month. The king is crushed and falls sick with despair. His most trusted knight summons the astrologer before the king and asks him, “when will YOU die?” 20 years from now, the astrologer answers. The knight beheads him immediately.

More on Agency here.

Nuanced Factors

Poverty

As a man grows older, poverty becomes a surer sign of spiritual decrepitude, and a conclusion on a person can only be drawn with further information. Temporary poverty can stem from virtuous sources, such as the vicissitudes of a life intensely lived, or a monk-like disregard for materiality. However, those bitter about their financial station are unlikely to be salvageable, as this suggests incapacity and low energy.

Vice

Vices and addictions are marks of unsaintly character, but also near-universal, even in powerful and worthwhile men. This is true often enough that an apparent total lack of vice can be a warning sign. Vices function as releases of energy or animal spirit which are otherwise not sublimated into productive output. Monsters of energy and industry destroy more in epic benders of compulsion and caprice than lowlier people can hope to create in lifetimes of idle pottering.

Apparent vicelessness can signify 3 things:

1. That vices are present, but secret. Possibly because the vice is shameful or perverted, or the person is dishonest — most people have a vice, and the souls of spiritual titans produce outpourings like a pressurised tank of steam, with powerful instincts and raw energy either sublimated into productivity, or depressurised as vice.
2. That the person is not spiritually energetic and titanic enough to have a vice worth speaking of: Their energy, low as it is, is adequately channeled into acceptable acts.
3. That the person is spiritually ascended.

1. The modern joint-stock corporation is rarely credited as the form of post-political social organization that it is; the only truly successful formula for in-group autonomy in the shadow of the state. ↩

2. NB: HardCom has eaten SoftCom before. The social world of language (signs representing physical objects and actions) is an arena of symbolic negotiation and competition which metaphorizes the world of manual competition (physical conflict). In much the same way, the Wired is a virtuality of social life wherein the symbol:noise ratio is further refined by the transposition of the act of communication to a higher-order symbolic realm abstracted from a lower one; a dream between bodies. ↩

3. True Fun is not “dab rig and video games”, it’s amassing a treasury to match the economy of a small African nation, or a running a kleptocratic slave empire in a WoW guild. ↩