I’m sure s/he must be asking itself the same question at this point, given what we’ve done to the planet. I suspect it was boredom. After 65 million years of the dinos, God had had enough. S/he needed something new, fresh, exciting to rejuvenate its creative energy. After awhile it must have been like having the fish tank screen saver on your computer. Very cool…but for 65 million years? So, fire a meteor into the earth, presto-blammo, dino-die-off, now taking applications for new species or new variations on old species. Must be creative, like Me.

Now, after only 1 million years, humans have developed the capability to kill God, or any concept of the sacred, both figuratively and literally. We are destroying the planet, which is our source of life, because to us no life is sacred, every life has a price or a use for someone else. The dinosaurs lasted 65 million years and it took a meteor to wipe them out. We’ve been around 1/65th of the time and are wiping ourselves out. Who had the tiny brain, again?

Life is sacred, not just mine but yours, too. I have no right to kill or exploit you in order to enhance my own life. And you will similarly respect me or I reserve the right to defend myself by whatever means necessary. When capitalism or communism or fascism or any other ‘ism’ permits this exploitation, that system is immoral, destructive, and ultimately self-destructive.

This basic truth, that life is sacred, has been lost, killed, sold.

God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we, murderers of all murderers, console ourselves? That which was the holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet possessed has bled to death under our knives. Who will wipe this blood off us?
– Friedrich Nietzsche

As we lose respect for others, and for that which created and sustains us, so we lose respect for ourselves, and we decay into moral lassitude, on a path to destruction but too drunk to care.

Not everybody is like this, of course. There are many people more aware of reality, and more moral. I believe the vast majority of people contain an innate degree of conservatism, meaning our natural preference is to move slowly and cautiously forward. That’s our history; generation after generation saw little change.

And when changes did come, often they were bad. A new oppressor, perhaps. Invasion. Some mysterious disease.

As a result, most of us fear change. We were bred to maintain the status quo. Unfortunately, much as we fear change we fear not to reproduce, and inevitably this puts a civilisation in a predicament. So far, no civilisation has escaped this predicament, and now it is our turn.

However, we have something no previous civilisation had: we know that they existed, and roughly what happened to them.

We also know how to avoid the predicament: live sustainably. Live within the limits set by God and nature, and you and your heirs will prosper. Destroy that which God and nature have provided, and barren will be your earth.

I deliberately phrased some of this article in Biblical-sounding prose to remind us of where most of us got our first concept of the sacred: in a church or synagogue or mosque or some holy text. Those with an allergic reaction to the word of concept of ‘God’ may be offended; that is their choice. I was once that way, but it doesn’t make sense to throw away the lessons of the past, including moral teachings, because one doesn’t like the source.

We have killed God and put The Almighty Dollar in its place, and we have the morals to match. We have embraced the Seven Deadly Sins and made them virtues. Prudence and thrift and “waste not want not” are quaint relics that we believe are better replaced with Greed is Good.

There is a part of all of us that understands the concept of the sacred, and thus worships life. Spiritual leaders like Jesus and Gandhi sought to get us to expand that consciousness to other aspects of our character, to other people, even animals.

Jesus shielded the prostitute and kicked over the tables of the money-lenders; we do just the opposite. We judge harshly those we fear, like prostitutes and drug dealers, to evade the reality that we go much easier on crooked CEOs and banksters because we benefit from the system they represent. We are complicit in our own entrapment.

We can avoid the predicaments of overpopulation, resource scarcity, pollution, peak oil, and even natural climate change like ice ages by simply living sustainably. For example, if we know that large areas of the earth get covered by ice every 20,000 years, we don’t put billions of people in those areas.

That would be planning ahead. This, by the way, would have kept us to a much smaller population centred around the equator, except for the Inuit. Of course, we didn’t really figure out the cycles of the ice ages until fairly recently and we had already carved up the planet into nations by that point. But at least we could agree that countries affected by the ice age need to plan accordingly, and as some of them are likely to disappear entirely (like Canada and the Scandinavian countries, for example) they should start planning for their demise. Preferably by attrition, meaning to let the population naturally decline to zero sometime in advance of the ice age.

The situation described is roughly the reverse of the one we do face under climate change, with the countries close to the equator likely to be wiped out and the northern ones – well, benefitting from warmer and shorter winters, but starting to pay the price from wild storms, wildfires, and water shortages that are going to get much worse soon.

But we don’t think 20,000 years ahead, and we don’t think even 100 years ahead now. Many of us think in very short terms indeed: executives quarterly, workers paycheque-to-paycheque; our houses are built to last 70 years. No need to worry about any signs of them being around come the ice age.

We don’t even consider our children’s future any more. Nothing is sacred. We consume everything and leave nothing for our children, not even hope. What kind of parents are we? Our family lines deserve to die out.

We don’t have to end this way. We can rediscover the sense of sacred within ourselves. And we must exert our right to restrain those who would harm that which is sacred: life; creation itself.

In a complete departure from my usual peak oil/climate change/collapse posts, I would like to digress into romance – which, believe it or not, ties indirectly into the problems just mentioned. This post is aimed at single men.

Dear Men,

If you’re alone this Valentine’s Day, you probably don’t care that much. (If you have a girlfriend or wife, she probably will….) However, if you’re alone much of the time and are tired of it, then you need to make some changes in your life. I did, and it made all the difference in the world for me.

If you’re sick of seeing ads like the one below, with the happy, smiling couples, and thinking that could never be you, then perhaps it’s time to change.

Not many years ago, I was in my early forties and very lacking in confidence with women.  This seems quite strange to people who know me, as I had been married – and divorced – twice by that point. However, one of the reasons I kept jumping into marriages was because of this lack of confidence. I would get my courage up long enough to get close to a woman and promptly propose.

Take it from me, marriage is not a solution to loneliness; it can actually make it worse. The solution is not to “find someone, anyone,” but to develop your confidence.

Women are Attracted to Confident Men

This Valentine’s Day give the gift of confidence to yourself.  If you come across as lacking in confidence, you ain’t getting nowhere with women. Developing confidence will pay off not just in ‘getting women,’ but in every area of your life. We are entering troubled times that are unlikely to end, and we need confident men.

Now, you can be confident based on an honest assessment of your abilities or simply on believing in yourself regardless of evidence, or ideally based on both. George W. Bush was widely described as cocky – and look where that got him. You may or may not be happy about Bush’s rise to the most powerful position in the world, but the fact is that a lot of very confident men get what they want out of life whether they deserve it or not.

(If you are cursed with a certain impulse toward honesty, you are very unlikely to rise far in our society regardless of your confidence, because our society is in denial about fundamental facts about reality and won’t want to hear what you have to say. However, you will be happier by being true to yourself and will certainly do better with confidence than without.)

The world needs self-confident men, men willing to face reality. We don’t need more cocky men, we need confident men. Part of confidence is choosing reality, not wishful thinking. Cockiness often requires ignoring reality.

It’s Not Money

Many men think women are attracted to money, and to a certain extent this is true. Many women are also attracted to power, fast cars, material possessions, and other things you may or may not have. There are a lot of immature or insecure women in the world, and you can certainly attract them with wealth and power – but do you want an insecure woman? You will if you are insecure yourself, but not if you are a confident man.

Most women want a man who is sure of himself and who is going places. They want you to have some ambition, to have some goals in life, to know yourself. You can be a fry cook at McDonalds and attract women – if you have confidence and a plan. If your plan is to work menial jobs so you can smoke dope all day, don’t be surprised if women are unimpressed.

Why Jerks Get Women, or, Nice Guys Get Nothing

I used to be one of those ‘nice guys’ who complained that the women only went for the jerks, the assholes who treated them poorly. What I eventually discovered was that women don’t really like jerks, but they like the confidence the jerk displays by clearly not caring what others think about him.

No woman wants a man who is clingy, who always wants to know what she wants, who has no preferences or desires of his own, and so on. Jerks appear confident because, by treating the woman poorly, they appear to have confidence. Women with high self-worth see through this and they want a confident, non-jerky man.

One word of warning, especially if you buy the DeAngelo ebook or something similar; don’t turn into a misogynist. Some guys, presumably lacking confidence, are only able to be forward with women by disrespecting them. Make no mistake, they will get women, but they will never keep a good woman.

Women Want to be Ravished

Or, women like sex, too, but they have certain hangups about it that prevent (most of) them from being forward. This I learned from David Deida (see the next section), and it is quite true. It has not been acceptable for women to make sexual overtures since forever, and that is not simply social conditioning; it is also one of the ways that women test a man (see the section after next).

As a result, women usually want the man to take the initiative sexually and will lose respect for you if you don’t – or don’t at least try. Believe it or not, Mr. Nice Guy, you are far better off to try early and inappropriately than too late or weakly. Whatever you do, don’t frickin ask; that defeats the whole purpose. This rather crude but hilarious craigslist post gets the idea across.

Women Don’t Know What They Want

With apologies to women, they really don’t know what they want. This is why women seem so confusing to men, who are more goal-oriented and concrete. A book that helped me tremendously in my journey was David Deida’s The Way of the Superior Man. Deida did not mean that men are superior to women.  The purpose of the book is to show you how to be a superior man. This book is definitely not for everyone, as it gets pretty esoteric in spots.

Let me give you two highlights:

• Women are like the ocean, a largely undirected but enormous source of power – the power of creation
• Men are like ships on the ocean; we can work in harmony with the forces of the ocean and achieve our goals, or we can fight the ocean and be destroyed

What this means in practice is that women have ’storms’ that sometimes seem to appear from nowhere – and as quickly dissipate. And that a man stirs up or makes such storms worse at his peril. It also means that sometimes the storms have nothing to do with you, but you just happened to be sailing through at the time and have to deal with it. As a confident man, you just deal with it and are not drawn into the swirling vortex of emotions yourself; an unconfident man reacts to the storm by trying to ‘make it better,’ or by getting pulled in and angry or emotional himself, or in some other way making the tempest worse.

It also means that women can be a great support and help to a man; take away the ocean and it’s a long and hard walk from one continent to another.

Women are Always Testing

Women constantly test men to see if they are worthy. Get over it. You will never find a woman who accepts you completely and utterly and forever, no matter what you do, except possibly your mother. (And even there….) Women are biologically wired to seek security. This comes, I am sure, from millennia of being the one who got pregnant and then having to raise a child; this puts a woman in a vulnerable position. A few decades of reliable birth control is hardly enough to overcome thousands of years of biological programming, so women want to know that a man is going to stick around and help with that child before he gets into her loincloth.

Men also seek security, but in different ways; power, money, status, credentials, connections – all are forms of security. This is one reason many women seek men with these things, because they mean some degree of security.

Be Physical

Women are often accused by men of being ‘too emotional,’ and it is certainly true that women’s emotions are more obviously displayed. However, men have emotions, too; that’s why so many drive ridiculously large pickup trucks, for example. They got suckered by emotional appeals by automobile advertisers, but can’t admit it, so rationalise away the need for such an expensive and impractical vehicle. Such men are indeed compensating for something: a lack of confidence. They would be embarrassed to buy a more practical vehicle; they care too much about what other people think.

That said, I think most men will agree that women are generally much more emotional than men, and this leads to a key difference: where men attempt to ‘think things through,’ women respond much better to the physical. If your male buddy faced some difficult situation, few men would offer a hug. Instead, we would attempt to help by talking in some way.

Women don’t work that way. Because they are more emotional, they are less rational – in the way men think of rational. We think it is far more rational to sit and discuss a difficult issue, say financial woes, where to woman action speaks far louder than words.  Let me give you a personal example, a lesson that I learned from a wiser man than me and that I did not really believe until I tried myself.

This fellow faced a situation where his wife, a new immigrant with her child, had become very upset. She had left her country to come and be with this man, and suddenly she got scared. She had given up a job, had brought her child, didn’t speak the language that well, knew nobody else in the new country, was now utterly dependent upon this man…and suddenly was having doubts about her decision. After a giant argument, the woman was in the bathroom sobbing her heart out.

What to do? Most men would try to talk, to calm her down, to reassure. This man, however, was a superior man. He recognised, consciously or not, that his woman had become overcome by fear. He walked into the bathroom and kissed her, hard. She melted. Her fears subsided (remember: ocean, storms…) and the sailing was smoother after that.

It makes for a nice story, and I remembered it but didn’t really believe it. It sounded like something out of a old movie. Then, one day….

My wife was extremely upset about something (me, obviously.) Extremely. Curled up in a ball, sobbing uncontrollably upset. In my pre-Superior Man life I would have attempted to talk, or ‘given her some space’ until she was more rational. That hadn’t worked before – I had gone through two divorces, if you recall.

So I walked over to her and wrapped my arms around her and just hugged her, hard. It took a moment, and then she melted. Her fears subsided. I was amazed. She relaxed and got back into a better place.

Getting Women – or at least A Woman

Ok, so what does all this have to do with getting laid/a girlfriend/relationship/wife? You are far more likely to get any or all of those if you have some confidence in yourself, in your future, and you understand women a little bit.

Here are the things I did to overcome my lack of confidence with women:

1. I made new habits. This is critical. I practised a new behaviour not just once or a few times, but often enough that it became comfortable. Then I upped the ante; I pushed myself further out of my comfort zone. This included being ‘forward’ with women, and flirting – see below.
2. I stopped taking things personally, a very bad habit of mine that I still battle. Some women are not going to be interested in you, and there’s nothing you can or should do about that. Move on.
3. I dated. A lot. I went speed dating. I joined Match.com, Lavalife.com, veggiedate.org (I’m vegetarian), and others that I’ve forgotten. I even put ads in the personals and joined a video dating service. All of those produced dates; 90% of them were with women I had no further interest in seeing a second time. So what? Look at all the practice I got interacting with women – I got much more comfortable talking with women, and with…
4. Flirting – it’s not just for women, and women love it when men flirt. Male flirting is not at all the same as female flirting, and that brings me to….
5. I bought a course from David DeAngelo. I spent over one hundred dollars on an eBook and a course of CDs that claimed to teach “How To Meet And Attract Beautiful Women… Even If You Aren’t Tall, Rich Or Handsome.” (The link is to the eBook; it looks like the CD and DVD-courses may not be available. I sold mine on eBay after I was done with it, so you may want to look there.) Both were great and will teach you invaluable lessons – if you do what is recommended. This takes courage. If nothing else, sign up for DeAngelo’s free tips.

Where the Rubber Meets the Road

Or the you-know-what. The things I mentioned – online and speed dating, DeAngelo’s courses – all will work if you do the work.  There are no magic formulas that eliminate the need for courage and a willingness to take chances. If you aren’t ready for that, there’s always the Fleshlight, I suppose.

But if you are, then give yourself the ultimate gift – of self-confidence. Believe in yourself, and trust that there is a woman for you. You may have to go through many of them to find yours, or even to know yourself well enough and to develop sufficient confidence to get the woman you deserve. Enjoy the journey, and know that it is just as important as the destination.

UPDATE: For those interested, here is a follow-up article: Suggestions for Unattached Men II – Getting Lots of Dates and Flirting.

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Resources for this post

Here are some of the things that worked for me to develop more confidence with women. Online dating services like Match and lavalife will get you in front of a lot of women. Be forewarned; beautiful women get overwhelmed with responses. DeAngelo (the uppermost banner) has excellent tips for dealing with this, including keeping your ad fresh, being one of the first to contact a woman who has just placed an ad, and creating an intriguing ad of your own.