Hi, I’d like to present an idea:

“Become as capable as the weapon you wield.”

 

In his 1977 article “The Theory of Affordances”[1] psychologist James J. Gibson describes the world as perceived through a lens of all “action possibilities” latent in the environment. For understanding what this means, I particularly like an example given by Professor Jordan B. Peterson. It goes something like this: ask yourself, what constitutes a chair? Well, you might say, maybe a flat surface upon 4 legs. But that’s obviously wrong, because what if it had 3 legs? Or no legs at all? Is a tree stump a chair? Okay, what about a bean bag? What about a rooftop? Quickly, it becomes apparent, rather, that a chair is in fact just a “thing you sit on”. And this is not only how we categorize but how we literally see the world, by means of utility, as has been further demonstrated by the famous visual cliff experiments[2].

What this signifies, is that we live and organize ourselves within a world of tools. Most of which, we create; neither objectively good or bad, but determined by the ways in which we use them. Fire, the wheel, gun powder, steam engines, nuclear fission, encryption.

So capable are these peripherals we’ve constructed, that the mutual and assured destruction of our species along with the utter devastation of our planet for eons to come has just been narrowly avoided at least 5 times already just in recent history[3][4][5][6][7]. It’s clear that fundamentally, with these tools being inanimate, all that mediates how they are used is us as individuals; the actions we take, our character—how we conduct ourselves and how we organize. Yet it seems, despite that, that we take great faith and aim ourselves toward the improving of the capabilities of these tools themselves, not necessarily matched by our moral caliber. In fact, the call-to-arms of the Comfort War is precisely telling of a phenomenon acting as a force opposed to this—the degredation of our cognitive capabilities. Supernormal stimulus serves this purpose astoundingly well, targeting our attention span, but not at all mediating our aversions toward careless action. It forms the incentive structure for self-inflicted detriment. In intuitively seeking comfort, we lessen ourselves constantly, incapacitating our abilities. What will be the consequence of that?

 

If you find yourself numb, empty and uneasy—if you’re unsatisfied, wishing to improve but yet incapable—if despite having tried every trick in the book, and giving it your all, you still find yourself pitted against rock bottom, unable to conquer that which you care about most, helplessly dejected—it may be because you’re fighting the wrong guy. It may be that you’re facing an enemy unknown. It may be that, in fact, you have within you a maelstrom of driven ambition, awesome and terrifying. That you do not lack passion in the least, no; that you’ve been consumed by it. That out of fear and unpreparedness you’ve taken to comforts just to dull this inherent intensity—to suffocate it, suppress it—leaving it to wreak havoc unattended. You notice this only during rare moments of desperate self-realization. When confronted by the frustration that you are not “you”—you’re not the way you should be.

As the Comfort Warrior enlists in this endeavor to counteract cheap pleasures, he/she endures hardship and undoes this over-stimulated desensitization in their pursuit of clarity. And before long, they recover the first victim of their previously-accustomed numbed-state of brain-fog; empathy. Once confronted with pain, forced to face it head-on, to look it straight in the eye,