This is the official home of The Free Self Project.
What is this place?
What you will not find here, is a political movement, a religious movement, or a social movement. It is not a 'movement' of any kind, in the traditional sense of the word. I do not advocate demonstrations, civil disobedience or political action of any kind. You need not move anywhere, wave any flag, wear any button or ribbon, post any ballot, pray to any god, or follow any rules.
The Free Self Project is about nurturing the freedom I already own, in order to discover my self more fully, and to explore that truth with others. It is about the philosophy and the psychology - the thoughts and emotions - of everyday life, how to understand them in the context of the past, and how to apply them to personal action in the present with an eye toward a more free, happy, and loving future for myself and those around me, and as a consequence, for the world as a whole.
The Free Self Project, therefore, is - and can only ever be - a personal project. This site, then, is a record of my personal journey through the project. In the coming months and years, I will be slowly expanding and developing this site with thoughts, ideas, and impressions from, for, and about me as a free self, and the world I inhabit.
And, who am I?
Imagine yourself a lower-middle-class tradesman, married to a brutally repressed catholic girl, living in a one-bedroom apartment on the southwest side of chicago. Now, imagine that you secretly hate your life, and that your wife is teatering on the brink of a psychological breakdown - but you are committed to making your marriage work no matter what the cost, because that's what good, hard-working people do, and you are not a quitter. However, there's one catch: you cannot ask for help. You MUST not ask for help. For, to do so, would be to reveal yourself as incompetent, ignorant - a failure.... That's where I come in.
I am the 40-year-old product of that union, and the oldest of 5 sons altogether. I grew up in a household where the solution to bed-wetting was a good, hard ass-whooping, and the best way to deal with your child's needs, was to teach him how to repress and deny them, for your own convenience.
By the time I was 8, I had the intellectual capacity to question my parents believe in the insane doctrine of Catholicism, but as a result of the brutality of my early childhood, I had the emotional life of something less than even an infant. I was so dissociated and so incapable of social connection by age 8, that the public school system I had begun to attend had ruled me intellectually retarded. Months of special testing proved otherwise. But, predictably, and infuriatingly, no one bothered to question the emotional state that had been the source of the judgment in the first place.
Of course not. To do that, would have been to question the very foundations of modern society. I was pushing myself, unconsciously, to give the adults around me exactly what I thought they wanted: my own annihilation. I could not give them that in material fact, so I gave it to them in psychological fact.
And, I continued to live in that half-ghost, half-human state for the next 29 years; just doing my "duty", and waiting for the day it would all end. But, there was one thing that kept me from sinking completely into the gray mass of rotting human psyches.
That something, was a single burning ember in my heart. A faint glowing warmth. A weak and waning, but unextinguishable flame of love for truth and beauty. A belief in logic, and empiricism. A rabid commitment to intellectual consistency. An unwillingness to surrender my soul, in spite of having surrendered my body.
Today, I am living proof that we can no longer get away with the sin of obligating our children to the task of redeeming us, before they even have a chance to understand what it is they are being forced to do.
I don't have a wide array of impressive credentials to offer, or much of a personal tale to tell. I'm just an ordinary joe, from the ordinary masses of ordinary people, who huddle their way to-and-from work every day, suffering the same silent desperation my parents suffered, fourty-plus years ago.
There is a difference between them and I, however. I cannot - and will not - suffer in silence, any longer. For once, and for all, I finally have a consistent, rational, empirical philosophical framework that I am confident justifies my commitment to absolute freedom, absolute peace, and absolute justice.
No, I did not construct it myself. Parts of it, yes. But significant portions of it, I have borrowed wholesale from Stefan Molyneux of Freedomain Radio. His "Universally Preferable Behavior", in concert with modern biological explanations of our moral sense (see Frans De Waal's "Primates and Philosophers") have significantly changed my view of ethics, psychology, family, and society.