I have exciting news to share: You can now read Shawn’s Newsletter in the new Substack app for iPhone.
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The Substack app is currently available for iOS. If you don’t have an Apple device, you can join the Android waitlist here.
Philosophy:
Always trust and follow your intuitions. If your intuitions are correct you will eventually be successful. If your intuitions are incorrect, well then you’re screwed either way.
Never take down a fence unless you know why it was put up in the first place.
Do not confuse your circumstances with your capabilities, circumstances only limit us if we allow them to.
Intelligence is the ability to solve problems while wisdom is knowing what to do with the solutions.
Vision without work ethic is hallucination.
All complaints come from a place of entitlement.
Peace is at rest while happiness is in motion.
The more choices you have the less choices you will make.
Home is where all your attempts to escape cease.
Freedom and equality are enemies. Leave men to be free and natural inequalities will multiply.
Some would argue that a rainbow is only beautiful due to its variety of colors. Mix the colors together and you destroy them all and they are gone forever and the end result is far from anything beautiful.
In the same way that shapes are defined by their edges, limitation, and the constant conflict that inevitably comes with it, is what defines all stories and even life.
The more labels you have for yourself, the dumber they make you. The more things you identify with the more you are constrained. Attaching yourself to the issues will only make you partisan and polarized. It's good to have passion and pride but don't let it limit what you can be or do.
Politics:
Replacing trust with a process is called bureaucracy.
The transformation of charity into legal entitlement has produced donors without love and recipients without gratitude.
Power that subdues us is not meant to defend us.
communist: from each according to his ability to each according to his need
capitalist: from each according to his gullibility to each according to his greed
There are more variabilities within racial phenotypes than between them. Is the same true for Gender?
A radical is someone who believes in violent change over gradual change.
Does the government deserve a monopoly on violence?
Both civil resistance and internet trolling have a common goal: to provoke a response.
Accepting injustice is the same as becoming injustice.
Apathy is the last virtue of a dying society.
Economics:
All of economic history is the slow heartbeat of a social organism, a vast systole and diastole of concentrating wealth and compulsive recirculation.
Saving is the gap between your ego and your income.
Advertising is just negging, create insecurity to create demand.
Everyone makes money by selling something or helping someone else sell something.
You can’t really make money without making an impact of some kind and on the flip side of the coin you can’t really make any impact if you have no money. it cuts both ways
Low time preference is having the discipline to delay gratification. People with low time preference save more than they spend and hodl instead of sell. they are people who think long term.
Generations that save more give rise to generations that spend more that then give rise to generations that save more and on and on and on
Religion:
Guilt is to our spirit as pain is to our bodies.
To take the sorrow out of death is to take the love out of life.
All suffering comes from attachment or desire.
Spirituality that is expressed is not true spirituality.
Religion should be questioned but respected.
Does the Death of Religion Lead to the Death of society?
The desire to create value to please God and go to heaven is a good one. Everyone should want to leave a legacy or want to leave something behind for future generations and want to be remembered for something. religion encourages that and does have value for that reason.
Science can't save the world by itself because humans are driven by emotional predispositions on a day to day basis. Science is a valuable tool for good but like any tool it is limited by our lack of wisdom or virtue on how to use it. Science gives us an illusion of complete certainty and control. Certainty and control are lies, we are beholden to higher powers whether or not those powers can be described or understood by science. Our lives are filled with pain and suffering, religion gives us something to live for.
Religion provides inclusion and community even to those that are outcast
Religion provides social structure and identity. It provides a framework upon which a people can build a culture.
It helps codify, enhance, and align the moral compass inside all of us
It unifies niche and underrepresented communities around common mutual goals thus giving them a voice and also helping to lift them up in society by giving them a support network
Religion conveys the mores of culture by passing down intergenerational wisdom and parables.
Religion offers rituals that heal us both mentally and physically. Prayers help reinforce gratitude and mindfulness in a way that are proven to help us psychologically
For the advertising comment, I think you would find this interesting https://theconversation.com/the-manipulation-of-the-american-mind-edward-bernays-and-the-birth-of-public-relations-44393
Really Makes you think