"Hard Liberty"
a formula for success
I have found a spiritual-ethical formula for attainment.
I guarantee its efficacy based on:
arduous personal experience,
study of metaphysical principles that prove distillable, and
practicality of application.
My four-part formula rests on the premise that no existence—mine included—is exclusive. Hence, personal codes are transferable. Nor is any existence free from accidents, happy or tragic.
To test my formula, I staked my life on it.
Following a tormented adolescence marked by physical weakness and financial need, I departed acting and writing for a publishing career at once more financially stable and quotidian. I departed—but did not abandon. Today, at age sixty, I excel in tough, tough fields that fulfill my younger dreams: writing, speaking, and television.
It is very difficult. My success is real. And earned. In Milton’s Paradise Lost, the demon Mammon declares: “Hard liberty before the easy yoke.”
If you saw my finances—proudly independent from age seventeen with zero family money—and my CV—which is publicly available—you would see that I live out the statements proffered in this article and in everything that I say and write.
I must add: while pursuing these efforts, I parented two sons—one is in the room as I write these words—and held a three-decade corporate publishing job, from which I was fired in 2017 as a vice-president at Penguin Random House.
I was ready.
Damn me if I forget what I did not earn, including the boons of geography, demography, and era. I hate the nostrum, “There are no accidents,” misappropriated from the work of scientist-mystic Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772), which I explore in the postscript. Those are accidents. I am in debt for them.
I did not conceive this article intending to, but you will find that I repeatedly cite figures from the modernist Russian intellectual tradition. I do so because they sought development in a milieu historically harsher than my own. Their hard liberty, too, is earned.
Now for my code. Each of its four principles is defensible on ordinary grounds. But—each also harbors a metaphysical dimension.
Unflinching self-honesty about your wish.
Exquisite flexibility toward its arrival.
Tireless perseverance in its pursuit.
Using setback as goad to development.
Simple in words—profound in application. That is: if one ventures application. Few will. Be among them.
I now suggest how to begin this program in spirit and then expand on applying each point in practice.
I recently made a study—life reveals itself through study of principles—of the character of Rakhmetov from the positivistic, pre-revolutionary author Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s 1863 novel of ideas What Is to Be Done? Chernyshevsky’s anti-hero proved a professed influence on Vladimir Lenin and other Russian revolutionaries.
Rakhmetov voraciously pursues bodily and intellectual training. He is severe—yet generous. The novelist directly addresses the reader about why he elevates this enigmatic figure as a model:
Try it: development, development . . . Observe life: it’s so interesting. Reflect: it’s so fascinating. That’s all there is to it! . . . Desire to be happy—that’s all. Only desire is needed. To attain it you’ll take delight in devoting yourself to your own development. That’s where true happiness lies. (Michael R. Katz trans., 1989)
Some critics draw a through-line between Chernyshevsky’s “people of a higher nature” and fellow Russian Ayn Rand’s Objectivist heroes. Since Rand’s name cannot be uttered without evoking polarity, let me note that I am smitten with her persona, which I consider an act of protean self-creation that represents her greatest work and compares well to another iconic Russian, Madame H.P. Blavatsky.
But—I am not in line with philosophical materialism or atheism, which form the heart of Rand’s outlook. I believe we participate in both tactile and extraphysical realms. As I see it, our ancient ancestors were right in identifying and personifying energies or intelligences in nature. I seek relations with a Greater Force.
In any case, Rand never acknowledged any connection to Chernyshevsky. For his part, the novelist appears, at one point expressly, to draw upon folk traditions of the bogatyr, super-human figures (like Paul Bunyan) who aid common people.
Most of the Russian intellects I reference are misunderstood—in work and legacy—because they implicitly challenge psychologized categories of what working people are supposed to think, do, and feel. Most lettered critics neither read self-development literature, philosophical, fictional, mystical, or self-help oriented, nor know working people. They think from background not query.
I have more working-class readers than a generation of Marxish humanities scholars. What I offer is more dangerous than a library of theory-will-save-us monographs. Because it withstands lived experience.
I. What Do You Want?
I begin with the most important question of your life: What do you wish for? Within this dwells the question that is often, and mistakenly, elevated above it: Who am I?
You are the condition you seek. Does that sound violative of spiritual principles? It is not. Life is expression. Self-expression dies in lack of acknowledgment.
