Despite that, and the debatable personal cosmology he exposes as a background for his theory, he shares some interesting thoughts.

Like most psychological thoughts, his agrees with the idea that mental chatter, explanations and justifications regarding desires, what is and what should be are always a distraction. Psychoanalysis tries to undo the knot around which the chatter aggregates by finding the right thread to pull, CBT and modern cognitive psychology try to cut through it, prayer offers to abandon it to God, yoga controls it through body discipline, other approaches try to ignore it, but everyone agrees: this is the main issue. The distraction’s goal is, of course, to cover the meaninglessness of life.

In some ways, Blanton meets and picks up where Didion left her Self-Respect essay. His solution to stop the game of explaining away your life and struggles is to take full responsibility (and not guilt, which would be another way to add to the knot), meaning the acceptance that “whatever you are doing, you are willing to experience yourself as the cause”. If the inner struggle is our own little theater we willingly set up to distract us from more pressing concerns, then accepting responsibility for all the characters (some might say: reintegrating the different parts of a fragmented self) is the solution to stop telling ourselves stories lying to ourselves.

The person who says he wants to lose weight, but says he just can’t give up midnight snacks, may believe he is in a struggle between “being good” and “giving in” to his cravings, but in fact he has already chosen to keep snacking. The “struggle” that he describes serves to hide this fact. (…) Our energy is totally invested in maintaining our lives the way they are, and the phony struggle for change only conceals the ways in which the status quo serves us. Our apparent battle for change is a tempest in a teapot. As long as I identify my “self” only as that desire to change and not also as a presently more powerful desire to remain the same, I will remain stuck. In a sense, I can change, finally, only by giving up trying to change.

Like Didion put it, it’s “a discipline, a habit of mind that can never be faked but can be developed, trained, coaxed forth”. Blanton’s discipline is maintained through continually telling the truth, learning to let go of the lie, and staying “awake” (“liberated”) through activity (direct experience of the world) and community (i.e. helping others) - all of them tried and tested solutions to an old problem.

Then Blanton went on founding half-heartily the religion of futilitarianism, but as I told earlier, he is insane.