One of those books that revisits very old ideas coming from a different path. I don’t know if the book is good, but the ideas still are.

Blanton’s basic idea is that modern life asks of us to lie and carry the lie, a skill we learn around the teenage years and that most of us never give up. But a lie is a crime against reality: it tries and goes against it, facing great resistance. The lie thus weighs on us, and eventually kills us (stress, addiction, etc.). So, his answer is: don’t lie. Tell the truth. Better, always tell the truth, even when it’s inconvenient (for instance, please do tell your young female patient you find her sexy on her first therapy appointment), even when the other one is not ready nor willing to hear it, until you purge yourself of it, even if it splatters on your fellow human.

So Blanton is insane, and apparently mainly concerned with his well-being. He is also both sincere and edgy in an old-school kind of way (I kind of picture him living the life on a Harley Davidson, and posting pre-2010 Anonymous manifestos while pumping gas :

We are an antidote to the poison of conventional education we have received. We wish to make us all more like animals. We are still angry, but we are less angry than the calm-looking phonies who have control of the bomb. We are less blinded by anger than your average pathetic rationalizing miserable bastard, engaged in the normal politics of experience. We are the new teachers. We are out to save the world. We are against politeness as a substitute for the truth because that politeness kills. Politeness and diplomacy are responsible for more suffering and death than all the crimes of passion in history. Fuck politeness. Fuck diplomacy. Tell the truth.

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 .