Hi,
My name is John Scott and this is my blog.
Millions of loving fans asked me to create this blog.
Not really, but that would be cool. I really created this blog as a web log. Novel idea, eh? For some time I’ve wanted to commit my thoughts to paper, but the time it takes do so prevented me from doing so.
Why do I blog? Huh. The answer right now is “my children”. I suppose there are other motivations as well. If something happens in the world that I don’t particularly take a shining to, and it’s handy to have a blog to set things straight. But mostly, as a parent, I want to abuse my children (as Dawkins would say) by sharing my values with them.
Personally
Who am I? I am a plain, simple, thoughtful human.
When I think of who I am, I think of my children more than anything. I love my kids more than anything in the world. I love them more than nature, which I love. I love them more than the morning air in Seattle, which tastes so good I could drink it.Not only do I love these kids, I like them. See, everybody loves their kids, but some people just love them while not really enjoying their company. Not I. My kids are a ball to be around. They are super kids. Intelligent. Kind. Giving. Caring. Compassionate. Moral. Well mannered. I really can’t explain to anybody how superior my kids are, but they really are. Guess you’d have to be lucky enough to know them.
As far as locations go, I love Japan. Tokyo mostly. And I love Seattle. I really can’t choose between the two.Tokyo is my “home”. I grew up in Tokyo, and when I hear the ding-ding-ding of a train crossing, I know I’m home. Tokyo is alive with people and the city is awake 24/7. I love that.Seattle, on the other hand, is one of the most boring cities on earth. Nothing to entertain yourself with, but nature is abundant in Seattle and it is so beautiful I feel “whole” just breathing the Seattle air. Absolutely the most beautiful city on the face of the earth – Seattle.
Philosophically
I became interested in philosophy at a young age, without knowing it to be philosophy. When I was in the third grade of elementary school, I had a crisis of purpose. I had discovered an old abandoned graveyard in the outback of East Wenatchee, Washington State.It struck me as absurd to live a life dedicated to some purpose, because we all die anyways and those people in that abandoned graveyard were forgotten, no matter what they had achieved in life. They had lived and died in obscurity and without affecting any great difference here on earth.
There are many popular purposes that offer themselves as reasons to live. Love, fame, riches, respect – all are meaningless. Love offers itself as a purpose in life, but it is fleeting and rarely survives. Most folks divorce, and those who don’t live in loveless marriages.
Fame also offers itself as a purpose. But what, I thought, could fame really do for oneself? It, too, is fleeting and being well known to a large number of nincompoops really does not strike me as worth the effort.
Riches also stands as a candidate for one’s purpose in life, but from what I could tell as a teenager, riches require a lot of work and sacrificing a lot of leisure to obtain them. And once you do obtain riches, friends and family as well as your enemies are always trying to take some.
Respect, likewise, is a fleeting phenomenon. Most people who we respect we do so without really knowing them. We impute virtues to them without really knowing whether they deserve that respect. So many formerly respected people are now cancelled or otherwise outcasts. The founding fathers are currently in such a predicament.
Thus I realized that no good reason exists for which we ought to live. Life became absurd, without purpose.
I had another crisis when the school I attended attempted to teach me the multiplication tables as truth. I knew that truths are particular. There is a cup of coffee on the table. That statement could be true if indeed there was a cup of coffee on the table. But 9 X 9=81 is not truth. It deals in abstract objects not found in the real world. That cannot be truth, despite Bertrand Russell’s statements to the contrary.
In 1985, at the age of 14, my family moved to Japan. In Japan, most folks do not strive for wealth or fame or any of those other inconsequential absurdities. They collect experiences. I call them keikenist, with “keiken” being the Japanese word for experience. They go on elaborate dates. They go to concerts. They travel a lot. The seek adventure. I quickly became a keikenist, which basically means trying new things and living each day to the fullest.
On October 17th, 1987, at the age of 16, I killed my long term girlfriend, Yoshie Matsuoka. Yoshie had taught me a lot about life, and was a wonderful person. She taught me not to say anything if you cannot say something positive. She also taught me that a man is only as big as the stone he stumbles upon. She was an exceptionally good person.
I spent 12 months in solitary confinement while the trial was under way. This gave me time to think. And I wanted to think. I wanted to know if what I had done was objectively bad. So I considered the word “good”. I discovered that there is no objective meaning to the word “good” – people use the word to describe something that is useful to some or another purpose, regardless of whether the purpose itself is objectively good. And the are no objectively good purposes.
I did, however, discover that, objectively, I had no right to kill Yoshie. Rights derive from consent and I had no right to kill Yoshie, and she had in no way violated my rights in such a way as to give me the right to kill her. Having realized this, I realized that I wanted to be judged and sentenced according to the truth of the matter. When the prosecutor and my defense attorney had both presented their cases, I was given a chance to speak and I told the court that I was indeed guilty of the crime and that I deserved harsh punishment, and would not appeal. However, the victim’s mother, who I was somewhat close to, asked the judges (there are three of them in Japanese superior court) to sentence me to a reasonable term that would allow me to rejoin society soon and become a “rippa” (立派）or “upstanding” member of society. Accordingly, because of the request of the victim’s mother, the prosecutor asked for, and was granted, a sentence of 3 to 5 years of hard labor.
In prison, I learned a lot. It was the best thing for me. People talk about prison as something that is counterproductive and not ideally suited to justice. The Japanese penal sysytem teaches inmates that they ought to control themselves. Otherwise, the authorities will control you, and that is unpleasant. I was out of control before my arrest. I was picking fights with people. I was driving drunk and wrecking cars and a motorcycle. I hit a schoolgirl with a friend’s motorcycle and left the scene. I was entirely wild, and prison was needed to tame me. My time in prison taught me to think first. It also taught me to work hard, in order to be eligible for early release. I worked so hard that the prison administrators made me “hancho” (班長, team leader) of the paper factory there in prison.
Prison also gave me the chance to study philosophy. My father bought the Great Books of the Western World from a Britannica saleslady. This allowed me to study Plato, Aristotle, John Locke, David Hume, etc. I also enjoyed reading the classics, such as the plays by Aristophanes, Aeschylus and Shakespeare, etc. The prison library was also stocked with good books.
After three and a half years in prison, I was released on parole. I was immediately deported back to the States where I became manager of a Japanese fast food restaurant in the University District of Seattle. I got the position purely based on my ability to speak Japanese and act like one. The idea was to save up and start my own restaurant, but I soon discovered that living on those wages, it is impossible to save money. I also came to doubt the wisdom of starting yet another restaurant in a market where restaurants regularly fail. This posed a problem for me because I was not happy to make little money. Some people are okay with low wages. Some simply want to put in 8 hours, call it a day and go home and have a drink. But I wasn’t one of those kind of people. I wanted nice clothes. I wanted nice shoes. I wanted a nice car. After a bit of soul searching, I decided to pursue a career in construction.
I went out to a large job site on a Sunday and made an offer to the contractor in charge, who was a framing contractor. “Teach me everything you know and I will work cheap.” The contractor accepted my offer and I started work the next day. The contractor taught me everything about framing in less than 3 months. I saved up enough money to buy my own tools and started doing piece-work. After a couple years of piece-work, I had enough tools and cash to start my own construction company and run two crews. I hired mostly illegal immigrants from south of the border, and paid them cash. Running a single crew, I could take home $5,000 a week. Running two crews – when the market was there – I could make $10,000 a week. Not bad for an 8th grade graduate.
Just around the time the United States was attacked on September 11th, I fell into depression and started an online relationship with a girl from Japan. My wife quite justly divorced me, and due to my depression I was unable to work. Instead of contracting, I turned to the Internet and started two websites. Neither of the websites made money, but I had spent thousands of dollars in getting them up and running. An insight occurred to me that there are millions of people in the same boat that I was in. They were starting websites without the ability to make them succeed. So I started a webmaster forum for webmasters to learn how to make their Internet based companies succeed. I also started a website design service along with an Internet marketing consultancy. Along with two web directories and building and selling websites, these projects let me make $50,000 a month. Mind you, I have no college degree or any sort of formal training in IT.
I sold the last of my websites – v7n.com – in 2008 in order to focus on my philosophy studies. My views have changed in myriad ways. In political philosophy, moral philosophy, philosophy of mind, and epistemology all my views have evolved. I am indebted to many people for my evolved views. Primarily, I am indebted to a friend who is an anarcho-syndicalist for inadvertently turning me into an anarcho-capitalist. I take anarcho-capitalist in the vein of Murray Rothbard to be the ideal, with right-libertarianism being the practical goal.
Politically and morally, I am an individualist. I believe the collectivization of utility to be extremely immoral in the moral arena, and collectivization of wealth to be an injustice in the political realm.
I am also a Christian, having witnessed many miracles wrought by God.
