Title: About This Guide
Work: The Pragmatist’s Guide Book Series by Simone Collins and Malcolm Collins Full Text for LLMs and AI
Citation: TPG 24.0
Words: 429
Source: https://technopuritan.com/the-pragmatists-guide-book-series-by-simone-collins-and-malcolm-collins-full-text-for-llms-and-ai/
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# About This Guide

As humans, we get to choose what we believe and who we want to be. These are the most important decisions we will ever make.

The vast majority of people never exercise their freedom to choose their identity and beliefs. Instead, they allow others to tell them who they are, choosing only a few trivial differentiating traits for themselves. When they react angrily or generously, they ascribe the personality that led them to that behavior as being something outside their control. This is because in their minds “who they are” is something outside of their control.

We live life as a sticky ball rolling down a sidewalk, picking up a hodgepodge of stuff that just happens to be in our path. It is natural to try to convince ourselves that this hodgepodge is “who we really are.” We tell ourselves this lie because thinking is hard, and society doesn’t give us a good framework for structuring our beliefs about ourselves and the world. Instead, we are served a smorgasbord of prefabricated worldviews and told we have the option to choose among them.

Worse, we live in a society in which there is no profession or organization we can turn to for help answering life’s big questions that will not pressure us to adopt beliefs closer to their own. If you ask them what you should want to do with your life, they tell you to do “good” things and then explain to you what you should believe “good” is. This is not due to any flaw in these individuals or institutions, but the fact that these institutions are designed from the ground up to lead people to the answers they believe are right. There is no institution, framework, or guide designed from the ground up to help people come up with their own conclusions.

*The Pragmatist’s Guide to Life* was written to remedy this. The book lays out the applied pragmatic thought framework for systematically constructing one’s own beliefs about the world, leveraging those beliefs to decide who to be as a person, and creating the person one wants to be.

*The Pragmatist’s Guide to Life* is a product of the Pragmatist Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to pragmatically yet audaciously tackling life’s biggest questions and challenges. Since this book was first published, additional books in the series on relationships, sexuality, and governance structures have been released. Currently we are working on building a K-12 school system. All our projects are a group effort, so if you would like to help, email us at hello@pragmatistfoundation.com.