Infected Intellects: Journey into the Kingdom of I

By Dillen Steeby

Infected Intellects is the perspective of thinking for yourself and taking responsibility for your life to act upon your desires to be what you wish to be through deliberate actions with a mind focused on discovering and rendering your potential into the world. It is the drive to know and understand your life and form your own perspective through a relentless pursuit of truth and justice.

Journey into the Kingdom of I is the foundation for the mindset that empowers the individual to overcome circumstances and influences that tend to distract us from the path we had dreamed to be before us. This argument for the power of the individual against the forces of socialization and enculturation is the secret to success of all those people who seem to rise above the average person, despite the circumstances they have come from, overcoming any adversities along the way. The best people seem to have come from the worst circumstances because they learned what it means to be truly self-reliant.

Rules are made for people who arent willing to make up their own.
Chuck Yeager

• Language: English
• Publisher: Trafford Publishing
• Release date: Oct 21, 2010
• ISBN: 9781426945632

Dillen Steeby

Dillen Steeby is a junior at Missouri Western State University in St. Joseph, Missouri, earning a double major in criminal justice with emphasis on administration and law enforcement. Steeby is also a single parent, chef, welder, heavy equipment operator, hydraulic technician, plumber/pipefitter, business manager, coach, and student of human science. He has had a passion for literature since age nine and began keeping a journal in eighth grade. In high school, writing served as an emotional release. As a college student, Steeby enjoys data mining—the search for information from research studies. He appreciates stimulating conversation and debating intellectual subjects, especially those pertaining to human knowledge and social sciences.

Book preview

Contents

WELCOME TO THE JOURNEY

CULTURE DIFFUSION IN INTERNATIONAL HUMAN RIGHTS AND HUMAN RELATIONS

NEUROTIC CULTURE

ABRAHAM MASLOW

SELF-ACTUALIZATION OF THE CAVEMAN

WALKING THE PATH OF GOD

SOBERING THOUGHTS

SAFETY NEEDS

ESTEEM, BELONGINGNESS AND LOVE

THE HUMAN ANIMAL VS. THE HUMAN BEING

SELF-ACTUALIZING PEOPLE; HUMANS BEING

CREATIONS OF SOCIETY

BEING AN INDIVIDUAL

THE WILL TO KILL

LOVE IN SELF-ACTUALIZING PEOPLE

INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS AND CRIMINALITY

GUN CONTROL AND

INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS

UNDERSTANDING 9/11 AND

ITS IMPLICATIONS

CONSERVITIVE, LIBERAL OR SOMETHING DIFFERENT

DEATH AND OTHER CIRCUMSTANCES

IT’S NOT MUCH OF A LIFE,

BUT IT IS MINE

SOME RANDOM THOUGHTS ALONG THE WAY

THANK YOU

BIBLIOGRAPHY

WELCOME TO THE JOURNEY

I began this project out of a lifelong desire not only to write, but to do something I feel is significant as a contribution to all mankind. I’m no doctor or professor or otherwise described as an expert in any field. I hold no degrees yet, though I soon will have completed a double bachelor’s degree in the field of criminal justice, with emphasis on administration as well as law enforcement. I will probably go to work on a master’s degree in international law or relations and am considering the possibility of attaining a doctorate in this field or perhaps in a field of human science; medical, psychological or perhaps genetics.

This book isn’t based upon any pure research of my own in that I have conducted no empirical studies or experiments and have collected no data of my own to come up with some new idea. It can be described as a sort of guide to self-actualization. It is that while it is also a sort of layman’s guide to understanding a perspective I have developed for myself through my studies of data and analysis of the work of people who have done the work of a researcher to find an understanding of the condition of being human mixed with my own thoughts based upon my experiences and insights I have found in the world around me along with my education and experience as a Christian. It is an attempt to take some massive amount of information and boil it down to the bare bones of what it truly means and try to convey it in a way that it can be easily understood by the average person. I am including perspectives from many disciplines of human studies and showing the connections between them which prove points and paint a picture of the world as I have seen it through the eye of my mind.

This is the beginning of a work and a message which I will continue to expand upon in the future as I am able to. I hope that it will be a beginning for you and me of a useful relationship. The foundation of any relationship is exchange; the sharing of some kind of resource between two entities whether it be something of a tangible nature such as food, shelter and money or intangible things such as knowledge or social satisfactions. It’s not what you have in this life that matters most; it’s the pieces of you that are left behind when you are but a ghost. I hope that you enjoy this little work of mine and find something to take from it which is useful to you and you can call it your own.

The Kingdom of I is a realization of oneself as a single entity which exists for its own purpose and owes its responsibility to only itself first and foremost; it is to say simply that I was born a single being and I will die a single being and my relationship to the world in which I live is as a single being. Some of my brethren of the Christian faith will argue that the purpose of human life is to serve a relationship with God, but my argument with this idea is that God’s hope in our creation is, I agree, to serve a purpose of companionship, but it isn’t demanded. If God wanted a being to be a companion he could have created such a being and not given them the free will to choose whether or not to be his companion. Free will is necessary because unless we are beings with a choice to choose otherwise then we are no better than robots or slaves. So God therefore created us with our own right to determine what we should be. So I am a single entity who owes nothing to anyone for what I am and no one owes me anything for it either. Everything else in life of any form of matter may be added to or taken away from me at any given moment; there are no promises or guaranties in life but birth and death. From this perspective one can begin to understand all possibility of what one can and should become through one’s own examination. One can begin to know and understand the truth of life and forge their own identity through their own intent. Each of us is a single being which is the King and god of our own single universe with the power to choose what we should and can become. Each of us must decide for ourselves what is important to our existence and strengthen our resolve to take responsibility for our own lives. We must determine where we are and where we want to be and begin to design the structure which will get us from point A to point B. This is where most of us fall short in pursuit of our dreams; we fail to create a plan which will hold up to the tests of life. The world is an unforgiving place and a single lie spoken in a time of stress and immaturity can change the potential of your life.

People speak of finding yourself but it isn’t about finding; it is about becoming or creating who you are. I have pieced together this idea of not a map but a sort of compass which measures the energies of reality to give one the means to understand where they truly are. Or perhaps it is a device which improves the vision so that one can see things which may have been hidden before. Like climbing to a high ground where you can see further and get a lay of the land around you so you can determine where you want to go. However you wish to define its function, I leave it to you to decide as I have no control over how you will interpret what I have done. I can only do my best to explain and define my intent and hope that you will understand my message it as it is intended.

This is the critical flaw of this tool of communication we call language; no matter the intent of my message you will draw your own interpretation as you are able to understand it. In a perfect world we wouldn’t need to rely on such an inefficient means of sharing information; we could just think a thought with all its meaning and intents and pass it on in a perfect state to another without any concern for the interpretation as it would be interpreted just as it is meant. It is however the best we have available to us despite all our advances over the animals of the world our ability to communicate with one another isn’t too far removed from them and in some examples far less effective; nevertheless it is all I have so I shall do the best I can with it. Hopefully someday soon someone will design a device which does everything a cell phone and personal computer can do and is small enough to be implanted at the base of my skull and be wired to my brain; then maybe I can share a perfect thought with someone else who had the device as well. There are really three intents I suppose if I must count them, yet they are only parts of a single greater intent. They are means to an end I suppose although to me the means are in and of themselves ends. So it is with careful thought and deliberation I seek to share my thoughts and intents and hope you will understand them just as I have meant. When it is done I expect I may be revered by some and demonized by others for what I have said in this work. I have no fear of the matter because I understand the truth of the message and its origin. Truth is good and deception is evil; so if my message is truth then it is of no evil and those who would try to demonize me for the truth I speak are therefore deceived or being deceptive and act out of evil by their own ignorance of intent and I will not fear evil. My experience has taught me that most people and their intentions aren’t evil at all; it’s just the methods they use to go about getting the job done which are questionable as being potentially evil. This is why the means are in and of themselves ends because they can cause a condition or set a thing in motion which takes on a life of its own.

A good example of the way a thing which was intended to serve one type of purpose can take on a life of its own and serve an entirely unintended side effect is Facebook. A gentleman in San Diego recently spoke out to try to convince people to stop using Facebook because he claims it causes a narcissistic condition to society. His idea is wrong-headed because his logic is backwards. I understand what he is getting at though because I have been quite dismayed at some of the things people have posted and the frequency with which they post. It seems as though some people can’t go to the bathroom without letting the world know about it. The website isn’t the cause of one’s condition; the condition already existed in the person and they are acting out in an available forum as a result of their pre-existing condition. Simply put, the narcissist is taking advantage of the availability of a potential source of attention. The founders and creators of Facebook didn’t intend to serve the narcissist, they were trying to create a way for normal average people to keep in touch with each other to build and maintain relationships, share culture and help bring people together in a world that is often too busy for us to make the time to nurture these relationships by another means. I’m not saying Facebook is a bad thing or that anything needs to be done about it. It is what it is and I find it useful for the very reasons I just mentioned, but it has found its ills from a particular type of personality. Facebook isn’t causing people to be narcissists; people become what they are based upon their own choices. It’s the same thing as XBOX. Hey we can play video game with people from all over the world and from all walks of life and it is great fun, but throw some of the wrong kind of people in the mix and it can be a nasty place and some people are addicts to video games as well. It’s not the fault of Microsoft if someone cannot manage their own life and habits of gameplay.

The first intent is to share information and understanding. Unfortunately Abraham Maslow’s work is not among popular literature and is rather difficult to find. I say it is unfortunate because it is my strong opinion that work of such wonderfully enlightening information should be found in greater quantity and in greater forum than it is. Some of his explanations, which I have been fortunate enough to be educated enough to understand may be difficult for the average reader to manage due to the nature of changes in language over