Self-Knowledge Symposium meeting tonight

I just got out of a Self-knowledge symposium lecture by the founder of the club, who is a successful philosopher and entrepeneur (he was one of the people who founded MTV, and worked successfully at IBM).

Auggie mentioned he had won the presitgious Templeton prize for one of his essays on life's purpose.

Perhaps in order to connect with the crowd of college students, some of whom were from Duke University, and perhaps some of them were from UNC (although I only talked to one Duke Student), Auggie used vernacular language and slang, re: the words frickin, screw, and bullshit.

The crowd was diverse ethnically, too. I am Jewish, and the Duke University Student I talked to is Jewish, and we could tell because we were wearing Yamulkes. I had a talk with the kid about conformity before the speech. There were also black people, some middle aged people, Indians, and both men and women.

He improvised his talk, and he had talked for over an hour and fifteen minutes when I had left.

Auggie introduced the talk with a story about how he went to a Rolling Stones Concert and sat front row; and he still ended up feeling badly about it later; he felt unfulfilled. He said he was worried his whole life would be like this: anticipation and unfulfillment. He asked us to consider times in our lives when we felt unfulfilled.


He spoke about how people specifically want to get away from themselves, literally get away from their selves. We do this by watching movies, watching television, and reading books, he said.

After saying people want to get away from their selves, he then said people want to move from being selfish to self-less.


We went over the spiritual journey shown in hollywood movies. This starts with the character being called back into action, then he goes into the wilderness for training, then he gets superpowers and has the ability to use them badly but instead uses them for good, and finally the protagonist then fights the monster or bad guy and goes home to his wife and kids.

He applied this to the movie, the Matrix.

He then applied this to the movie The Devil Wears Prada.

He said some other stuff and then he told a story about how a cleaning lady friend of his a few years back was talking to him.

She said all she ever wanted was a nice husband and kids in her life.

Auggie told her that she should have wished for wisdom. She should have wished for wisdom to pick a better husband and make better life choices.

That was when I walked out.