Self-Help, Nihilism, and the Revolutionary Transformation of the Individual
Below is an edited transcript of Noah Schenck’s speech to the Center for Political Innovation National Convention on August 15th, 2026.
For a while now, I have been fascinated by the genre of self-help.
Specifically, I've been fascinated by the genre like as it appears and as it's been marketed to people my age on the internet. And like anything in life; I'm a Marxist, right? That's my background. My background is in Marxism.
The immortal science of Marxism Leninism tells me that I should put everything in context; and in particular the context of world history, of the economy and of social relations.
Because what we might call self-help right it's not just, when you go home and your grandparents are telling you about how “I discovered that you know I've been poor and suffering but if I eat nothing but canned tuna and and and and make myself really really poor then one day I might be a millionaire cuz I read a book on it.”
No, self-help has existed for a long long time for a long long time and it's gone by various names throughout the years.
And in every situation where it's existed, like everything it's been influenced by the dominant class of that time period.
And the the first self-help movement or the first time we saw self-help emerge as far as I can tell is really in ancient Rome, actually.
Self-Help in Ancient Rome
In Rome the dominant ideology of the Roman Empire was called hedonism.
And hedonism was the idea that what is best in life is to derive the most pleasure in life because human beings are nothing but another animal.
So, you should eat the best food and you should go out and try to find the most beautiful slaves when you pillage a country and you should try and live the wealthiest, most pleasurable life.
And I think we can all see, from living in this country, that that's not a very good way to organize a society. That sort of selfish mindset that doesn't create the greatest results for a society. And you had huge problems in ancient Rome. It was a brutal slaveocracy and it was pillaging the world and they had to argue among themselves about the problems they were having. And out of this argument there emerged the stoics.
And to this day the stoics are still very popular, among young men. I worked at a bookstore for a while actually, and it was very popular to see a bro come through; you'd see some Chad come through and he's reading Marcus Aurelius's meditations. We are still reading the work of the stoics today.
Well, what were the stoics arguing? They were arguing “hey you guys its not a very smart way to organize society to say ‘hey let's all you know derive the most pleasure we possibly can,’
In particular if you are organizing a society that is reliant on war and bloodshed and death, which is what the Roman Empire was. Rome was one of the most brutal societies to ever exis.
And hedonism was not creating the best results, it was not the best way to organize society. It wasn’t going to create the best warriors who are going to bring back the best loot for the ruling class to tell them. “Just flow through life. Do what's pleasurable.”
And so you had the Stoics that came about and argued that you need to have discipline, you need to set goals and you need to endure suffering at certain times. And they took it really far. Which speaks to how sick Roman society really was. On the one hand the hedonists are eating so much good food that they would force themselves to vomit so they could enjoy more of it and on the other hand the stoics are literally engaged in self-flagellation.
But that shows right that self-help exists to benefit a certain class at a certain time period.
The Renaissance and the Merchant Class
And that's not just true of the Roman Empire and of today either.
As feudalism was coming to an end there was the Renaissance period. And in Italy and in parts of England and in France you had a new emerging merchant class.
The merchant of Venice, was very a famous Shakespeare play.
And the merchants in Venice, they were emerging as a new dominant class.
they were emerging out of the feudal guilds and beginning to overtake the feudal landlords. They were beginning to overtake the aristocracy because the aristocracy had outmoded itself. And in that context, a gentleman emerged by the name of Nicolo Makaveli. And he, along with others who were less popular created a genre called “mirrors for princes,”
Mirrors for princes existed during the time of the Renaissance as a sort of self-help for the aristocracy as their position was threatened by the emergent conscious merchant class who were bringing capitalism into existence. As they were pushing away the old feudal bonds that had held society together; as a sort of self-defense effects mechanism. You had the mirrors for princes, genre and they talked about the best way to be a leader for the aristocracy.
The Entrepreneurial Bourgeoisie and Positive Thinking
And so we can keep this in mind when we talk about self help as it exists today, in our context.
For many years self help has been sort of an ideology, for what we might call the lower level levels of capital.
The entrepreneurial bourgeoisie. They're not the monopolists who want to keep the rest of society poor, but it's the entrepreneurial bourgeoisie who want to make as much money as possible. They want to go out and they want to get rich. And it's stamped with that character. There's always an optimistic character to a lot of self-help.The so-called power of positive thinking.
Donald Trump's pastor is a big promoter of the power of positive thinking. If you listen to a lot of the genre they are promoting the idea that what you think you can do. That you can go out and you can do anything.
And that's the ideology of the lower levels of capital because they want to believe that if they work hard enough that they'll make it in this world. That's really helpful to them as a class. It's been stamped with that optimistic character.
This year Netflix came out with a documentary about what they call the red-pill. Which is funny because they are about 15 years too late… the red-pill is really a phenomenon of the 2010s.
It came out in the Obama era. But if you look at all the marketing around what they called the red pill, it's that it's that it has that some it's that entrepreneurial bourgeoisie optimistic vibe. They have slogans like “We’re all gonna make it bro,” Or “it's so ridiculously easy to be in the top 10% of men.”
You can think of the Red Pill as a response to the alienation felt by young men, as our society deteriorates, stamped with the optimistic character of the entrepreneurial bourgeoisie.
The Male Loneliness Epidemic
Speaking of the deterioration of our society and of social bonds, mainstream media has been running a lot of articles lately about the male loneliness epidemic.
And they are pointing to a real phenomenon. There are real statistics there. It's a real thing. 30% of men between the ages of 18 and 30in the United States have never had a single romantic relationship. 15% of men in that same demographic report never having a single close friend.
But a lot of the rhetoric around the male loneliness epidemic makes you think that this is a gendered problem. And they talk about toxic masculinity. They talk about the need for third spaces. They talk about issues with the way men approach relationships. They talk about misogyny.
But I don't think that that's fair. I don't think that it's fair to say that this is a male only problem. because women I feel are just as lonely in this society right now. And a big part of the reason why people are lonely right now is really simple. It's the economy stupid.
According to Bloomberg, as of 2023, 45% of adults between the ages of 19 and 29 still live at home with their parents. And in that same survey, 45% of adults in that age demographic say that they couldn't afford to if they wanted to.
The MIT living wage calculator found recently that the amount of money required to live comfortably for a single adult in the United States was roughly $90,000 a year.That's almost double the median single income.
We also see this reflected in deaths of despair in this country. With so many people struggling to have your basic needs met, something like a relationship will often be on the back burner. That's just common sense.
Similar things happened during the Great Depression. If you read the literature of the Great Depression. It's all about lonely young men who are out on the railroads. If you read Of Mice and Men ect.
Deterministic Nihilistic Internet Self-Help
Keeping this in mind I’d like to talk about a newer trend in internet self-help. And I like to call this deterministic nihilistic internet self-help. So again, when we're looking
Mainstream media has caught on faster than normal but again they single out the angle that has been marketed towards men.
The Black Pill and the Cult of Self-Optimization
There's been a lot of stuff online about what they call black pill content.
A lot about what they call looks-maxxing content. But again it's not a male only problem.
There's a similar phenomenon that happens to be marketed towards women. And it exists in the form of what they call wellness content.
What is the message of wellness content that's marketed towards women of mental well-being content, mental health content that's being marketed towards these women?
It’s this idea that you are born a certain way and that the way you were born is inferior in some way. You're not normal. There's something wrong with you. And because there's something wrong with you, just don't do anything. It's healthy to just not do anything.
You don't have to do anything. There's so many people I grew up with, I went to high school with, and I see, they'll start a Substack. And they start writing about how “I used to I used to be a high achieving person, and I used to care about getting, you know, good grades in school, and I thought maybe I could change the world one day, but then I realized I have anxiety. I have depression. And so, I just realized that it's just better for me to sit at home and do nothing. And and that's actually healthy and brave of me to say that. You should praise me for saying that I have anxiety and that I don't have to do anything.”
There is so much content out there about gifted kid burnout. It's the idea that some school administrator at some point when I was seven decided that I was a smart kid. They decided that I was better than all my peers. And as I've grown up, me being the best person at regurgitating what adults have told me hasn't panned out into success. And so that proves there's something wrong with society.
People are constantly talking about how they used to be high achieving, they used to have big dreams, and they've accepted there's something wrong with them. And so they don't even try. Black Pill content is very similar. It's the new frontier of the manosphere. The argument around the black pill is that your social standing is genetically determined at birth.
Which is funny. That seems to be exactly what our ruling class already believes!
It's genetically determined at birth and it's determined by how good you look. And the reason your life is a mess is because you aren't good-looking enough.
And then they begin to experiment on themselves. These young men, they're getting a limb lengthening surgery. It's this surgery where they break both of your legs and insert metal rods into them so that you can become taller and they're getting rhinoplasties and they're purchasing experimental peptides off of the internet that are marked not for human consumption. They’re taking them to try and get better looking and they're taking anabolic steroids. And the slogan of the black pill is “it's so over it never began.”
And this is the attitude of the people who run the internet.It's no wonder why this stuff is getting so popular. CNN keeps running pieces saying “I can't believe that young men would think this.” Well, that's the dominant ideology of the ruling class. It’s the monopolist ideology being disseminated among the masses.
The Pessimism of the Ruling Class
I really admire this musician. His name is Cornelius Cardew. He's somebody we greatly admire CPI. Caleb introduced me to him,
And his music, the music that we appreciate at CPI, it's a little tongue and cheek. It's like if they made the leftist meme where it's a block of text, it's like they made that a song. So we admire it a little bit tongue and cheek. But Cardew was an avant garde composer. He was an experimental composer in Britain. He was very famous.
He worked for the Royal Academy of Music, and he had an epiphany when he was getting older and he broke with abstract art. And after he broke with abstract art, he became a communist. He became a Maoist revolutionary and during the 70s he wrote a lot. And there is a compilation of some of the work that he did and his criticism of abstract art that I find to be really really insightful.
One of his students, a gentleman by the name of Rod Eli, talked about the attitude of the people who run this country, the attitude of the people who run this system of global imperialism and how their attitude begins to disseminate out amongst artists and amongst the masses.
He said “With the gradual breakdown of the capitalist world during the twentieth century, the future life of the bourgeoisie, the preservation of ill gotten wealth has become one incredible mass of problems for them. This is seen in the personal anxieties and neuroses due to alienation the pressure of the ‘rat race; and now the growing sense of guilt or to be more accurate fear if about the precarious affluence of a small class n a sea of world poverty; a world of growing unready communist subversion and revolution and the threat of a third world war they know they cannot survive as all political efforts fail to check this collapse the bourgeois ideologists and so-called experts are busy constructing malthusian theories reducing man to a lemming like creature set on its own destruction. In this way they try to make universal the approaching doom of capitalism and the bourgeoisie and transform it by academic conjuring trick into the doom of the entire world, or at least civilization as they would have it.”
And this applies to art but it also applies to film, right? It applies to music and it applies to the general attitude, you know, of ordinary people as you come across them. And we saw it sort of fuse with the ideology of self-help.
But why is it that whenever you hear somebody praising how there's a new great movie that they can't just wait to see. It's the most depressing thing you've ever seen in your life.
It's because of this attitude that the bourgeois ideologists have. They are a doomed class. They know they are doomed. They know their system is doomed. The monopolists are doomed. Their system is dying. And in Russia and in Venezuela and in Cuba and
in the Sahill states and in China and in Vietnam and in Korea and in Iran. The people of the world are breaking out of the system that they know and they are doomed. And so they project their anxieties onto us, onto ordinary people who would benefit from that very death of the system. And they make us feel like we're hopeless. And they project a lassitude onto us, a hopelessness, a feeling that oh, nothing really matters anyway.
But this hopelessness doesn’t speak to why black-pill content is popular.
The Fantasy of the Manosphere
In the case of anything, you have to think about why it is being disseminated? There's a reason for it. And what is the appeal? Why are people watching this stuff. And in the case of the manosphere, it's very simple. It's a fantasy.
There was a live stream a few months ago. It was February I think. I think it really really exposes the fantasy.
It was a live stream of a character by the name of Clavicular. He's a very popular
looks-maxxer. He's very big in the Blackpill influencer space. And he assembled like a lineup of manosphere adjacent figures.They piled into a limo with Nick Fuentes and with Sneako
and with the Tate Brothers and of Myron Gains of the Fresh and Fit podcast. They all pile into this limo and they're singing along to Kanye West’s hit single Heil Hitler. And afterwards they all go clubbing
But what's the underlying fantasy that's being marketed to their fans? You're a bad person.
You're lonely. You suck. You're broke. You are failing romantically. You can't get a girl. And so, if you do all of these things.
All of these things that are supposed to make you an exceptional person. If you start a business, if you learn a language, maybe you fix your wardrobe, you take up bodybuilding,you do these things that in other circumstance would make you an exceptional person. And you suffer to the extent that you force yourself to do them.
You take these extreme measures and at the end of all of it, you get to go back to being a stupid normie.
You get to go clubbing on the weekends and you maybe you get to date another normie, because apparently there's no greater virtue in this life than fitting in with other people.
And you're left to wonder,” but couldn't I have just done the clubbing part first?”
And once you begin to see it, you start to see it everywhere. And it goes beyond explicitly political gender discourse in the manosphere. It infects supposedly apolitical “fitness” creators like Connor Sinaan or like Togi.
But why is it the most popular live-stream category, watching some chad get drunk and talk to women at bars?
That’s the most popular live-stream category, and why is that? Because they are selling their audience a fantasy.
And it's a harmful one.
I Know Because I Was the Target
And I am exactly the kind of person that that fantasy is meant to appeal to.
I can remember when I gave up on it.
It was 2024. and I had been invited to Sochi. I was invited to Sochi for the World Youth Festival. In many ways it was a profoundly amazing experience. It was a very validating experience. I got to meet young people from the new emerging economy that exists in the world. I got to see that maybe I wasn't alone in thinking these things in the United States. I also got to speak with the Russian president Vladimir Putin in a televised Q&A.
But I remember one night I was walking along and there was sort of a lull of activity. So I was sort of by myself. I was in the festival grounds. I was sort of walking around. and there was an EDM concert going on.
And you had all you had these Russian pop stars. They were on stage and I saw people dancing and I saw people laughing and I saw them all
having a really good time and I remember this feeling of sadness. It just washed over me because I realized that I wasn't normal.
Our guide actually said something to me about it. I remember I asked her, "Hey, what do you think about Americans?"
And she said she meets a lot of people at these festivals that she volunteers semi-frequently at and when she talks to people from Argentina or wherever, that it often comes across to her that all they wanted was a free trip.
But when she spoke to me and when she spoke to Caleb, she said there was something different about us and that all we wanted to talk about was geopolitics. All we wanted to talk about were obscure political figures. All we wanted to talk about wasBRICS. All we wanted to talk about was what was going on in the world.
And later I told another friend about this, another Russian friend I had made, and she got mad at me. She kind of got annoyed with me that I felt so upset by this. And she said, "So what?" You know, she said, "Yeah, you're pretty bookish. You're a little shy. You're pretty obsessive. I would say, but that doesn't make you a worse person than anybody else”. she said, "I like talking to you."
And I thought about it for a while and I realized I realized she was right.
I realized I'm not normal. and I know that there are many people in this room who know that they're not normal.
I realized I'm exceptional.
I realized that the only reason I have been able to accomplish anything that I have done in my life is not in spite of the fact that I am different. It's because I am different.
Right. And that's the fundamental lie right at the heart of this sort of individualistic nihilistic self-help control. It's this idea that being normal is the highest virtue a human being can have. And it's just not. It's not true.
And that's not to say that there's anything wrong with trying to be a better person. That's not to say that there's anything wrong with self-help or self-improvement.
Self-Help Has Socialist Origins
In fact, self-help as a genre has socialistic origins. Self-help as we understand it today. You know who coined the term self-help in the English language? It was a man by the name of Samuel Smiles.
And Samuel Smiles was part of the Chartist movement. Now folks who have read Karl Marx may be familiar with the Chartists. The Chartists were the first working class movement in Britain.
And similarly Wallace Wattles, we're a big fan of Wallace Wattles at the Center for Political Innovation, but he popularized the concept of what we now know today as manifesting. And he wrote books like The Science of Getting Rich, The Science of Being Great. But he was a socialist. He was a follower of Eugene Debs. And it was only after Ronda Byrnestook Wallace Wattles’ books and took all of the radical politics out of them, publishing her book The Secret that manifestation became cringe. But a perfect example of self-help in socialism.
Malcolm X and Transformation Through Struggle
It's the life of Malcolm X.
Prior to becoming involved in the Nation of Islam, Malcolm was a petty criminal.
If you read his auto autobiography, he describes about how pimping women, doing drugs, stealing from people, that is what made up the whole of his life along with partying, but that he went to prison and that by joining a movement, by taking history into his own hands, he became a different person.
And had Detroit Red never joined the Nation of Islam, you never would have heard the name Malcolm X.
Because the process of changing history, the process of getting involved in a struggle, of getting involved with a movement, it changes you.
It teaches you empathy and it teaches you patience and resilience and discipline and it transforms you into the kind of person that is capable of fulfilling the role that history has chosen for you.
And think of what the world would have been robbed of if Malcolm X had become an internet pickup artist.
Huey P. Newton Was Not Normal
And this transformation is not unique to Malcolm X, right? You read about the life of Huey P. Newton, right? the founder of the Black Panther Party.
Prior to founding the Black Panther Party for self-defense, who was Huey?
Huey Newton was a college dropout and he made ends meet by short changing people. But because Huey Newton was exceptional, because he chose to get involved with Students for a Democratic Society, we got what may be the most effective working class movement that this country had seen in decades.
We got the movement that built the free breakfast programs. It's the only reason that children in schools today have free lunch or free breakfast. We got the movement that built local community organizations and empowered the black community to fight for their rights. And think of what the world would have been robbed of if Huey had decided that his interest in revolutionary politics was too weird and he had wallowed in his misery on the internet.
Here's another thing that often gets obscured. Huie Newton was not a very charismatic guy.
He was a brilliant organizer. He was a brilliant theoretician. He was not a very charismatic guy.
And if you read accounts of the way that he was and his public speaking, they say that he was awkward. They say he was stilted. They said that in his classes it was very very hard to understand him because he would really really overcomplicate things.
They said that the higher level political classes that the Panthers taught were too dense and that they were too insular.
Huey P. Newton was not normal. And you need to get it out of your head that the only way that you can amount to anything is by desperately trying to be normal.
Because often the people who change history are obsessed.
And the way they are able to accomplish what they do is because they are obsessed.
Lenin and the Power of Obsession
Another perfect example of this, Vladimir Lenin. Vladimir Lenin was not a normal person.
nor was he described as terribly charming or personable. People who interacted with him say that he talked with a lisp. They say that he would get so worked up about party disputes, about issues going on in Russia that he would work himself up into such a panic that he would have these prolonged panic attacks, and he would have to play the piano to calm himself down. They say that he would stay up for days on end ranting and raving about different issues that were going on with the Bolsheviks.
Fiyador Illich Dan who was a Menschevik, he was an enemy of Lenin. He said in an essay attacking Lenin "What are you going to do with a guy who talks, writes, thinks, and breathes nothing but revolution 24 hours a day."
And that that was a common attack by the Social Democrats on the Bolsheviks. They said, "Oh, this isn't a political party. This is a monastic order. This is a cult. These people are weird. They give the whole of their lives to the struggle for justice."
And that there was no understanding at that time that the reason that the Bolsheviks were able to transform Russia from a backward agrarian society into a superpower was precisely because they were that way.
Jesus Christ and Revolutionary Transformation
I also just feel I have to mention because we're talking about movements and transformation. I would be bereft if I didn't mention the greatest revolutionary who ever lived. That's a man by the name of Jesus Christ. Amen.
Because Jesus Christ and the movement that he led, they were revolutionaries. Christianity was a revolutionary movement.
It was a movement of the proletariat of ancient Rome. That ancient Rome was the first society in the history of the world where you had this new class that
had emerged that were neither slaves nor masters. And when dignitaries would come from outside the Roman Empire and they would visit the central city of Rome,
they would be confused. They would say this is the wealthiest country in the world. This is the center of the world and yet there are homeless children on every street corner.
There was this class of people. They were neither slaves. They weren't owned by anybody. So nobody had to take care of them and they weren't masters. They didn't own anybody. They had nobody to exploit and they lived in poverty. And that Jesus Christ led a movement of those people. He led a movement of the oppressed and the exploited in the in the area that we now know as Palestine against the slavocracy that was the Roman Empire.
And who was one of the most important figures in the ancient in the early Christian church? It was Paul. And who was Paul? Paul was a Pharisee and he had helped to oppress Christians.
He had worked for the ruling class to kill Christians prior to his conversion on the road to Damascus.
But he had an epiphany and through joining a movement he was transformed into the figure that we know about today.
So whenever there have been social movements and whenever there has been self-help it has always been an instrument as part of the development of a world historical figure and the world historical process. It's not a recent phenomenon.
You Have to Join an Organization
If you really want to live up to what you have to offer humanity, you have to embrace the person that you are, and you need to join an organization.
And it's not easy. I've stayed up for days at times. It involves a lot of rejection. It involves dealing with and understanding people. Sometimes you don't even like those people. (Not talking about anybody in this room, of course.)
It involves persecution. It involves learning to be resilient to that persecution.
Tom Joad and the Meaning of Revolution
But I think about the person that I was before I joined the Center for Political Innovation. I am just so glad that I joined.
My favorite American novel is The Grapes of Wrath.
It’s my favorite novel because of how much I relate to Tom as a character and how much he truly captures what it means to become a revolutionary.
I love how at the beginning of the story, Tom is a horrible person.
He's selfish. He's mean-spirited. He's short-sighted. He's impulsive. He's lazy. But that by struggling and by suffering and by coming to understand the struggle of oppressed people through getting involved in a movement he has transformed not only into a better person, but into the kind of person who is capable of sacrificing his own freedom for a group of striking workers, defending them from the police.
And after he's made that sacrifice he has to confront his mother about why he has to run away.
And the words that he says, they've become a mantra for me. And when I've lost jobs for what I believe.
And when I've lost friends for what I believe.
When I've lost girlfriends for what I believe.
When I start to question whether this commitment that I made was worth anything; I say these words to myself and it gives me the strength to keep going.
He says,
“Maybe a fella ain't got a soul of his own, only a little part of a big soul.
The one big soul that belongs to all of us, the human spirit, and then it won't matter.
I'll be all around in the dark.
Wherever there's a cop beating up a guy, I'll be there.
Wherever there's a fight so that hungry people can eat, I'll be there.
I'll be there in the way that guys yell when they're angry or
kids laugh when they're hungry and they know supper's ready.
And when the people are finally living in the houses they've built and eaten the food that they've grown, I'll be there, too.”
That is what being a revolutionary means to me. That is what being an activist means to me.
That is what self-help means to me.
And I spent so much of my life trying to deny that, trying to fight that. But I know in my bones that I was born to be a revolutionary.
Take Ownership of Your Consciousness
And I know that there are so many people in this room that feel the same way. And I know that there are many people who are watching at home. Maybe they couldn't make it or maybe they decided that they didn't want to make it. And I know that they feel the same way.
But if you're ready to take up history's challenge, if you're daring enough to grasp the destiny of this country in your hands, then you have to take ownership of your consciousness.
The Courage to Stand for Something
I'll just say it. I can't stand freethinkers.
I can't stand people who think for themselves.
They really get on my nerves.
You know, they'll say,
" Oh no, I can't be in an organization, Noah. I can't be in a cult like you. Noah I mean, that maybe that's for you. maybe you but I think for myself. I think for myself.”
And what they're really saying is I am a coward.
I can't handle the social consequences of not conforming.
When they say I think for myself, what they mean is I want to let my enemies think for me. That's right.
They just want to sit back. They want to listen to mainstream media. They want to listen to Netflix. They want to passively drift through life without ever taking responsibility for their thoughts or for their actions.
But I'm sorry, we live in a very deeply sick society. And at some point, you just have to make a decision. You need to make a decision about who you're going to listen to. You need to have the courage to say,
I know that Russia is right and that NATO is wrong.
I know that the Sahill states are right and that AfroCom is wrong.
I know that Cuba is right and that this embargo is wrong.
I know that China is right and that the CIA is wrong.
I know that Iran and that the Palestinian people are right and that Israel is wrong.
You need to have the courage to say that the people of the world are right and that this system, this globalist imperialist system that is keeping them poor, that is killing humanity, that it is wrong and that it doesn't matter what good-looking actor they put in front of me to tell me that I should just accept my death. I am going to stand for something.
Mastery of Body and Mind
You need to say, "I'm an anti-imperialist. I believe that human beings are social creatures empowered with creativity and I believe in our latent ability to master our environment”
Because I believe that it is humanity's destiny to break past the narrow limitations of the western financial system and create a world without want or frustration or war or needless death.
And I'm going to do anything in my power to make sure that that comes to reality.
And it's only when you are able to do that that you're ever going to be independent. That you're ever really going to be able to think for yourself.
That you'll be truly a master of your body and of your mind.
And that mastery, that mastery comes with a tremendous power. That commitment, it's going to change you.
And you're going to be forced to become the greatest version of yourself that you can possibly be. And you will accomplish things you never thought that you ever would have.
The Struggle Changes You
When I joined the Center for Political Innovation, my life was a mess. I'm going to be honest. It was not something people would aspire to be.
I was 19 or 20 at the time. I'm 24 now. and I didn't really have a lot going for me.
I was really struggling to get my life in order. But by making that commitment, I can say that I've become someone who I'm proud of.
And I've been able to speak at the United Nations and defend North Korea at the United Nations.
I've been able to meet Russian President Vladimir Putin.
I've been able to represent my organization at international gatherings at the intervision songwriting contest.
I was able to be on television in Iran and in Cameroon and in Russia. I've been able to do things that I never thought I would have been able to do.
And I I know there are lots of people in this room and and I apologize if I don't name you or some of your accomplishments,
But Mike and Ellie have both been given awards by Fidel Castro personally.
And Penny has been on television in Cameroon
And Dan has been on podcasts with millions of subscribers talking about our ideology.
There are so many people in this room who have accomplished so much and there's a reason why Albert Einstein was a communist.
There's a reason why great people, people who accomplish great things just so happen to be involved in the struggle for justice.That's because the struggle changes you.
Take Up History's Challenge
And by giving the speech, I don't intend to entertain you by talking about how crazy Looks Maxers are or or about self-help on the internet. The point is to challenge you. I want to challenge you to take up history's challenge to live as a human being. And I really hope that you're ready to do that.
Thank you.