In olden days, certain people were geniuses at being friendly, mixing a sense of mischief with a keen perception bordering on clairvoyance. These people occupied many stations in life — clerk, taxi driver, nurse — and what they passed one to another was a deep appreciation of just being alive. Today, scientists say human beings use only ten percent of their mental capacity, mostly to "fit in" to civilization. This website is devoted to the part that doesn't fit in — to the remaining ninety percent.

Some people use isolation in an effort to stay in contact with the deeper parts of their mind. Thoreau, for instance, used Walden as his sanctuary. If you go to New Guinea, you can find natives who have no conception of calendars, years, or even seasons (because of the constant climate), who live in the eternal now. Even in modern cultures, a real effort is made to raise kids in some level of isolation, letting them follow their dreams and desires as much as possible, giving them an internal atmosphere of hope. It is this inner atmosphere which crystallizes into various formations of mind, which may or may not help the individual later in life. We speak of their "character," which is their fate.

They say poetry is a raid on the inarticulate. The deepest parts of the mind are "preverbal" and inarticulate. Trying to comprehend or understand these deep aspects of consciousness, a person gets the idea they are akin to an exotic art, with many dimensions. Likewise, this website has many dimensions, all of which come to bear upon specific "verbal transactions" in the outside physical world. These dimensions are expressed as "ideas," scattered across eighty-eight pages of taxi1010.com, ideas which assist a person interested in transforming the "suffering" aspects of their mind into tools which can help them dive down deep into harmony with Nature, Humanity, Consciousness, and Hope.

First Dimension

The twenty-two cards of the Major Arcana of the ancient Tarot are used as the "bones" of this website. They are interpreted as ages 1 to 22 years in an ordinary person's life — a poetic interpretation — described in the SiteMap of taxi1010. As long as you see these ideas as "poetry," you will understand how they apply to the "preverbal" and inarticulate parts of yourself. However, if you grab these ideas with habitual formations of mind devoted to bitching and complaining, they will not help you.

Second Dimension

It's not too difficult to see four broad classes of verbal assault: (1.) Murder, in which the deepest parts of yourself pretend the other person "doesn't exist"; (2.) Separation, in which the deepest parts of yourself become separated from each other and from your own personal experiences; (3.) Rules, based on conflicts between real rules in outside physical reality, and imaginary rules you habitually think, feel, and believe; (4.) Challenges, which question your acceptability and fitness within the belief systems of other people and even of your self, especially in the way you were brought up.

The twenty-two divisions of this website cycle through these four major classifications of verbal abuse, with a slight "glitch" during the teen-age years in which two years are treated as four. Thus the earliest years of an ordinary person's life are poetically called, "The Age of Domination" — The first of these four years has to do with (1.) Murder; the second with (2.) Separation; the third with (3.) Rules; and the fourth with (4.) Challenges.

The next four years are called "The Age of Attention," which cycle through those same four classes of insults, followed by "The Age of Self-Expression," "The Age of Insanity," "The Age of Detachment," and "The Age of Significance."

Thus, for example, an insult of the type, "What's that supposed to mean?" would tend to be treated in "The Age of Significance." It could further be treated within the class of (3.) Rules. In this way, "What's that supposed to mean?" gets recast as "What is the significance of what you are talking about, and under whose rules does it apply?"

Both of these questions are seen as attacks. The purpose of this website is to help you select an appropriate response to these or any other attacks, whether or not they are "justified." The philosophy behind this is that you have to stick up for yourself whether anyone likes it or not, because no one else will.

As an added complication, most people actually turn on themselves, making matters much worse than they actually are. You have to be your own friend, because you have within you a friend you know very little about — the part of you that wakes up and dreams at night, and which during the day sleeps, (mostly along for the ride,) hypnotized by civilization.

Third Dimension

Street smarts are defined as "a shrewd awareness of how to survive in an often hostile urban environment," and the purpose of this website is to collect that "sly knowledge." It's very important to see verbal abuse within a larger framework, so let's take an imaginary trip to the moon, to a safe place where we can breathe, and together, look back down on the planet. (Aren't the stars beautiful? Did you know there are exactly eighty-eight constellations?)

The stranger comes to town. He's a martial arts expert, though no one there knows it. He doesn't look buff like a weight trainer, and he doesn't look too keen-witted — in other words, he doesn't menace anyone. Unfortunately, there are people who have rejected him in advance, just because they're mean. They don't like anybody, least of all themselves. So they come after the stranger with words, and the stranger lets them win, just the way you would with a child. You don't want to win all the time, because what does that do to the child? You want to spoil them a little, so you let them win. Maybe half the time.

Let's watch this from back up on the moon. The stranger gets a job, and after a while, he makes a simple mistake, the kind of mistake anyone would make in the process of learning. His boss (the town bully) screams, "WHAT WERE YOU THINKING?" Without batting an eye, the stranger replies, "—Don't worry." which is kind of humorous on the face of it. He really was thinking, "—Don't worry." That's what he was telling himself. And it has a second meaning: He's telling the bully Don't worry, too! It has a third meaning: He's telling the bully what to say when someone else attacks the bully in this way. Now the bully knows a little more about how to defend himself, say, from his own vicious father, and he's extremely grateful. It has a fourth meaning!

Later that night, when the bully goes out on a date with his girlfriend, and they're looking back up at us on the moon, his girlfriend says, "What were you thinking?" The bully pauses a moment, then says, "—Don't worry." Then with a twinkle in his eye, he turns to her and adds, "—You tell me first."

Fourth Dimension

This website is not just about the codification of street smarts into eighty-eight categories (with closure), and it's not just about the reverse engineering of what to do when communication breaks down, or what to do when someone goes off the edge, doesn't follow the rules of logic, mutters a little show stopper, or bores you to death. It's a question of what's really important.

Personally, I believe that you're important, and that's why I brought you on this imaginary trip to the moon. In many cases, you don't want mean people to know the best defense for a particular attack, so it's best not to write or to say anything — Let them die ignorant.

If you do say something, you're better off saying something that's appropriate to the situation, rather than anything about what you really think, feel, or believe. For instance, if a little boy tries to get your goat by copying everything you say, you can just recite a variety of things to make him smarter — "Patience is the key to joy," "All things come to those who wait," "Hitch your wagon to a star," or "Never smarten up a chump." — Replace stubborn morbidity with a sense of humor. This is strictly a professional stance; for instance, when Walter Cronkite delivered the evening news, he never made public his political or personal beliefs. When you are out and around in the world, "don't cast pearls before swine." Do whatever's appropriate. Then, for the most part, when you are around friends, just be yourself.

This website treats all attack (even flirtation, or repartee from your closest friend) as having been uttered by one of twenty-two varieties of patient inside a Japanese Mental Hospital: (I.) A Bully, (II.) A Belittler, (III.) A Cajoler, (IV.) A Nitwit, (V.) A Curmudgeon, (VI.) A Busybody, (VII.) A Distracter, (VIII.) A Spoiler, (IX.) A Violator, (X.) A Hypocrite, (XI.) A Manipulator, (XII.) A Demolisher, (XIII.) A Usurper, (XIV.) A Provocateur, (XV.) A Crackpot, (XVI.) A Blowhard, (XVII.) A Patronizer, (XVIII.) A Schemer, (XIX.) An Instigator, (XX.) A Reformer, (XXI.) A Turncoat, and (XXII.) A Stooge.

If you can name something or put it in words (to yourself), you can understand it and do something about it. If you can't put it in words (to the youngest, preverbal, or inarticulate parts of your mind), it could be anything.

By temporarily treating an attacker as if they're a patient, you diminish their importance. Further, you get the idea you can always retreat to a safe distance, devise a "therapy," and return a little better prepared.

Preparation is everything. And there's an added advantage. If you say something to someone as a secret "therapy" for them, and they respond with a vicious attack, they're not really attacking you. They're attacking the therapy.

It's like attacking two friends sitting on the moon.

Fifth Dimension

The most astonishing aspect of Non-escalating Verbal Self-Defense is that when practiced most successfully, it goes almost unnoticed. Well, maybe that's not so surprising considering that street smarts are about the opposite of phoniness. All we're doing here is dividing street smarts into eighty-eight pieces so we can examine each piece in detail. Later on, of course, when a person actually uses that knowledge, it gets fused back into one reality — quick and honest.

Exactly half of these "stargates" elucidate informal fallacies of logic — not simply defining them, but providing a whole slew of things a person can say right back. For instance, in most textbooks, tu quoque is translated from the Latin as "You do it, too!" implying someone's argument is worthless because they don't follow their own advice. In other words, if I advise you not to smoke, that advice is not logically diminished by the wee little fact that I am a heavy smoker. What those textbooks leave out is what to say back to defend a tu quoque argument. You'll find it here, along with specific responses to each of forty-three other informal fallacies:

Appeals to Sympathy: Argumentum ad Misericordiam, Argumentum ad Verecundiam, The Authority of the One, Appeals to the Superego, Argumentum ad Captandum Vulgus, The Authority of the Select Few, The Authority of the Many, The Authority of Tradition, The Authority of Precedent, The Fallacy of Special Pleading, and Argumentum ad Ignorantiam.

Personal Attack: Argumentum ad Hominem, Esprit Gaulois, The Genetic Fallacy, Abusive ad Hominem, Circumstantial ad Hominem, The Trojan Horse Fallacy, Tu Quoque, Poisoning the Well, Abandon Discussion, Argumentum Baculinum, and Challenging Authority.

False Logic: The Fallacy of Accent, The Fallacy of Amphibology, Hypostatization and Snobbery, The Fallacy of Hasty Generalization, The Fallacy of Composition, The Fallacy of Division, The Fallacy of Equivocation, The Time-Line Fallacy, The Fallacy of Concomitant Variation, Post Hoc, ergo Propter Hoc, and Denying the Antecedent & Affirming the Consequent.

Trickery: The Fallacy of Overlooking the Facts, The Fallacy of Accident, The Fallacy of Bifurcation, Unrepresentative Sample, Petitio Principii, Question-Begging Epithets, a Fortiori Argument, The Fallacy of Complex Question, The Fallacy of Misleading Analogy, Ignoratio Elenchi, and Call for Perfection.

Now — Only a total egghead could deal with these Latin and French things on the fly. Also, in my estimation, no one has more than half a second, at most, to do a syntactic analysis, a semantic analysis, or much of anything else in the course of actually defending themselves. So — taxi1010 is designed from the ground up to let a person respond to just one word in an attack — an immediate response, with no analysis whatsoever.

Let's take the word, "haircut." No matter how a haircut attack is formulated, you can always respond, "—You're safe," "—BACK OFF!" "—On schedule," or "—Nothing better." See how easy that is? So don't talk to me until you get a haircut!

[That attack falls within The Fallacy of Special Pleading — Applies leniency for ourselves (because we are special) and a stricter standard for everyone else]

Sixth Dimension

When you remember a book from your childhood, what you really appreciate is the art.

Seventh Dimension

That sounds a little daunting — The Seventh Dimension! Jeez. I know someone like that.

Life is strange. You've got people all over the place, with all the varieties of human experience, you'd think everything would be easy. So why do people suffer so much? You get the idea people are trying to protect something. I wish I knew what it was.

I think I'm supposed to be serious here, act like I know what I'm doing. You know, "And then blah, blah, blah, blah ... should I add a fifth one? Blah!" Insults are strange, you know? They're never original, and that's the Achilles' heel of mean people — I mean, I couldn't really do research on rude or superficial people if they were in any way original. So as sort of a pastime, I started wondering, what could be underneath all this? Maybe I could determine some sort of "diagnostics" — as if unoriginal communication was an engine — driving what? Let me throw in an art here.

Actually, I threw in two. Which one do you like better? I know, I know ... Both! I don't want to hurt my sister's feelings. Hmm! ... my attention switches back and forth between them, at twenty second intervals.

So, I spent a little time at this — seven eerie months — pouring over note cards, posting huge tables on a four-by-six-foot poster board, actually two of them, experimenting with "diagnostics of insults." In the end I came up with twenty-two, equally distributed across all the insults I had jotted down over twelve years — That's a huge number of insults! Here's the list ... I'll leave you with the list ... I don't know what good it will do you:

(A.) Ambush, (B.) Blackmail, (C.) Coercion, (D.) Delusions, (E.) Embarrassment, (F.) Fantasy, (G.) Give-And-Take, (H.) Harassment, (I.) Hatred, (J.) Interrogation, (K.) Intimidation, (L.) Loftiness, (M.) Masking, (N.) Nagging, (O.) Obliqueness, (P.) Put-Downs, (Q.) Quandaries, (R.) Reference, (S.) Sadism, (T.) Teasing, (U.) Undermining, and (V.) Veiled Hatred.

Don't even ask me what "Reference" is — I used to know. Maybe it's even better to look at things from the point of view of everyday situations. That's the Eighth Dimension!