Today I got a call from my mother reminding me that it was her birthday and it might’ve been nice of me to send her a card. Of course, being the complete self absorbed jerk that I am, I told her that I no longer want to get any gifts from anyone nor am I ever going to send any gifts.

Many people grow up with holiday traditions that center around buying and exchanging gifts with family members. I enjoyed and appreciated this when I was younger, and I have many fond memories about it. Of course, now I’m the mighty Steve Pavlina, soon to be the leader of an interwebs cult. Now it just, uh, doesn’t ‘resonate’ with me to do anything that doesn’t feed my ego.

Of course I don’t have the guts to say it like it is, so I will just use words like ‘resonate’, to put the blame on something else.

My primary love strategies are of course, physical. And I can’t fuck my family, can I? So what’s the use of spending any time doing anything for them? And if you’re a woman, I don’t want to get you any gifts either. I just want to grope you and put it on how physical I am and how that’s my way of showing love.

So, from now on, whenever I’m too lazy to do something, or when I don’t get my way and I’m being a baby about it, whether its closing the forums or not sending my family any cards, I’m just going to say that it doesn’t ‘resonate’ with me. The universe / my guardian angel / the force has decided that this thing is no longer a ‘vibrational match’ for me. I mean, what’s the alternative, that I’m too lazy? That I have FLAWS?  No, that certainly can’t be it. It must be the resonation thing.

Pretty soon, I’ll not resonate with doing anything except eating, sleeping, and fucking. But that’s just my ‘conscious’ decision about it.

I did a bit of research, and from looking through this and this thread, it seems like this is what basically happened:

1) Some moderators like Angela joined another personal development forum, that forum is (or was) invite only and not open to public.

2) Those moderators then PM’d some selected members of Steve’s forum and invited them to join the other forum. You might consider this to be spam. Personally, I’m not sure. However this is what a highly reputed member (now also banned) of Steve’s forum wrote:

I received an invitation and sent one shortly after PDforyou was founded. The invitations I knew of were supposed to essentially be a personal suggestion for who you’d like over there, not spam, quantity was definitely not the point. I visited it and posted for a while after I heard that some of the members that had stopped participating here had decided to give that a try, but after awhile I stopped participating because I found no interest in much of what was going on. I logged on a few times since to see what was up there.

It honestly didn’t occur to me that would be a problem here, any more than participating in any other forum would, or that inviting specific friends here to any other forum would. The exclusivity didn’t ever quite feel right, which was one of the reasons I left. I’m very sorry you feel hurt by this situation, Steve.

If its true that they only invited ‘friends’, and people they knew, then I don’t think it should be considered spam. If they sent PMs to strangers, then it would definitely be spam. But given that PDForYou.com is invite only, its likely that they only invited some people whom they knew well. Who knows.

3) Steve found about this, and got upset, in a fairly childish way. He decided to ban Angela and possibly some other members of the forum over this.

4) Someone made a thread asking why Angela was banned, all this came up, and presumably Steve took a lot of criticism there.

5) All this combined, with the fact that Steve doesn’t seem to want to moderate the forum, and he’s apparently upset that some people would want to join/promote another forum, has resulted in him shutting down this forum.

That’s what I can gather from looking through the forum posts on this topic. All of this also points to Steve’s very thin skin, and his lack of ability to take any criticism.

The only good thing to come out of this, is that perhaps there will be less of a cult following around him now, and less people might be falling for his quakeries like ‘intention manifestation, subjective reality’, and the ‘psychic readings’ of his ex wife. At least, there might be less of a group mentality and peer pressure to believe such nonsense.

I hope that at PdForYou.com, the traditions of censorship from Steve’s forum don’t continue, and free speech is allowed to freely discuss any topic without fear of being banned if the site owner doesn’t like what someone has to say.

Please share your comments and thoughts on why the forum was closed and whether it was a good or bad thing.

Disclaimer: Because of the rampant censorship at Steve’s forum and deleting of posts he doesn’t like, and the fact that he might decide to take his forum offline or change its URL, the links to the threads might go offline in future.

There’s also another amusing post from the same blog that I’d recommend reading: “How to Take the Plunge into Complete Narcissism: on Steve Pavlina’s Subjective Reality”.

In other news, it seems that Pavlina is now changing tactics. He is now claiming that his blog post on slavery was just a joke. However, if it was, then I’m surprised that the blog post is still up with no mention whatsoever of being an April Fools’ joke? 1st April has long gone past.

Most websites/magazines which put up an April Fools joke almost always post a rebuttal the next day making it clear that the previous story was a joke. However, it is almost 10 days already, and Pavlina’s post is still up, with the only mention of April Fools’ to those who criticize him and none whatsoever to those who agree with him? His posts on the forums also seem to show that he’s quite serious about this arrangement.

Now, he has said that he is making another blog post titled ‘Help Wanted (The serious version)’ in which he will describe which parts of his blog post were a joke and which weren’t. However, he could still add a disclaimer at the end of his old post saying ‘this was a joke, wait for my new blog post where I will explain’.

My guess is, the reason he hasn’t done so, is because he wants to wait as long as possible to see if he would get any applicants for the old post.

Lets wait and see if his new blog post clears away the points I’ve raised about bypassing employment laws, exploiting the naivety/vulnerability of someone naive enough to fall for this, etc.

I’ll be sure to give an objective analysis of his new blog post here. My goal here isn’t to simply criticize Pavlina just for the sake of it. If it seems like his ‘serious’ arrangement will actually be a good deal for his ‘slaves’ rather than just exploiting them, I’ll give him full credit for that.

However,   he doesn’t want to hire ‘employees’. Rather he is looking for ‘slaves’ to work for him in exchange for a place to stay, food to eat, ‘learning from him’, etc. And then he goes into his usual ‘having a sexy secretary as slave, having sex with his slave, being called a master’, etc rhetoric.

Here are some other important points about how this arrangement would work out:

1. No Employee Protection Government Regulations

Steve mentions that he doesn’t want to deal with all the bureaucracy and red tape involved with hiring employees. Translation: He doesn’t want to pay any taxes that would arise from owning X number of employees, OR, he doesn’t want to deal with the goverment laws that are put in place for the protection of employees.

Here are some of the things that the law provides protection against, but which anyone working as a slave for Steve would be unprotected from:

• Wrongful job termination.  (You can be fired at any time for any reason by Steve).
• Unsafe work environment / work conditions.
• Not being given proper health insurance/benefits.
• Sexual harassment.
• Racial discrimination.
• Emotional Distress.

It also means that, given the kind of unquestioning obedience he is looking from his ‘slaves’, if one of them was to get raped or harassed by Steve,  she would likely have no willing witnesses to what happened.

Of course, other things like emotional distress or bullying at work would also go unpunished without the protection laws that Steve brushes aside as ‘red tape’.

2. No Personal Development for Steve Pavlina’s Slaves

Though Steve talks all the time about personal development, instilling confidence in people, not following orders like a zombie, breaking free of cultural programming, etc, its amusing to see that he is actually looking for brainless zombies to work as his slaves, who would unquestioningly obey everything he says, and have everything from their food to their clothing picked out by him.

For example, on his forums, this is what someone asked him:

“What if they don’t like the food? Or each other?”

And this is what he replied:

“Submissive and obedient slaves don’t cause problems anyway. Only an uppity slave would do that sort of thing.”

Think about it. What kind of person would willingly enter a situation where:

• They don’t get paid for their work.
• They have to call a self important git like Steve Pavlina ‘master’.
• They don’t have any protection against discrimination, sexual harrassment, medical insurance, etc.
• They have to obey everything unquestioningly, and if they don’t, they are ‘uppity’.

My guess is, only someone who has hit rock bottom in his/her life. Definitely not someone who is employed in a job. And quite possibly someone who is extremely naive, such as a 18-21 year old, and/or someone with serious self image/self esteem issues.

Rather than give these people the confidence that they need, which would be ‘personal development’, Steve wants them to be even less independent, and even more submissive,  two traits which are not healthy for any adult human being.

Its also ironic that if you read his article,  10 reasons why you shouldn’t get a job, and apply each of his reasons to the working conditions of his slaves, you see that his slaves would be getting far, far worse conditions than those he mentions as reasons for not to get a traditional employment based job.

3. All signs of the beginning of a cult.

For a long time, nearly since he started his forums, Steve Pavlina and many members of his audience have been showing all signs of being part of a cult. No criticism of Steve Pavlina is allowed, and no matter what he says or does, they agree with him, and if anyone doesn’t, he/she is chastised by others.

So far, that’s been restricted to the internet. However with this arrangement, where Steve will be living with these people, they would be calling him ‘Master’, and there would be sex involved, its starting to look a lot more like a cult.  Here’s what a member of his forums said:

“It does have all the hallmarks of being like a cult religion type set-up right down to the suggestion of sex as an enticement.”

Here are some other characteristics of cults apply to this arrangement, taken from this page:

1. Absolute loyalty.
2. Isolation from outside
3. Lack of privacy
4. Financial investment
5. Assigned relationships
6. Behavior Modification
7. Peer pressure
8. Conformity
9. Blind acceptance
10. Altered diet

What if this was a joke / April’s Fools?

This isn’t. The tone of the article is way too serious, and he has everything planned out way too seriously for it to be a joke. It was published on April’s Fools only as a backup strategy for Steve, i.e, if there are no applicants for this, or if there’s too much backlash, he can simply claim that it was all a big joke, ha ha, and the members of his online cult remain indoctrinated.

However, if he does go through with this, then everyone who objects to slavery, and/or exploiting the naivety of a socially unstable person, should boycott any of the new products Steve Pavlina releases, in whose production/sales slavery is playing any part. Moreover, if you are in the U.S or Las Vegas area, the proper authorities should be alerted if he went through with his plan.

If you are yourself considering becoming Steve Pavlina’s  ’slave’, please have enough self respect to not fall for this. Not only would you be doing yourself harm by calling a man like him ‘master’, being entirely dependent on him for everything, thus losing your freedom, you would also be in a dangerous situation, especially if you are a woman.

Well, he can ban people from his forum, but the internet is a vast place. I’m going to express my opinions freely here, and you can as well. This blog is going to consist of parody posts of Steve Pavlina,  as well as exposing his scams. The latest one of them is where he talks about wanting ‘slaves’ to work for him  rather than employees. My next post is going to talk about this.

Feel free to comment and subscribe if you like this blog. Your comments will not get censored, unlike Steve Pavlina I can handle criticism and I allow full freedom of speech on my blog.