Frankly this piece of his little rant directed at others is maybe the finest and most clear example of the pot calling the kettle black that I have ever come accross in the world. It reminds me of Chappel's "Black White Supremacist" skit, except in a way this is funnier or maybe more sad. I don't know.
Quote:
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Originally Posted by Mike Mentzer
Mike: That is because they possess a different 'sense of life' than you or I, Brian; and, therefore, they have a different explicit philosophy. A person's sense of life is his subconscious, emotionally integrated view of existence; it represents his basic, early value integrations; and such is what determines his adult - (i.e., conscious, explicit) philosophy of life. Very few of these individuals ever learned early on to properly value truth, knowledge, science, ethics and justice. As a result they've wrecked the functioning of their cognitive mechanism; which means, simply, they can't properly identify or evaluate the facts of reality, i.e., they can't think. These individuals are primarily motivated by the irrational desire to project and protect an image of incontestable superiority and, even, god-like omniscient infallibility; which serve, of course, only to make them appear ridiculously pathetic. They just can't admit that after all the years of endorsing the non-theoretical, volume approach that maybe, just maybe, they made a mistake. They've never granted any slightest plausibility to the theory of high-intensity training, and, instead, continue to evade the issue involved and/or resort to unwarranted impeachment of the moral characters of those who advocate high-intensity. For instance, high-intensity can't be valid because "Arthur Jones is insane" or "Mike Mentzer is an alcoholic," or whatever.
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Sadly the reality is once you get insitutionalized and have major mental breakdowns and issues, you start to question your ability to think and function. You erode your sense of certainty and unfortunately it's certainty about the yourself and ability to preceive correctly and function and not an external topic. In order to put yourself back together again, I imagine what Mike did was revamp his mental processes and try to see that he was right or could be right about things and think clearly. Introduce Ayn Rand and objectivism here.
Of course attachment to the mind always leaves us with the single lingering doubt that maybe we are just nuts and deluding ourselves. Mentzer obviously required dogmatic certainty to be able to bolster himself up and this was applied to his theories also (or who knows maybe he was so financially and ideologically wedded to them that he was unable to revise them - or maybe such revision was threatening to his psyche). I don't know. We are all a bit crazy. One of the major symptoms of schizophrenia or other disorders is hearing voices and talking to yourself, yet I don't know anyone really who doesn't have a drubbling near constant internal dialogue running all day long, sometimes locked in a dreamlike state.
EDIT: actually in remembering I think Mike said his moment of clarity came when he had the thought "Mike Mentzer go back to what you know." That was the transformative moment for him and he went back to bodybuilding. Thinking on that, I imagine that's an underpinning that would be rather difficult to revise. Sadly, expert level or even fairly basic knowledge of training and exercise science is not a requirement to be a very successful pro BBer.