Be All You Can Be -- U.S. Army

Rand believed only life made the idea of value possible. If we didn't have a nature, if we could not be harmed or changed, we would have nothing to gain or to lose. In other words, without a nature, there would be nothing that could count as being for or against us, harming or furthering our interests, or threatening or serving our welfare.

The requirements for human survival are determined by nature itself. Man is unique in that he must think to survive. In order to establish a context, grasp relationships, and discover differences and similarities, conceptualizing must be actively sustained. Without his ability to reason, man has few natural advantages.

There is no gulf between the is and the ought; man needs to realize certain virtues to survive at all. This is why Rand opposed those who turn meekness and charity into ethical ideals -- for something like charity to even be possible, someone somewhere has to be productive.

There is no solution to survival; if we even consider survival to be a problem, it requires constant thought and originality-- we never reach a point where we need to stop thinking. Productive activity calls upon the highest aspects of human character-- creative ability, ambitiousness,and self-assertiveness. There needs to be practical thinking going on someplace in the human community if the community is to survive in the first place. It follows that a rational being will support property rights, since life is a process of self-sustaining and self-generating action. Rand believed the ultimate vice is evasion-- the unfocusing of one's mind, the refusal to know.

Like Aristotle, Rand believed there can be no fundamental conflict of interest among good people. A good man is honest-- he doesn't fake reality. A good man is just-- he doesn't seek the unearned. A good man has integrity-- he doesn't change who he is for others. A good man is independent-- he relies on his mind to form his own judgments. One's person's gain is not another's loss; individual achievements benefit everyone through knowledge and trade.

The ethical spirit of Rand is noble-- there is nothing higher than to want the best for yourself, your friends, your family, your country, and the world. One can even want the best for evil people without embracing or aiding their goals. Your life belongs to you.

As a result, Rand rejected using emergencies to provide insight into the basic principles of ethics. Disasters only are of primary concern if one has a nightmare view of existence, where we are all doomed beggars, where our first concern is whether to sacrifice ourselves. Man's life depends on his daily productive activity-- emergencies, disasters, and catastrophes are not the norm. If one keeps an aretaic theory of ethics, then this reasoning is appropriate. However, it is inconsistent with both egoism and absolute rights.

That Rand's ethics proclaims to be objective does not make it unique. Nor does it make it coherent. Ethical systems can be aretaic, deontological, and consequentialist. The task for the philosopher is to discover which ideas are basic and which ideas are secondary. For example, in one passage, egoism supposedly demands that the beneficiary of an action should be the person who acts. On other pages man's rights are taken as basic. And, as just mentioned, sometimes an Aristotlean, aretaic approach was chosen. All of these purport to be objective systems, but they aren't consistent with each other, even though their conclusions may overlap in many cases. That's the purpose of finding problematic cases-- they bring issues of principle into clear focus.

For instance, suppose you are captured and held in a prisoner of war camp. Your captors offer you early repatriation for their own propaganda purposes. If you turn it down, it may be a few years before you are released, if ever. Now, if an agent should only act for the benefit of itself, the rational choice is to leave your friends behind and choose the early release. Of course, while Rand didn't want to be known as a hedonist, human survival is consistent with either choice the POW makes. Now, we can reject hedonism by building human roles into our reasoning. One may say that to be an American at all, or to be a soldier at all, certain virtues are required to make the practice possible. If we choose Aristotle, one must lose the egoism-- here is a case where considerations of honor and dishonor require sacrifices on the individual's part. The same follows elsewhere in life-- a father who leaves his wife and kids for the sole purpose of being with a young, more attractive woman is not only acting selfishly, he is a bad father and husband.

An Objectivist may reply-- the POW in question can still act selfishly and honorably, since if he remains in the POW camp, he is being loyal to his highest values. I cannot permit this move, since it attempts to defend normative egoism by appealing to psychological egoism. When a person is committed to a value that demands altruism, there is no sense in saying that the person is still an egoist. It is a tautology to say that each person's set of values are their own.

The same inconsistency applies to rights. Rand noted that a society must respect rights if it wants to maximize its productivity, which ties into the basic virtues required for survival. However, one can imagine emergencies which require the violation of rights-- perhaps Jack Bauer may need to torture a terrorist to prevent a nuclear bomb from going off in a city with millions of people in it. The purpose of the example isn't to defend a nightmare view of existence-- if anything, it shows that if one is to prevent these kinds of nightmares, good is more basic than right. It is the question of principle that Rand evades.

Rand, seeing everything as a market transaction that benefits the self, even went as far to describe love, friendship, respect, and admiration as spiritual payment. Whether one pays for something or not, however, is arbitrary. Aristotle would say that we ought to praise what fulfills its potentialities and actualizes its perfections.

One may even question Rand's notion of productive work as an ethical ideal. If we go to Aristotle, we'll find that work is seen not as an actualization, but as a deficiency -- a lack of leisure. Many human excellences, from sports to theoretical research, do not produce any physical objects for anyone on this planet. In other words, the magnanimous man works for the purpose of living; he lives not for the purpose of toil. Rand dismisses the fun, pleasant, and playful in life as whimsical-- her rational man must be an obsessive, terse workaholic.

It isn't an accident that Rand's world has little place for the young, the elderly, the sick, the unborn, the retarded, and the dead. She forgot that virtue is also a process of cultural renewal requiring institutions. If man automatically is good through the free exercise of reason, then he is in no need of moral instruction-- no one could corrupt him. But if men are born incomplete, then they learn morality and immorality from others. After all, morality isn't a mystic insight into an abstract, inhuman realm; it deals with the tools of life for human beings on this planet.

While selfishness is not necessarily a virtue, it is not necessarily a vice either. Many often have the attitude of what Rand labeled a social metaphysician, a man who regards the minds of others superior to his own, and desperately wants to be liked as a result. This mentality turns renunciation, resignation, and self-denial into ethical ideals, forgetting that the refusal to be sacrificed does not mean one intends to sacrifice others. The teachings of a social metaphysician lead to moral agnosticism, the doctrine that we must never pronounce moral judgment. This doctrine implicitly asserts the moral equality of all desires; hence, the only way to get along is for everyone to give in to anything. Compromise among rational agents is a mutual concession for mutual benefit-- we give up something to get something. Moral agnosticism ends up asserting compromise for compromising' s sake. It doesn't give both sides a fair hearing, for it denies the very possibility of a fair hearing by asserting both sides of an argument are morally equivalent in advance. The cultural manifestation of this denial of good and evil is the anti-hero: a person with no virtues, no values, no goals, no character, and no significance.

If Rand was genuinely selfish, how can we explain why she preached to others? Because she wanted to won't fly, because again, we cannot rationally base any sort of normative egoism on psychological egoism. Rand genuinely cared about the direction of mankind, letting us know that the cannibalism spreading across the Earth in the twentieth century was neither inevitable nor desirable. That is regard for the welfare of others, and it doesn't imply a disregard for the welfare of yourself. Rand is good, but Aristotle is better.

Further Reading:
Alasdair MacIntrye: After Virtue
Mary Midgley: Beast and Man

Most of my material for the Fountainhead post comes from a six part lecture by Andrew Bernstein who has his course posted on the Ayn Rand Institute website.  I was so taken by the character of Roark from the get-go I felt a need to blog on this, and also Atlas Shrugged.  There are really no characters like Rand's in any other book.  Rand herself said that her books were totally original and that her plots and her characters were totally original. (From Preface to Atlas Shrugged 1991 edition).  I believe it.  You must read these books and you will believe too.

Ayn Rand wasn't perfect.  She presents the ideal man but has no idea how a society of these kind of perfect people would exist in reality.  In her two main novels she never has her heroes

1. Have children and try to raise them this way
2. Any religious faith of any kind
3. Have any type of physical or mental disease to challenge them
4. Have positive relations with their biological families
5. Even have pets

Her heroes/heroines are also always perfectly thin and beautifully clasically dressed.  They don't seem to crave lots of food or drink or anything but sex, and only with other perfect people!  You will note in each book that the female lead has no less than three lovers and a decent sexual appetite for the times.  (The sex scenes are a nice surprise for people expecting to be bored by Rand.)

Rand did not see humanity, with it's warts, worth saving at all, only her perfect people and their admirers more or less.  How were people who didn't meet her exacting standards supposed to survive after her perfect America was in place?  Guess I'd have to ask my mother which would be much harder than you'd think. The time Rand's characters enjoy themselves is very rare, indeed.  I can think of only one real example.  It's when Howard Roark goes on the yacht of Gail Wynand towards the end of the Fountainhead.  He totally lets himself go and enjoy his vacation to the point it shocks Wynand.  Thank God (even though Rand did not believe) for that.  Still, I believe she has many many points to make and much to say about society today and how we (they, LOL) have gone wrong.  Here is Mr. Howard Roark, Ayn Rand's fire haired sex symbol.

In the beginning, we see Howard Roark standing on the edge of a cliff, nude, and mighty proud of himself that he quit school.  He could not continue in school because the dean and the professors want him to conform to the old ideas of architecture.  It is supposed to be 1921.  Roark is only twenty or so.  This first challenge he faces becomes a lifetime of challenges for Roark, but for the time being, he stands on the cliff, ready to dive into a natural pool, a mini-God.  We are led to know he has enormously high self esteem and is physically desirable.  He is tall, thin (almost too thin), has bright red hair, gray eyes and high cheekbones.  He is an almost instant turn on for female readers.

Roark is an independent and the source of his ideas is himself and the objective reality (the five senses) around him.  He refuses to borrow ideas from the past for his buildings and also refuses the help of other's to "pull him up".  When he gets help from others he makes sure it's an equal trade and he will give at least as much as he gets.  He is always thinking of architecture day and night.  He can look at rocks or a wall or a cliff and complete a building in his head.  His mind never stops.

He has few friends and no family.  Throughout the novel he keeps it that way.  The few friends he makes accept him the way he is and do not try and change or manipulate him in any way.  He wants relationships of mutual respect.  He never wants to be in a one-up, one-down relationship.  When he finds love it is only with the most impossibe woman in New York and through nothing he can buy her--all he can offer is himself.

Roark takes rejection in stride because he never lets the hurt go too deep.  The only hurt he feels is that his work is affected and he can't continue.  He won't mope or sit and pine away because someone does not like him.  When asked by Ellsworth Toohey what Roark thinks of him after Toohey screws him out of a contract, Roark says "I don't think of you." and he means it.  Later, Rand had more feeling heroes in Atlas Shrugged, but her perfect man with the fire hair could take all the crap life gave him in stride without developing mental problems or substance problems or even stress!

For Rand, maybe Roark was what she dreamed of being:  someone who did not emotionally react to their accusers.  Maybe Roark was a dream to Rand.  It was obvious she was sensitive in real life, as her interview on Donahue way back in 1980 shows.  When an audience member took her on about some of her views, Rand could not argue calmly but resorted to nasty anger.  I expected her to be calm and react like Roark would but she was all too human after all.

In the next post, I will examine Roark's relationship to the other characters in the book and what the book means to people today.

If there is a self-help book out there, this is the one. Ayn Rand's views on human nature and the raw characters of man are hauntingly real. If there was a book that changed my view of humanity, or just put it into words for me, this is the one.

The timing of my reading couldn't have been better. Rand emphasizes the importance of the individual (a very big theme in my yoga practice) and the importance of creativity for the sake of self, not to please the masses. This ideal is something that transcends into my field, journalism. Though Rand is critical of the profession, I believe her points can be taken to better the profession and practice of journalistic integrity.

I also loved the term "second-handers" to refer to those who live their lives second-hand...their self worth comes from the acceptance of others. I love living life first-hand!

Good Quotes:
"We are poisoned by the superstition of the ego. We cannot know what will be right or wrong in a selfless society, nor what we'll feel, nor in what manner. We must destroy the ego first. That is why the mind is so unreliable. We must not think. We must believe." Part 2, Chapter 13
"Independence is the only gauge of human virtue and value. What a man is and makes of himself; not what he has or hasn't done for others. There is no substitute for personal dignity." Part 4, Chapter 18

In a world approaching 7 billion souls, we find ourselves becoming less and less significant. I ask myself daily, if I were to disappear today, would the world miss me? Of course, not. They would just crank out three newborns to take my place. (Current World Population Link in my Blogroll) Man has become nothing more than a recyclable commodity. Work, pay your taxes, cut your lawn, then die and all will be well. In the future, instead of cemeteries, there will be human recycling bins. Got to keep the earth green! I do not matter, and neither do you. You think you still do, at least to someone or something. A spouse, your family, your dog or cat, but you do not. This is all illusion. Except in the rarest of cases, 21st century ego will not allow it. Too much self love. Am I guilty of narcissism myself? Absolutely. It is a pandemic that is sweeping the world, and I have been exposed.  As there becomes more and more of us, people are screaming everywhere looking to be noticed. Why do you think I have published this blog? Hey, here's me! Like me! Hold me! Love me! I am, however, unlike you, searching to be cured of this terrible disease that has eaten away at my dignity. I am looking to become less and less significant. I want to be forgotten by everyone, even by those who claim to care about me. I desire to become nothing!

This process had its genesis on September 11th 1999 when I set out, like HD Thoreau, to live my life in the woods. I had set up my tent and supplies in the far NW part of a major US city. For the first six months, I lived in a state of constant fear. Anytime, I thought, I would be discovered by the Sheep Police and thrown back into society. Those six months passed and nothing happened, I thought then that I was free, however, the anchor of the world, still kept me down. Now nine years have passed. I still live in a tent, only a couple of miles from my original location and finally I am going to attempt to break totally free from it all.

I like my tent. My surroundings. Every time I am away from it for a couple of days, when I get back and lounge on my sleeping bag, and hear nothing but silence, a state of euphoria engulfs my being. Sadly, this has always been shortlived because, when I awaken the next morning, I hear the cacophony of vehicles driving on the nearby freeway, people on their daily commutes to jobs that they hate. Jobs that have no other purpose other that to line the pockets of the sickos that exploit them, so they can have the money to buy stuff that they really do not need. Oh the maddening perils of capitalism. There has to be a better way! Right? Sure I buy stuff. Beans, rice, soda (my sick addiction), batteries etc. But these are essential items for me to exist. Is $4.00 a gallon gasoline essential for you to exist? You will insist that the answer is yes. You will jump up and down until you are blue in the face. Ha! I say. In reality, the car is as essential as your toaster, but the toaster is better. It makes toast. What does a car do? It wakes me up in the morning and pollutes the air. Sure it might get you to WalMart, a movie, or to some other distraction, but next time, how about walking. Or as Thoreau put it, sauntering. I bet you (and I) need to saunter a few pounds away. Can't hurt to leave that car in the garage just once. Once.

Tent life has its challenges, of course. It isn't all puppies and sunsets. There are heat, bugs, rains, floods, and animals to contend with. The Jehovah's Witnesses have yet to find me, but I do feel them closing in. That is why I move from time to time. Recently I have acquired human neighbors. They live about four hundred yards from me. They means more than one. Most certainly two, perhaps three or four. I haven't taken a census yet. One is harmless, you're garden variety bum. A "I Will Work for Food" toting miscreant. He has a limp, a crutch, a bike, a dog and is always reading a cheap mass produced novel. We chat on occasion. He asked me if I liked John Grisham. I tried to frame my answer as politely as possible. I did not want to make an ememy of him. He has been around for years. We can co-exist. His running mate is the one I am not sure about. He is bi-polar, dirty, and would ask Jesus for a dime. He is a talker, but has yet to say anything. He disappears from time to time. Often a guest of the county, in their jail or more likely in their psychward when he is not taking his medication. Soon, lets hope, he will disappear again. I wish him no ill harm, but he is bringing attention to where I live and I do not like that. I go to extremes to stay hidden. Those guys have flashing neon signs saying "Bums Needing Handouts Live Back Here" out near the road. These people are products of our sick nation. Stockbrokers and corporations are looking for handouts, why shouldn't those who are less than fortunate? I could easy follow their lead and just sellout in this manner, however I do like to bathe and these people generally travel in herds. I am a lone wolf. I like it that way. I have learned to make do in more subtle, unique and craftly ways.

That wasn't always the case. I used to steal. Alot. I first started shoplifting as a means of protest. Abbie Hoffman once wrote " To steal from a brother or sister is evil. To not steal from the institutions that are pillars of the Pig Empire is equally immoral." The first thing I took was a gallon of Minute Maid Orange Juice. I thought by liberating a large grocery chain store of their overpriced OJ that I was really sticking it to the man. I did not want to let Abbie down. So then came a theft, then another theft, then another theft and soon I was a one man crime wave. Soon I was taking baskets of stuff out the door. Groceries, videos, clothing, rollerblades, books, you name it. It was no longer a revolutionary act, it became the way I made my living. That is true withmost things in live. You start something withgood intentions, but as it snowballs, it becomes a cry for help. Looking back on it, I couldn't believe I got away withit for so long as I did. But being a average looking middle aged white man has its advantages. If I were of color, or had long hair and tats, they would have caught me for just thinking about such an act. I was quite brazen withit. Always testing what I could get away with. Once, Barbara Bush was signing her book at this particular store. There were at least 10 uniformed cops there, not to mention the Secret Service. That didn't stop me. I wheeled a basket of goodies right in front of them, then out of the store. I even waved. Eventually, I did get caught. Three times. It was just getting too easy so I got stupid and sloppy. The first time I was busted, though I took a stupid risk, it was sort of a surprise. I thought I was bulletproof. The next two, I knew if I walked out of the store I would get busted. Previously I would had walked out leaving the ill gotten booty behind, but shrinks would say I wanted to get caught. So I did. All total I spent roughly 200 days in the county pokey for my transgressions. I sort of liked jail. I got caught up on all of the Simpsons episodes I had missed and it was all-you-can-eat Little Debbie's Snack Cakes. I have a particular fondness for the Goo Goo Clusters. Millions of people who haven't shoplifted once are in jail and they don't even know it. Self made prisons. Many are doing hard time. Are you?

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I always wonder where all of the Christians are? This is a Christian nation, right? Where I live, they have churches as large as basketball arenas. One, in fact, was converted from a basketball arena. You know the guy. He says, screw Heaven and the afterlife, you can live your best life now! Religion in the USA is worse than our politics. Of course, it is often our politicans that find new and creative ways to screw up any chance for a true religious life in America. The only way to God here is in a monastery or a convent. I have a theory that all mainstream US pastors and other forms of clergymen are raging atheists. They are just a cut above the homeless people that I described earlier. Instead of holding up a sign on a corner, they panhandle from the pulpit. I have talked to 100's of preachers in my travels. Sadly, I can count the ones who truly love their God on one hand. A few have been downright sinister. Don't believe me? Turn on you TV or radio and listen to them speak for five minutes. That is all you need. Sure, there are exceptions. Of course, finding one is like finding a needle in a haystack. I like churches. Big ones, small ones, round ones, red ones. Baptist, Catholic, Jewish, Muslim... no matter. They have always fascinated me. I often sit in them for hours at a time when nooneisaround, which is often the case except on Sunday mornings when everyone pretends to be Godly. I will not pretend here. I am not godly. I am agnostic. I just love the silence. The larger the church the better. The silence is larger. I especially like the older churches. They have a special smell. Old moldy hymnals and candles as old as my grandmother. I used to pretend that I was a Christian during my visits. I have since deemed that silly. Why be like everyone else? I think I may have believed when I was a child, but now that sensation has become fuzzy. I did have a rude experience with an Associate Pastor of the church that I was attending when I was 13, but that really did not have a lasting impact on me. I have, in the past, used that as an excuse for my agnosticism. Not the case, so I will now forgive this man for his dasterly deed, for this is the Christian way. In hindsight, he was really just doing his job. Today, if I feel a negative vibe during a clandestine visit to a place of worship, I simply walk out and find a new church. They are everywhere. I have several favorites that I go to time and time again. They are like old friends. I have even given some names!

I admire Ted Kaczynski. You may know him as the "Unabomber".  Let us forget that he murdered three people. Well, that is hard to overlook, and in my opinion was a miscalculation on his part. He was a Math Professor, afterall. He had likely figured out as well, in all of his equations, that the odds that he would not be apprehended were good. However, he almost certainly overlooked that his squirrellybrother, David, be on to him and would turn him in. I wonder, if I someday turned evil, would my family do the same? My relationship with my family has cooled in recent months. They have grown tired of my act. One has actually suggested that I "grow up". Great. Especially coming from the source. They do not understand my lifestyle. Never will. I should not expect them to. I do, however, understand theirs, because it it almost exactly like yours. They are worldly people. Ted and I are not. They believe that I am mentally ill. I very may well be and it is a diagnosis that I will not refute. But if it is to live a life like theirs or be mentally ill, I choose, without hesitation or prejudice, the latter! Let us all be a bit bonky. The world will be a better place. Kaczynskibelieves that it is runaway technology that will be the end of us all. He wrote about this, in length, in his manifesto (Link in My Blogroll) I tend to agree. Technology has made use fatter and dumber. He lived a spartan, and except for the pipe-bombs, a technology free life as a hermit in Lincoln, Montana. He had a small cabin, sans running water or electricity. His contact withothers, including his family, was on his terms. He took walks, read books and plotted his revenge. Unlike Ted, I have no axe to grind. Society is what it is.. doomed to fail. Who am I to stop it? Ted couldn't and others in the past with intellects that would make Kaczynski look like the town idiot threw there hands up in the air and just walked away.  Can you explain how people like Bill Clinton and GW Bush became president of the so-called most powerful country on Earth? Those few people withreal qualifications want nothing to do withthe office. I cannot blame them. It has become nothing more than a dog and pony show. All of this has the makings of a bad Ayn Rand novel. I will live out my life soon, like Ted, in a desolate place, withno neighbors. I am now halfway there. I have learned that one can live without the creature comforts of a Sleep Number Bed, an I-Phone or a HDTV. I have told some acquaintances that if I ever had $20,000 in my hand, they would never see my again. With all that has gone on this year, and my new outlook towards things, maybe it is time to lower that to $2000.

MORE LATER....

I asked why.  Why immediately leap to the conclusion that a divine spark is necessary?  We mentioned the works of Shakespeare, the music of Mozart, the kindness of charitable, selfless human beings.  I asked him why he couldn't just give credit where credit was due.  Why take away from the accomplishments of these people by saying that they required a magic spell from heaven to help them do it?

I'd say that mankind has accomplished quite a bit of greatness despite the ugly things.  Jesus didn't reveal to us the smallpox vaccine, for example, that saved millions of lives.  No religious text gave us any insight into modern science, which allows the earth to support millions of more human beings than normal, and improve the quality of life of everyone.

One can argue all day that the inspiration for these great accomplishments came from some sort of divine nudge, but why?  Is there any evidence for it?  Why is it even necessary?  That's like saying, "My urge to go skinny-dipping was divine inspiration from the nudist god of Neptune."  It's utterly meaningless without evidence.

Creationists often speak of how an impersonal universe, the theory of evolution, etc., takes away from life's meaning, that it reduces human beings to ugly, base things struggling along in selfishness.  But here is a prime example of the opposite.  Here is a creationist deliberately lowering human beings and claiming that they aren't capable of greatness on their own.  Indeed, the entire message of many creationists (like the followers of Abraham's God) is that mankind is inherently flawed and God is perfect.  All morality comes from God.  Only through Him shall you gain grace and forgiveness and paradise.

Personally I think it's rather depressing.  Why put such limitations on our capabilities?  Why have such little confidence in your fellow human beings?  Shouldn't we strive to find greatness within ourselves, rather than concede that we can't achieve it unless a mythological father figure grants it to us?

I think it comes down to responsibility.  Maybe if we start holding ourselves completely responsible for everything we do - both good and bad - we'll no longer have any need of this pointless and insulting notion that human beings are in need of guidance from something greater.  Let's have faith in ourselves rather than faith in a comforting campfire story.  Ayn Rand said "Belief in the supernatural begins as belief in the superiority of others."  Until someone can come up with evidence, why should we assume that there is anything superior to human beings at all?

The title of one of her other books / essays kept ringing in my head - "The Virtue of Selfishness."

And having been trained in finance and economics, the idea that selfishness drives the economy is not that far off from the popular views of business. Free markets will save the world.

I seem to be flying through the pages (which is good considering the paperback version that I have is almost 1100 pages long). I'm currently on page 154. What did I miss when I was 13 that seems to be clicking with me now?

I just know that the drama that I thought would be slow moving to unfold is actually incredibly fast paced in this novel. I can almost see the movie (which I have never seen) in my own eyes.

Veritas est adaequatio rei et intellectus. -- Thomas Aquinas

Modern intellectuals treat the factories and skyscrapers in their environment like growths of nature. Like the stranger of Camus, everything is given and open to view; there are no consequences and no causes.

The modern university is a bizarro world where the ultimate immorality consists in making moral judgments, i.e. being judgmental. Ignorance is believed to consist in claiming knowledge. The cognitive and ethical claims go together-- an ethical characteristic like honesty cannot exist if there is no knowable external world. At first glance, one would guess those who believe there are no answers wouldn't pretend to look for them. In reality, we witness the absurd spectacle of cynics who care-- they desperately need assurance from others that no answers and no morality is possible.

Collectivism becomes the default style of thinking when the conclusions of the individual mind are believed to be impotent. As a philosophy, this translates into herd behavior in practice-- any challenge can be met if we "come together." Without the mind, means are detached from ends; many activists feel they can stop wars by forming herds and clogging up traffic with their bodies. They need and seek direction from a higher authority, whether it be a priest, guru, or dictator. Rand-worship from the Objectivists themselves ironically is the same phenomenon.

Ayn Rand noted that man cannot act without some sort of philosophy; our assumptions about ourselves and our place in the universe will impact the decisions we make.

For example, if one believes that rewards and nature just happen to us, then the world will be seen to be unfair. John Rawls, for example, establishes his views by using a veil of ignorance, as if everyone would choose a society with socialist entitlements if they did not know their starting position in life. However, if men do not understand their own identities, they have no way to grasp what things to live by, and what alternatives they should choose. What you ought to do depends upon who and where you are in the first place.

B.F. Skinner arrived at Rawls's conclusion from an opposite direction. While Rawls believed that man would choose controls because he is autonomous, Skinner believed man needs controls because he is not autonomous. Since everything is a form of control, we should all submit to the control of experts that will help our culture survive. Like Rawls, Skinnerian man receives no credit for his choices and achievements. Both believe man is infinitely malleable without an identity. Their philosophies are variations on a Marxist theme -- from each according to their ability, to each according to their need.

In short, the metaphysical has been confused with the man-made.

Rand made no such confusion. When confronted with a task, people often ask "Can I do it?" Usually the question is asked in the sense of whether a person has the innate ability to accomplish the goal. There is no such automatic inspiration. A better question is "what is required to accomplish my goal?" F-22 stealth air superiority fighters simply do not suddenly pop into existence by nature; the world around us is the result of individual men applying their minds and exploiting their environment.

Like Batman and the Joker, conservatives and progressives need each other. Conservatives teach that the meek are blessed, that a rich man cannot get into heaven, that sacrifice is a virtue in itself, and that we should always put others first. This provides spiritual nourishment for socialists who take conservatives at their word and put the nation first, chanting and demanding that we nationalize energy, nationalize healthcare, nationalize finance, turning the government into a colossal busybody. Progressives in contrast treat ideas as if they were a mystical con game-- everyone has perspectives that each must be respected. Progressives then wonder why, after teaching that human reason is a myth, that they cannot reason the conservatives out of their bigotries, superstitions, and prejudices.

Serenity comes from saying yes to existence, provided that you have the courage to say no to others when required. Let us have an active mind, and never an open mind.

In human history, freedom is normally the anomaly, emerging briefly between long periods of tyranny. During the Renaissance, man's mind became free from mysticism, and freedom from the taxes and bureaucracies of kings slowly followed. Despite mankind's limited progress, the 1900s saw the return of the absolute state. It was not led by the remants of the feudal aristocracy. It was not led by the labor unions. It even wasn't led by the businesses. The reemerge of tyranny was led by worshipers of doom, resignation, and death -- the bulk of the intellectual class.

We all live in an atmosphere of militant uncertainty, crusading cynicism, and self-righteous depravity. Nothing is real, we're taught, and knowledge is an illusion. We extend compassion to criminals, and ask forgiveness for any reason, or should I say, no reason. Artists in our culture, from television to literature, uphold murderers and drug addicts as representatives of humanity. This all has created an atmosphere of guilt, panic, despair, boredom, and evasion. This is astonishing, given the magnificence of our scientific and technological achievements under what Adam Smith called "the obvious and simple system of natural liberty," named capitalism by its socialist critics.

Ayn Rand believed that reason was a volitional faculty. Without focus, one can only function at a perceptual level, drifting from moment to moment. Alert, independent minds thrive under capitalism; a businessman, after all, thinks in the long term and expects things to make sense.

In For the New Intellectual, Ayn Rand stated what ought to be a blatant commonplace: before capitalism, most men lived in tyranny, and life for the common man was nasty, brutish, and short. Often, the most important truths in philosophy are the most simple. Yet, intellectuals condemn capitalism with the most absurd of reasonings-- they preach, via the newsrooms, Hollywood, and universities, that men who produced wealth are thieves who stole wealth from those who did not produce it. Production is equated with looting, choice is equated with compulsion, reward is equated with terror, pay checks are equated with guns, and trade is equated with force. Businessmen are supposedly robbers, slave drivers, exploiters, and tyrants. The lesson is that no difference exists between the earned and the unearned. So we're taught.

Ayn Rand believed free minds and free markets go together. When a free market disappears, liberty of thought vanishes as well-- men are no longer the architects of their own lives. It is not an accident socialism's greatest writers in the 20th century wrote from the capitalist countries. When liberty of thought vanishes, socialism is soon to follow. No discussion, voluntary co-operation, agreement, or understanding is possible among men who substitute emotion for proof. A man who doubts his mind will not uphold his own person.

If one is bankrupt, either financially, intellectually, culturally, or nationally, what can we do? One can panic, frantically searching from a range of the moment expediency that will save us the trouble of looking ahead. We can hope, believing that somehow, there must be a way. Or-- we can identify our situation, check our hidden assets, and rebuild. Knowing our surroundings, finding what else is in the world, and being a productive human being all require the use of intelligence on this planet.

Most intellectuals are united in that they believe reason is impotent to understand the world. This means the soul and the world are disconnected from each other. Thinkers who place emphasis on the former believe the cosmos is best interpreted through faith; the latter see nothing but muscles and force. Ayn Rand labels the two philosophical archetypes the Witch Doctor, and the Attila.

The Witch Doctor feels like a metaphysical outcast, a stranger in a hostile world. He dreads reason and feels the world is cold, unreal, and unknowable, escaping into visions and emotions. In place of thinking, he substitutes dreams, imagination, wishes, and hopes. The Witch Doctor takes pleasure in the corruption of achievement, values, and enjoyment. At bottom, we're supposed to believe, everyone is abjectly rotten. Life is really about self-sacrifice, renunciation, suffering, obedience, humility, and faith-- the Witch Doctor worships death and damns life. He spreads his poison via guilt.

The Attila, in contrast, rules through fear. The Attila is a naturalist that doesn't believe in the mind. As a result, he explains everything with the principle called somehow. Without reason, he cannot learn from the past or anticipate the future-- everything is range of the moment, a problem to be solved with a club or a fist. He approaches men like beasts of prey-- we can perform miracles if we force the right people. The Attila doesn't think of creating. He just thinks of taking over.

The Attila has no conviction, for he lives in a fog of unknown threats. He can only move up in a society by default. He needs the reassurance of the Witch Doctor, who offers him spiritual protection. The Witch Doctor, fearing being alone in the world, needs the Attila. Both are impotent without each other.

Why did Sartre, a radical existentialist, align himself with the totalitarian ideology of Marxism?

Why does a dreamer like Obama need a tough guy like Biden?

Why would Richard Dawkins, a materialist preaching a collectivist philosophy, make religious appeals?

Ever wonder why Megatron never killed Starscream?

Ayn Rand, who lived through the rise of collectivism in Russia, understood the psychology too well.

I find an Ayn Rand quote to be particularly apropriate here:

The conservatives see man as a body freely roaming the earth, building sand piles or factories--with an electronic computer inside his skull, controlled from Washington. The liberals see man as a soul free-wheeling to the farthest reaches of the universe--but wearing chains from nose to toes when he crosses the street to buy a loaf of bread.

 Ayn Rand (pseudónimo de Alissa Zinovievna Rosenbaum) nació el 2 de febrero de 1905 en San Petesburgo. Falleció el 6 de marzo de 1982 en Nueva York, Estados Unidos. Fue filósofa, escritora y principal creadora del Objetivismo, una "filosofía para vivir en la tierra".

Autora de El Manantial (1943) y La Rebelión de Atlas (1957), entre otros, Rand se destacó por una visión racional del hombre y la sociedad.

Para ella, cada individuo tiene derecho a existir en sí mismo, sin sacrificarse por los demás ni sacrificando a otros para sí. "Cuando el 'bienestar común' de una sociedad se contempla como algo aparte y superior al bienestar individual de sus miembros, el bienestar de algunos hombres prevalece sobre el bienestar de otros, y esos otros son destinados al sacrificio."

La única forma de conocer es a través de la razón, considerada como la virtud principal que le permitirá al hombre alcanzar su felicidad (el propósito moral más alto de su vida).

Para el objetivismo, los hechos son hechos, y la tarea de la conciencia del hombre no es crear ni inventar la realidad, sino percibirla.

Ningún hombre tiene el derecho de usar la fuerza física, excepto cuando actúa en propia defensa y contra quienes iniciaron su uso. La relación entre los hombres debería ser como comerciantes, buscando un mutuo consentimiento y beneficio. El objetivismo rechaza cualquier forma de colectivismo, como así también la actual economía mixta. 

En resumen, de esto se trata el objetivismo, una filosofía bastante particular y muchas veces, de difícil aplicación…

"The uncontested absurdities of today are the accepted slogans of tomorrow." — p282

The year 1969 was a turning point for man. In July, millions turned out to watch at Cape Canaveral as reason lifted men to the Moon. As amazing this would seem to men of the past, this wasn’t a defining moment. In August during the same year, 400,000 unkempt hippies attended a Dionysian rite at Woodstock, many helplessly rolling around in their own excrement, rain unable to disturb the otherworldly bliss. The Apollo missions represented the end of the Old Left, which believed government could scientifically create a utopia through the rational application of expertise. The abandonment of reason at Woodstock would be a portent of things to come regarding the New Left. Counterculture is far from over — they are shutting down oil refineries for Gaia in the midst of increased need, and are demanding jihadists captured on the battlefield sue our soldiers in courts in the name of cultural tolerance.

Without thought there can be no love. When we refuse to make discriminations, then everything is special, but when everything is special, then nothing is. Rand’s views resemble what love meant in the original sense– love for the world, love of mankind, and love of ourselves, the end result seen in the Apollo missions. In contrast, many radicals feel sacrifice in itself as a goal, without discerning if the sacrifice is for a gain or for a loss. The socialism of the Old Left despite its evil had at least some plausibility: enslave the competent to make the incompetent better. But no one today believes capitalism leads to the poor house.

Throughout my life I’ve heard everyone state the dissonant claim that counterculture represents idealism. It does not. We’ve all heard such progressives say that they are beyond all theories, labels, and definitions. They are correct– counterculture is an anti-ideology, against the promulgation of any value. It leads to aimless defiance, hate, violence, depravity — the end products of a nihilistic disregard for reason. Our rebels preach love, while maintaining that human beings have no right to love. The hippies at Woodstock ironically called their opponents pigs, while unable to plan in advance and provide for their own food, water, and shelter. This is a practical result of a refusal to think.

Such attitudes led to environmentalism and multiculturalism, two absurd doctrines that are mainstream today. Suspicion of reason leads to mistrust of its technological applications– one has to be completely naive, like Boxer in Orwell’s Animal Farm, to believe environmentalists want to improve our quality of life. Environmentalists are fearful of a universe they do not understand, and like primitive cultures, see nature in terms of the inexplicable, portentous, and sacrosanct.

As mentioned, mistrust of reason also leads to multiculturalism– if the world is unknowable, we have no place to turn except the authority of the tribe. Diversity in itself however is ethically stupid– we wouldn’t make people sick, for example, to have diversity of health. A mixed economy creates tribalism– the individual by himself cannot be a piece of the pie, so there is an incentive to identify with pressure groups. We forget that the smallest minority is the individual.

Many with justification criticize Rand for being insufficiently analytical. But analysis is not the only activity of philosophy. C.D. Broad once divided philosophical thought into a trinity of three activities: analysis, synthesis, and synopsis. Analysis begins with something given and separates it into constituent parts. Synthesis starts with given elements and aims to combine them into a unified entity. Synopsis in contrast isn't a construct from the given; it is the seeking of totality, generality, and limitation in a comprehensive vision, much like Spinoza’s scientia intuitiva.

Most modern philosophy lives in the neighborhood of analysis. Ayn Rand’s thought placed priority on synopsis. For instance, Rand claimed "integration" is an activity of reason, that is, rational beings can establish a context, organize thoughts– finding extraneous ideas and building them within a system. We can strive to be comprehensive. A rational being can orient himself in the greater scheme of things, including place, past, future, eternity; without a theory of life, man cannot act, but only react. Reason in the sense of synopsis cannot be divorced from reality; there is always a relationship between theory and practice.

Western teaching during the last two hundred years often said otherwise. Rampant idealism degenerated into pragmatism, logical positivism, and linguistic analysis. Rationality was reduced to a language-game of "I-Sez, You-Sez." Metaphysics was believed to be an empty idea — what was true for you may not have been true for me. Values were believed to have no basis in fact– nothing is really good, so cynicism became realism. Reality in itself was thought to be unknowable– we're taught we can only know immediate sensations. While obviously not applicable to all 20th century thinkers, we would be remiss not to identify the general tone of 20th century philosophy.

Existentialism, as mentioned by Leo Strauss, Rand, Voegelin, and other writers, is a practical consequence of doctrines like logical positivism. If cannot obtain rational knowledge of the universe, then fear, despair, misery, and a general nausea about our daily lives become man’s essence. Courage becomes any action, since no action can be taken rationally.

Since Weber, positivist philosophy frequently asserted values have no rational basis. In principle, this suggests that all values are created equal. Being taught this by his positivist teachers, modern man takes moral neutrality as the paradigm of a good will. As a result, any success becomes seen as a form of cheating, and any failure becomes viewed as a form of oppression. One can smell the stench of moral equivalence from thinkers like Claude Levi-Strauss and John Kenneth Galbraith– they look at different societies and see identical structures of power, known by the laity as The System. The true barbarian, we were told, is the one who believes there are barbarians in the first place. This is a hatred of the good for being good. We now worship primitivist junk as art precisely because it is *not* admirable. This is why hippies flaunt deliberate ugliness. Weakness is now believed to the ultimate source of rights, privileges, and entitlements. With merit erased, all inequalities from sex to race are seen as signs of oppression.

Progressive education, created by John Dewey has much to do with this trend in America, where the goal is to get the individual to adapt to the will of the pack, often through bullshit "discussions" and "class projects." Knowledge, preparation, and experience are not relevant to social justice, which requires, in an existentialist spirit, the fierce urgency of now. We’re taught that doubt and criticism of everything is the basis of a free and democratic society, but people only certain of the sensations of the present, who even cannot relate yesterday to tomorrow, cannot distinguish concepts from percepts. They can follow an argument, but cannot retain it– the spirit of rational discussion required for a free and democratic society erodes. We’ve created a bunch of helpless dependents who fear reality and want to belong more than anything else. Our ideal of sophistication resembles John Stewart — a court jester. But a court jester needs a master. We’ve created a mentality ready for a Messiah, a Führer. We already see this with Obama-worship; lurking behind are the thugs and Neanderthals who believe it is A Time to Fight.

The anti-ideologist is highly conformist– they don’t want anyone to rock the boat, or even build one for that matter. They stand with the most reactionary paleo-conservatives who venerate ethnicity, which amounts to racism plus tradition. The catch is that any culture should be valued, from Native American superstitions to fundamentalist Islam, as long as the culture is not ours. At best, we’re told, all cultures are just as bad. Give Rand credit for standing against pollution in 1971 — the primitivism that's polluting our intellectual life.

Further Reading:
Roger Scruton, Thinkers of the New Left

'But if through my lie God’s truth abounds to his glory, why am I still being condemned as a sinner? And why not do evil that good may come?—as some people slanderously charge us with saying. Their condemnation is just.'  ~ Romans 3:7, 8

Funny search engine terms used to find my blog:

- "heather ferguson" "daniel miller" [Patricia may not be the only one with a stalker!]

- the dancing question r.l. dabney [I prefer the Electric Slide. Next question.]

- presidents drinking beer [The country might be better off...]

- בירה [Any seminarians want to help with this one?]

- idaho intravenous vitamin c [It's better than the stuff you get from Wisconsin, anyway.]

- year 6 farewell party [Where did year 5 go?!]

• They seem to have discovered Charles Wesley’s ‘Secret Code’ and I say it's about time!! 

• Army Dress Greens out—Dress Blues are in.

The olde Dress Greens, circa 1989.  (Dig the buzz cut!)

• 'Question: Should Stephen be subject to civil or criminal liability for deserting his employers and violating the terms of his contract? That contract was certainly valid at the time of its execution. But it became defective when Stephen's employer required him to commit crimes against innocent people. A contract requiring a party to commit a crime is not enforceable.'

• ‘Mogadishu has the closest thing to an Ayn Rand-style economy that the world has ever seen…’

This 1980's Moment is brought to you by: Stevie Nicks 

Many decades ago, Ayn Rand forged a body of beliefs labelled Objectivism, advertised as the path of salvation for mankind. Leonard Peikoff, one of Rand’s apostles, still to this date evangelizes this flavor of gnostic rationalism. His website proclaims: "To save the world is the simplest thing in the world. All one has to do is think."

Which prompts the question– if man is free and rational, why does he partake in irrationality and work to create unfree societies? Does not the truth set us free? The case of Germany is a blaring counterexample. We once witnessed the world’s most cultured and philosophical country walking down the path of barbarism and madness.

The libertarians, who Peikoff opposes, have a standard answer about how evil enters our world: the tax man uses the sword; the tax man indoctrinates. This response explains nothing. When we explain the actions of men with more men, we create an infinite regress. Even worse, claiming free men can be conditioned and brainwashed stinks of determinism, contradicting the initial libertarian premise of innate freedom.

So we're back to square one-- we need to simply be rational to save the world, but people continue to act irrationally.

In The Ominous Parallels, Leonard Peikoff developed a demonological explanation. Human beings are born good, but are stuck in a bad world created by a demiurge. Instead of body thetans, we have memes of altruism corrupting our souls. Immanuel Kant plays the role of a socialist Xenu, the cause of all Mussolinis and Stalins.

This is astonishingly stupid, given Kant defended the sanctity of private property, advocated Rule of Law, believed in free will, and opposed ecclesiasticism. Most importantly, Kant argued that every man should be treated as an end in himself and never as a means only. Why? Kant derived man’s rights from his rational nature. According to Kant, we have a duty to respect the rights of the individual, no matter what inclination such a violation may serve. This is all essential, and not incidental, to Kant’s ethical philosophy. Kant also worked to demonstrate the objectivity of science. In short, Kant is the philosopher of the Enlightenment par excellence.

It is bad enough that so-called Objectivists employ Kant’s ideas. Going beyond that dishonesty, they turn Kant into a collectivist monster by leaving critical ideas out. For example, Peikoff complained about Kant’s emphasis on duty, leaving out that we have a duty not to infringe upon the rights of rational beings. Objectivists themselves call this kind of evasion "context-dropping."

Objectivists think they have an ace in the hole when they correctly state Kant wanted us to act from duty, not inclination. Objectivists wrongly take this proposition to mean we should always act against inclination, which isn't what it says. They want it to mean that though, since Objectivists define altruism as the sacrifice of a greater value for a lesser value, and think they've found the father of all altruists in Kant. This won't suffice since Kant argued that reason is the test of what makes an action moral, not our feelings. For example, a person who respects another person's rights out of pity is not acting morally according to Kant, while a person who does it out of principle is moral. In other words, in Kant's system, whim isn't the criterion of a right action; reason is. We *are* morally permitted to act from inclination in Kant's system, though only in ways that do not infringe upon the rights of others.

Ayn Rand never read Kant. In an essay titled From the Horse's Mouth, Rand attempted to attack the basis of Kant's philosophy by examining Immanuel Kant: His Life and Doctrine, written by Friedrich Paulsen in 1898. I'm all for reading secondary sources, but they are by definition not primary sources, that is, not the "horse's mouth." Rand mooched off the thought of someone else, inheriting both the insights and the mistakes. Peikoff's mistake is that he follows Rand, and follows her blindly, as if she had the final, infallible revelation of all things, a system eternally closed. Peikoff did make the effort to read Kant, but it was in the style of a creationist going through the scientific literature, desperately cherry picking information without context, for the purpose of keeping the faith alive.

This all is a pity, given Peikoff detailed Germany’s philosophical journey down the road of self-immolation, its Götterdämmerung here on Earth. I’m setting the bar very low– it doesn’t take much imagination nor research to discover the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei was something nationalist, socialist, German, and proletarian in character. The Nazis were a product of German philosophy and culture, from the doom preached by Schopenhauer to the will to power expressed by Nietzsche.

This is an important point that cannot be exaggerated. Remember, economic depression didn’t drive all countries down the path of the Germans. The sting of losing WWI is a bad explanation also-- Turkey, one of the losers, became a secular republic, while Italy was on the side of the victors. Furthermore, Germany was the primary aggressor in that conflict too. Referring to German cultural traditions is definitely something required when addressing the roots of its militarism and totalitarianism.

As Peikoff also copiously documented, the Nazis were intensely anti-bourgeois, judging money-grabbing capitalism as something ugly, artificial, inauthentic, and cold. The Nazis embraced a pragmatist anti-ideological ethos, professing to be beyond all labels, systems, platitudes, agendas, and categories. The Nazis were activist– they believed in direct action over intellectual foresight, and force over deliberation. They were socialist, dictating to business, having collective ownership of property de facto where they could not have it de jure. The Nazis were collectivist, believing the individual has no existence apart from the group. The Nazis were also irrationalist, denouncing the intellect in favor of revelation, intuition, magic, astrology, instinct, and myth. The concentration camps made no utilitarian sense; like a Dadaist they were absurd for its own sake, beyond freedom and dignity. The Nazis were truly beyond good and evil, which is just another way of saying they were evil.

Peikoff in 1982 believed America was soon to fall into a collectivist dictatorship. Why? America’s pragmatist intellectual tradition has its roots in Hegel and neo-Kantianism. Peikoff conveniently forgot America’s conservative tradition that blossomed in the late 1900s, mainly because Objectivists fancy themselves as the only game in town, the saviors of a troubled world. Due to Reagan and Gingrich, conservatives in America were able to accomplish tax cuts, wide deregulation, welfare reform, free trade, stiffer penalties for crime, and the country has had its largest economic expansion in its history. In 1991, the Soviet Union even crumbled, thanks to the pressure of interventions the Objectivists opposed. Today the governments of Canada, France, Germany, Italy, and soon the United Kingdom are moving in a conservative direction of traditional liberalism. The rapid economic growth caused by increased freedom in Eastern Europe, India, and China has sent socialism into disrepute. Some still have the audacity of hope in socialism; they will have to learn from their mistakes, or be passed by those that do.

Conservatives believe in Original Sin– man is born evil, and institutions from the family to the university are in place to make him better. Small kids can be vicious and cruel to each other-- being good is something that is learned. Peikoff, like socialists, believes that man is born good, and institutions corrupt him. The only difference is the name of the institution — the socialists blame the corporations, while Peikoff blames the state. This is why Peikoff now supports the socialist Democrats here in America, people who want the government to nationalize healthcare, energy, finance, and dictate to everyone from racial quotas to food intake. The Democrats Peikoff now supports also want to appease fundamentalist Muslims straight out of the Dark Ages.

What can possibly be Peikoff’s motive?

In short, Peikoff hates Ned Flanders. Peikoff hates the irrational and spontaneous part of life, including habits, conventions, traditions, customs, and other products of the human imagination. Peikoff fails to see that "killer" Christians are political in the first place because they oppose the wholesale slaughter of human beings by abortion procedures– the lasting legacy of the progressive eugenics movement. By following reason alone until our social fabric from the family to the courts is completely dissolved, Peikoff must embrace the Democrats. Peikoff’s A has become not-A.

Further Reading:
Jonah Goldberg, Liberal Fascism

Lições de vida para um futuro menos repressor e cerceador de suas liberdades, selvagem brasileiro? Eis um filme educativo. Veja um trecho aqui e o trailer aqui.

Ah sim, você nunca o verá por aí. Ele é muito politicamente incorreto no linguajar de hoje. Sabe como é, pluralismo, só entre social-democratas, socialistas, anarco-socialistas, comunistas. Liberalismo jamais será discutido porque, afinal, as necessidades da maioria (sem qualquer critério de medida, claro, porque isto seria positivismo e positivismo é, para os analfa-metodológicos, liberalismo) se sobrepõem às da minoria.

Assista-o e discuta-o. Liberalismo não exige profissão de fé. Exige apenas que você respeite as individualidades e tolere as diferenças. Todo o argumento anti-liberal que ouço nos botecos brasileiros está no filme. É incrível. Bela produção.

Mas se tiver chance, um dia, veja. Eu mesmo tenho cópia do filme que, eventualmente, volta ao ar na TV paga (aquela que o governo queria controlar o que você pode ver com quotas de produções nacionais).

p.s. a verdade incomoda aos poderosos?

p.s.2. o sucesso do liberalismo é tanto que o livro que deu origem ao filme está esgotado.

 Quite naturally, the resurrection of our neglected yard prompted me to ponder the prospects for the recovery of liberty in our society, which is invaded in every conceivable way by the choking tendrils of state power. This overgrowth has happened not merely by neglect – as is the case when a yard becomes ragged with weeds – but more importantly by invitation.

People have been seduced into believing that they can live in symbiosis with the State that is killing what little liberty and prosperity we still enjoy. We have succumbed to the lure of what Bastiat called “institutionalized plunder,” fallen prey to the temptation to employ the State’s coercive power to live at the expense of others. And now we’ve reached a point where a simple weeding, even a thorough one, won’t suffice.

   Mr. Grigg blogs about the little-known recent prosperity in Somalia.  Somalia's government collapsed and the private market flourished.  The Somalia of recent memory was very-nearly a pure Ayn Rand-style flourishing economy.  They threw the World Bank and other International influence our of Somalia.  The International "help" was hurting Somalia.

   Mr. Grigg continues:

Somalia may not seem to have a whole lot in common with the USA. One key similarity is found in the fact that the government ruling us, like that of pre-1991 Somalia, is propped up by foreign creditors who simply cannot continue to subsidize Washington forever.

   This is a great blog post.  Somalia's story can teach us a few lessons.

My oldest child was conceived while I was a Senior in high school. I was astounded by the almost universal reaction to this event. Almost to the last person, the question asked was, "Have you scheduled the abortion yet?" This was done by future in-laws (ironically, all good true-believing Catholics), friends, our teachers, the school counselors, medical people, and especially people at the clinic. When we announced our plans to keep our child, the near universal response was a groan, an eye-roll, and the exasperated words, "Oh, God!" You might say we made the wrong choice, but that "potential human being" is about to turn 30 years-old, is my only son, is a journeyman electrician, and has given me 3 totally awesome grandchildren. Sure, my life was harder, but I have no regrets, and I sleep well at night.

Not to say I didn't waver from time to time in my opposition to the practice. While I would never consider the practice myself, I was occasionally partially persuaded by the arguments of the "pro-choice" crowd. (I hate that euphemism. What's next? Will murdering an adult become "retroactive choice"?) I could never go totally over the line because, no matter what my mind said, my heart just kept screaming, "Hell no!" I bounced around like this for several years until about 25 years ago, I happened to be reading a book by Ayn Rand. I was reading an essay on human rights, human worth, and human dignity. It was very compelling. Finally, I read something that clicked in my mind and I said, That's it! That's why abortion is wrong!" To my horror, when I resumed reading the very next sentence stated that what I had just read was why the right to an abortion was absolute! Talk about cognitive dissonance. This all goes back to what I said about polarization and the difficulty of actually persuading someone by rational argument.

It is one thing to argue with someone who had his facts wrong, or has misinterpreted the facts, or some other issue relating to getting the true facts. The problem lies when people have the same facts, do a legitimate analysis—and come up with exactly the opposite answer than you did! You and your adversary have placed value judgments on the same data and come up with tragically opposite positions. I have come to believe that the pro-abortion stance isn't so much immoral as it is amoral. In my conversations, and arguments with pro-abortion people, I don't feel that something is wrong with them so much as I come away with the queasy feeling that something is missing.

The take home lesson there is that these people will never, and can never, be persuaded appeals to morals, ethics, logic, or reason. They can only be, and must be, defeated. To do otherwise is to waste valuable time while people die.

I've heard arguments that we should let the pro-abortion crowd have their abortions. That since they tend to be hard-core leftists they will weed themselves out of the gene pool. A good theory, but it breaks down in practice. Leftists import people from other countries to breed the dim-witted left-wing voters they are too lazy, or gay, to breed themselves. Besides, I think that is a rather cynical way to look at it. A newborn is innocent until it can make a conscious choice to do wrong. You have to give them a chance. They might decided to rebel against their parents by putting down the crack pipe and going out and getting a job.

Even the leftists claim that there is a responsibility, or even a duty, to watch out for and protect the weak, innocent, and vulnerable. What is more weak and innocent than an infant? What is more vulnerable than a weak and innocent infant trapped inside its murderer's body? That truly is an infant in Hell.

Jeg har netop fået anskaffet mig første bog i fantasy-serien Sword of Truth af Terry Goodkind: Wizard's first rule på en lydbog og lade mig starte med at sige: Den er godt nok god!

Normalt hverken lytter eller læser jeg fantasy (men har en forkærlighed for science fiction, især Frank Herberts Dune, som er en af mine yndlingsbøger), men det, som gør denne bog forskellig fra en række andre bøger er, at den forfatteren er erklæret objektivist -- og ikke på nogen måde lægger skjult på det; heller ikke i sine bøger.

Bogen minder lidt om Ayn Rands Anthem i den forstand, at hovedpersonen minder meget om Lighed 7-2521/Prometheus og forsøger at bekæmpe kollektivistiske kræfter, der vil skabe en art social ligevægt i verden -- men her, bare i et fantasyunivers med en masse sidehistorier og personer. Den er, som sagt, rigtigt god.

Bogen læser jeg som lydbog. Jeg har den m.a.o. liggende på min ipod, så jeg kan læse den medens jeg laver alt muligt andet; jeg har før gjort tilsvarende med andre bøger, henunder liberalistisk-teoretiske bøger (som kan hentes via mises.org) og kan egentlig godt lide denne form for litterær nydelse.

Hvorom alt er: Så kan jeg anbefale Sword of Truth-serien!

So what effect has capitalizing “I” but not “you” — or any other pronoun — had on English speakers? It’s impossible to know, but perhaps our individualistic, workaholic society would be more rooted in community and quality and less focused on money and success if we each thought of ourselves as a small “i” with a sweet little dot.

The assault, and it is one, is not on an assault on the written word, but on the concept of individualism - on egoism. "I" derives from the Latin word Ego, and in the world that we inhabit, humility is preferred over egoism. "I" is bad, "we" is good. Those who have no idea about the pure evil that lies at the root of this idea should read Ayn Rand's dystopian novella - Anthem (Project Gutenberg e-text) -

There is some word, one single word which is not in the language of men, but which has been. And this is the Unspeakable Word, which no men may speak nor hear. But sometimes, and it is rare, sometimes, somewhere, one among men find that word. They find it upon scraps of old manuscripts or cut into the fragments of ancient stones. But when they speak it they are put to death. There is no crime punished by death in this world, save this one crime of speaking the Unspeakable Word.

The word is Ego. I.

This is a drawing from a NY Times piece on the artistic genius of architects. I know many of you -- my friends -- are architects. But I have to say, when it comes to raw hubris, not even Richard Cheney can beat an architect (or their groupies).

Non sono propriamente una sostenitrice del capitalismo, ma dell'egoismo. Non sono tanto una sostenitrice dell'egoismo, quanto della ragione. -Ayn Rand

Crazy

• Richard Pryor reciting the alphabet. He seems like he's inches away from tossing a "fuckin'" in after every other word, but he never does.
• Patrick Stewart, decked out in doublet and pantaloons like Hamlet, musing, "A B or not a B?"

• Feist singing about counting to 4
• Johnny Cash warning Big Bird to "not take your ones to town"
• Andrea Bocelli putting Elmo to sleep with "Time To Say Goodnight"

• REM singing "Furry Happy Monsters"
• Tito goddamned Puente, that's who
• Robert de Niro showing Elmo the basics of method acting.
  Elmo: Is that all Mr. DeNiro can imagine being?
  DeNiro: Well, no, Elmo. I can imagine I'm a New York City taxi driver, or an out-of-shape boxer, or a cabbage.
  Elmo: Do the cabbage! Do the cabbage!

• LL Cool J rapping about adding. James, this is Sesame Street, all right? Please stop fucking the camera with your eyes.

In other news, I think someone tried to scam me yesterday.

I got a call on my cell at work from a Comcast representative, claiming that I owed them $268. "If you'd like to pay that down now," he said, "we'd be happy to take your credit card information or a check number by phone."

I thought for a moment. While I have gone in debt to Comquack in the past - many times - it always works out this way:

• Comcast sends me a notice in the mail that I owe them X hundred dollars in three days or they're shutting off my service
• Three days later, Comcast shuts off my service

Maybe they thought I was still the account holder at my old address, and my roommate had forgot to pay the bill. That could be it.

"I just sent the check yesterday," I told the guy. Which was true - a check for a fraction of this so-called $268, but that's not important.

"Oh, excellent," the guy said. "I'll just put a note in your file here that a check has been sent."

Later that evening, in front of my computer and my files, I called Comcast's customer service to check on my balance. "We show a balance of $61," the helpful lady said.

"And do you show any other accounts of mine open?"

"No, sir."

"Hmm. Thank you."

I'm a naturally suspicious sort, as a rule. When I won the Ayn Rand Institute's essay contest on The Fountainhead, I got a call a few days later from ARI congratulating me. Since they were sending me a check in excess of $600, they needed my Social Security Number for tax purposes. I told whoever it was and then hung up, worrying that I might just have given out personal info to a scammer. I did the sensible thing, of course: not tell anyone anything about it until my parents got my high school's monthly newsletter, saw a little blurb about their son winning $10,000, and came to the public library where I worked with a bemused look of shock on their faces. "Did you ...?" the conversation began.

So I hope that, even if I did owe Comquack $200 or more, I'd have the presence of mind not to give credit card info to a stranger who called me first. I hope.