Ayn Rand And The Prospects For Objective Ethics

 

 

 

 Ayn Rand was a brilliant if amateur philosopher, but she had gumption galore. She believed that an Objectivist Ethics was knowable, and here she seems to allude to such on Page 18 of her book, The Virtue Of Selfishness: "In answer to those philosophers that claim that no relation can be established between ultimate ends or values and the facts of reality, let me stress that the fact of living entities exist and function necessitates the existence of values and of the ultimate value which for any living entity is its own life. Thus the validation of value judgments is to be achieved by reference to the facts of reality. The fact that a living entity is, determines what it ought to do. So much for the issue of the relation between 'is' and 'ought.'"

In defiance of David Hume's skeptical, accepted assertion that we probably can know what its, but that cannot lead us to clear statements about what ought to be or objective moral truths, Rand the moral and epistemological dogmatist boldly disagreeing, proclaim the fact that the moral agent exist determines and directly reveals what he ought to do, so there is no residing mystery or puzzle at work here. I think she may have a point but so does Hume, so I withhold final judgment until I can study this more.

Rand continues: " Now in what manner does a human being discover the concept of 'value'? By what means does he first become aware of the issue of 'good or evil' in its simplest forms? By means of the physical sensations of pleasure or pain. Just as sensations are the first of the development of a human consciousness in the realm of cognition, so they are its first step in the realm of evaluation."

My response: our innate moral categories sensing what is good or evil, when we are not self-deceiving, when language and concept are assigned by us to these sense stimuli, both good and evil. I am uncomfortable with Rand's assigning to raw sensations of pleasure and pain. Such emotional/physio-chemical responses to what we experience might feed our cognitive structures, and allow us to evaluate whether such experiences , but these rough sentimental categories need to be compared and contrasted with our code of ethics too. 

Rand continues: "The capacity to experience pleasure or pain is innate in a man's body; it is part of his nature, part of the kind of entity he is. He has no choice about it, and he has no choice about the standard that determines what will make him experience the physical sensation of pleasure or pain. What is that standard? His life."

My response: Rand seems to be striving for an Objectivist ethical code based upon the gold standard, centered in biology that the action is good or pleasurable or bad or painful, depending how each action improve or degrade his life. I do not yet know if I buy this, but will read carefully and much more, before deciding if biological states of sensing and then concluding and assigning value based on natural, pleasurable or painful response, does work. I like her reachjng for Objectivist ethics but I am not sure thig assertion that one's life is one's ultimate ethical stand holds under scrutiny.  Maybe it does. It just seems too.simplistic, too mechanistic and too reductionistic.

Rand continues on Page 18 and 19: "The pleasure-pain mechanism in the body of man--and in the bodies of all living organisms--serves as an automatic guardian of the organism's life. The physical sensation of pleasure is a signal indicating that organism is pursuing the right course of action. The physical sensation of pain is a warning of danger, indicating the organism is pursuing the wrong course of action, that something is impairing the proper function of the body, which requires action to correct it. The best illustration of this can be seen in the rare, freak cases of children that are born without the capacity to feel physical pain; such children do not survive long; they have no means of discovering what can injure them, no warning signals, and thus a minor cut can remain undetected until it is too late to fight it."

 

My response: Like she is roughly correct that our instinctive feelings to any incoming stimulus, a feeling of pleasure or pain, might have survival value, but does that suffice to serve as the gold   standard for evaluating all actions, some of which are subtle and complex. What pains us might be evil or it might be good that we feel pain (or guilt) if we would, for example,  torture a cat. It might give us intense pleasure to play the sadistic child and torture a cat, but that pleasure would be evil. Rand might be able to ground her Objectivist ethics on the perception of natural felt reactions to any incoming sensation, labeling the painful or pleasurable reaction to each specific sensation as respectively evil or good, but I am trouble by it.

 

My response: our innate moral categories sensing what is good or evil, when we are not self-deceiving, when language and concept are assigned by us to these sense stimuli, both good and evil. I am uncomfortable with Rand's assigning to raw sensations of pleasure and pain. Such emotional/phsyio-chemical responses to what we experience might feed our cognitive structures, and allow us to evaluate whether such experiences , but these rough sentimental categories need to be compared and contrasted with our code of ethics too. 

Rand contiues: "The capacity to experience pleasure or pain is innate in a man's body; it is part of his nature, part of the kind of entity he is. He has no choice about it, and he has no choice about the standard that determines what will make him experience the physical sensation of pleasure or pain. What is that standard? His life."

My response: Rand seems to be striving for an objectivst ethical code based upon the gold standard, centered in biology that the action is good or pleasurable or bad or painful, depending how each action improve or degrade his life. I do not yet know if I buy this, but will listen much more before deciding if biological states of sensing snf concluding work. I like her reacjg fr objectivsti ethics bt I am not sure thig assertion that one's life is one's ultimate ethical stand ard works. Maybe it does. It just seems too.simplistic, mechanistic and too reductionistic.

Rand continueson Page 18 and 19: "The pleasure-pain mechanism in the body of man--and in the bodies of all living organisms--serves as an automatic guardian of the organism's life. The physical sensation of pleasure is a signal indicating that organism is pursuing the right course of action. The physical sensation of pain is a warning of danger, indicating the the organism is pursuing the wrong course of action, that something is impairing the proper function of the body, which requires action to correct it. The best illustration of this can be seen in the rare, freak cases of children that are born without the capacity to feel physical pain; such children do not survive long; they have no means of discovering what can injure them, no warning signals, and thus a minor cut can remain undetected until it is too late to fight it."

My response: Like she is roughly correct that our instinctive feelings to any incoming stimulus, a feeling of pleasure or pain, mgiht have survival value, but does that suffice to serve as the elgal standard for evaluating all actions, some of which aresubtle and complex. What pains us might be evil or it might be good that we feel pain (or guilt) if we would torture a cat. It might give us intense pleasure to play the sadistic child and torture a cat, but that pleasure would be evil. Rand might be able to ground her Objectivist ethics on the hat of natural felt reactions to any incoming sensation, labeling the painful or pleasurable reaction to each spefic sensation as respectively evil or good, but I am trouble by it.

 

Nihilism

Nihilists argue that truth does not exist. I am not a pure dogmatist, but I believe that truth most definitely exists, and we are able to discover what is true and false, what is what, and what is right and what is wrong. Every action or almost every action can be categorized as good or evil. And these values judgments are true, so we are able to rely upon them as we capture capturing of the truth about reality and the human place in it, judging each human act as good or bad. Grasping the truth allows us to develop moral values to identify each action as good or evil, and this is critically important for world survival and for potential happiness for each supporter.

Stuart Rachels

 

Stuart Rachels is a professor of ethics that has updated his father's (the late James Rachels) ethics primer. This book, revised in 2012, is The Elements of Moral Philosophy, Seventh Edition. Rachels, from Page 76 to Page 81, lays out three arguments against ethical egoism. The first argument, laid out on Pages 76 and 77 goes as follows: "The Argument That Ethical Egoism Endorses Wickedness. Consider these wicked actions, taken from various newspapers stories: To make more money, a pharmacist filled prescriptions for cancer patients with watered-down drugs . . . A nurse raped two patients while they were unconscious . . ." 

My response: Yes, these were cruel, wicked, selfish acts. I would argue that selfishness, especially when cruel, wicked or abusive, is far more common among collectivists than among individualists, though there are selfish cruel individualists. I would also argue that every story Rachels carried of wicked, selfish acts were wicked. Other acts are kind, neutral or virtuous. It may be more pertinent and accurate to describe an apparently vicious selfish act as it is, as blameworthy, without attributing its malefactor the motives of self-interest or other-interest. Besides, the cruelty of true believers in a mass movement, or among those committing the worst kind of crimes against humanity are the most violent, barbaric acts that people can and have done to others, and all these perpetrators are selfless and motivated by group-interest.

 Let me quote Rachels further: "Suppose that someone could actually benefit by doing such things. Wouldn't Ethical Egoism have to approve of such actions?" 

My response: When cruel, dishonest, vicious or violent acts are committed by others, even when the evildoers gains personally, this cannot be consistent with the brand of ethical egoism that I prescribe to. I generally define ethical egoism is the pursuit of one's enlightened self-interest. I would define enlightened as acting consistently and reasonably so that one's action uplift oneself without hurting others. The Mother and Father are Ethical Individualists and Ethical Individuators, and they are the authors to spiritual and moral goodness. We are made in their image, and likeness and are honored to serve them as accomplished individuators. With rights that they naturally grant us, come concomitant responsibilities. We are to take good care of ourselves. We cannot take good care of ourselves unless we are kind and respectful to others, or at least do not deprive them of life, liberty, property or happiness without grave need. If we hurt others, we hurt ourselves. If we are kind to others, we are kind to ourselves. We should pursue our own interests first and foremost, but the needs of others need consideration too. What is good for the self is good for the community. What is good for the community is good for the self. And these statements should be implementable in everyday life if people discuss, compromise and are reasonable so that the enlightened self-interest of all, most of the time, can be met without damaging the needs of the community, or of neighbors. 

 Rachels continues laying out the argument that such selfish actions committed above might disfavor ethical egoism: "This seems like enough to discredit the doctrine. However, this objection might be unfair to Ethical Egoism, because in saying these actions are wicked, it assumes a nonegoistic conception of wickedness. Thus, some philosophers have tried to show that there are deeper logical problems with Ethical Egoism. The following argument is typical of such proposals." 

 My response: Rachels does not seem to dismiss this ethical argument as baseless because it assumes a nonegoistic conception of wickedness. He does not say so, but it is well known in religious and ethical circles that individualism is considered selfish and the source of wickedness and sin in the world. These behaviors are condemned as the source of malevolent suffering in the world. Like Ayn Rand I submit that virtue is selfishness or self-interest over all, and that selflessness and collectivist living are selfish and vicious. Nonetheless, we need not worry about criticism such selfish behaviors listed above by Rachels as anything but selfish and wicked (which they are), whether or not the sinner and criminal is self-interested or selfish while being other-interested. 

 

 On Page 77 and 78, Rachels presents his second argument against Ethical Egoism: "The Argument That Ethical Egoism Is Logically Inconsistent. In his book The Moral Point of View (1958), Kurt Baier argues that Ethical Egoism cannot be correct, on purely logical grounds. Baier thinks that the theory leads to contradictions. If this is true, the Ethical Egoism is indeed mistaken, for no theory can be true if it contradicts itself."

 

 My response is that logically inconsistency may be built into almost any axiom or theory, that Aristotelian logic is not the only logic at work in the universe, that the law of contradiction is true most of the time, but logically inconsistency may be true part of the time, and that is how the universe works, that the exception proves the rule. I do not know if Ethical Egoism leads to contradictions, but it might, and it likely would not matter too much if it did. All theories that are true, would still be true mostly, once it was discovered how it contradicted itself. 

 

Let me quote Rachels again: "Suppose, Baier says, two people are running for president. Let call them 'D' and 'R', to stand for 'Democrats' and 'Republicans.' Because it would be in D's interest to win, it would be in D's interest to kill R. From this it follows, on Ethical Egoism, that D ought to kill R--it is D's moral duty to do so. But it is also true that it is in R's interest to stay alive. From this it follows that R ought to stop D from killing her--that is R's duty. How here's the problem. When R protects herself from D, her act is both wrong and not wrong--wrong because it prevents D from doing his duty, and not wrong because it is in R's best interests. But one and the same act cannot be both morally wrong and not morally wrong." 

 My response: It is in D's interest to win, but he must do so by honorable, or moral means--he must play fair. That is his best interest, not murdering a political rival to remove the competition. Such a horrendously immoral act is only D's self-interest in some sick, selfish way. So acting would devastate R and D himself. It is his self-interested duty not to harm R, let alone justifying her assassination. It is R's duty not to allow D or anyone to harm her. It is right for her to prevent him from hurting her, and it is right for her to do her duty. There is no logical inconsistency here embedded. Any moral act cannot be purely logically inconsistent--that it can be morally wrong and not morally wrong. That reading is absurd and false, but some modest logical inconsistency, that the same act is mostly morally wrong and a little bit right is true more than false, and meaningful in a complex, tricky-to-read world. But that is how this universe seems to be constituted. 

Let me quote Rachels again: "Does this argument refute Ethical Egoism? At first gland, it seems persuasive. However, it is complicated, so we need to set it out with each step individually identified. The we will be in a better position to evaluate it . . ."

My response: Rachels, the backer of logical consistency and Aristotle's law of noncontradiction, would accept that, were Baier or any critic able to show how the theory of Ethical Egoism is self-contradictory, then Rachels would quickly and decisively reject that theory as false and to be discarded. I would not be that quick to dismiss a working and workable moral theory like Ethical Egoism. Rachels below will go another route: he lays out Baier' criticism as plausible but defeated by one extraneous line that Baier added. If that line is removed from Baier's argument, then the theory of Ethical Egoism is shown to be laid out in a logically consistent way, so Baier's attack thus fails. 

 

 Rachels has several lines of Baier's argument that I will cite and then remark upon: "(1) Suppose it is each person's duty to do what is in his own best interest. (8) But no act can be wrong and not wrong; that is a contradiction. (9) Therefore, the assumption with which we started--that it is each person's duty to do what is in his own best interest--cannot be true." 

My response: (1) It is primarily each person's duty to do what is his own best interest, but his secondary and minority moral duty is to care for others, or at least ensure that his pursuit of his best interest does not arbitrarily overrule their pursuit of their own best interest. Where clashes occur, and they frequently will, the parties need to discuss in good faith, and find a way to compromise where possible so that it is a win-win situation for both. Also, what is one's own best interest requires explaining. One's own best interest is that action or actions that elevate the needs of God, the angels, oneself, others and the community. Any action that does not elevate the self first,  or others secondarily is an immoral interest that it is the agent's duty not to pursue. D murdering R can never be D's moral duty. Now I will contradict myself: there are times when a complete lack of logical inconsistency will be the nature state of a pet theory. At other times, the logical inconsistency built into that theory will be slight, and perhaps modifying, eliminating or replacing but one premise in the syllogism is enough to clear up criticisms of logical inconsistency. At other times the logical inconsistency will be so glaring as to likely destroy the argument, or if the proposed theory is hopelessly, logically inconsistent, the theory may have to be discarded. 

 Let me quote Rachels once more: " Thus we need not reject Ethical Egoism. Instead, we could simply reject this additional premise and thereby avoid the contradiction. That is surely what an Ethical Egoist would do, for it is always wrong to prevent someone from doing his duty. He would say, instead, that whether one ought to prevent someone from doing his duty depends entirely on whether it would be to one's own advantage to do so. Regardless of whether we like this idea, it is as least what the Ethical Egoist would say. And so, this attempt to convict the egoist of self-contradiction fails." 

 My response: If someone's duty was loving towards God, himself and others, then his fulfilling his duty would be a noble calling that an understanding neighbor should not obviate. If the agent was fill with selfishness, rage, envy, hate, malice and trickery, then his definition of his duty and self-interest might require opposition. To prevent another from doing his misguided duty would be salubrious to the interest of all, including the frustrated agent planning a cruel, wicked condemned duty. If someone doing her duty is morally good as duty and enlightened self-interest, then that agent doing her duty should not be interfered with, period whether it is to the advantage of onlookers or not.

 

 Now we come to Rachel's 3rd argument: "The Argument That Ethical Egosim is Unacceptably Arbitrary. This argument may refute Ethical Egoism. It is at least the deepest of the arguments we'll consider, because it tries to explain why the interests of other people should matter to us. But before presenting this argument, we need to look at a general point about moral values."

 My response: For a theory to be arbitrary it must possess internally innate unpredictable, whimsical triggers for the person to do an about-face, to act illogically, even crazily. Just persons are more logical, consistent and predictable, not swayed by passions, bribes, flattery or corruption. I do not see this arbitrariness must at work in individualists because individualists, on average, are more rational and logical than are collectivists, joiners or group-oriented people that are far more emotional, fickle and illogical than are individuators. If Ethical Egoism is the value system of choice for individuators, it cannot be that it is arbitrary. Instead, altruist ethics will be whimsical, subjective and arbitrary. Dictators are notorious for being arbitrary, moody wielders of un-derserved, congregated power. It might be argued that they are the most selfish of villainous individualists, and, in a way, they are, but I am more inclined to see them as kings of the heap, and that heap is populated by millions of people.

They are not individualists but the un-elected leaders of the pack. Their unhealthy hierarchical society is quite groupist. Their arbitrariness is also fed by their unjust, excessive personal power that sickens and rots them out. A presupposition for individuators is that theirs would be a rather classless society of upper middle-class people whose wealth and power relationships would be rather decentralized. Where power is balanced and dispersed, the citizens tend to be individualist, rational, sensible and scrupulously fair and square in dealing with others--nothing arbitrary about them. As an individuator, an anarchist/supercitizen in a constitutional republic, I do not need it explained to me why the interests of others should matter to me. They do, but my own interests are my duty to work towards, so they take priority. Allowing others, the power and freedom to do their own thing is respecting their interests in the most loving way that I can imagine.

 Rachels continues: "There is a whole family of moral values that have this in common. They divide people into groups and say that the interests of some groups count more than the interests of other groups. Racism is the most conspicuous example. Racists divide people into groups according to race and assign greater importance to the well-being of one race than to the well-being of other races. All forms of discrimination work like this--anti-Semitism, nationalism, sexism, ageism, and so on. People in the sway of such attitudes will think, in effect, 'My race counts for more,' or 'Those who believe in my religion count for more,' or 'My country counts for more,' and so on."

 My response: Stephen Hicks, Dennis Prager, Jordan Peterson, others and I all agree with Rachels here that the moral values of those that are racist, sexist, ageist, etc., use moral values as a cover for the most hateful, vile, mendacious, irrational moral assertions about their personal in-group versus despised out-groups is outrageous and to be condemned. Our contention would be that these moral values are really the immoral values of all the various tribal groups existing today and yesterday, and that their evil views are altruistic. Their pathological selfishness, elevating themselves against others and their neighbors is the source of evil in the world, and it is growing worse now that indentitarianism as practiced as cult worship by ideological postmodernists on the march to take over the world as ruled by one totalitarian Communist ruler takes shape. They are obsessed with others in such a sick, twisted way as to hollow out the individuality of insiders and outsiders. This is the malevolent side of groupism. 

Whites, males, Christians, Jews, capitalists, conservatives and the religious are hated out-groups, demonized and scapegoated, eventually slated for genocidal attack, gulags, converted into the oppressed classes and enslaved and made to suffer by their new masters. The coming Reign of the Beast will unleash altruism as never before witness, a reign of murder, terror and sadism, such as the world have never seen before. Ironically, Rachels is using racism and groupism as indicators of ingroup selfishness, and it is, but it is aligned, mostly I argue, with excessive altruism, not selfish individualism--though there is some of that. We need to return to the American liberal standard, pushed by Dr. Martin Luther King, that we should judge each American as an individual, by the content of his character, not the color of his skin. Those pushing CRT bigotry are promoting and fanning the flames of tribalism, not allowing the gentle West to further evolve into tolerant, peaceful, productive indviduator-anarchists, very high achievers, participants in a high civilization, all based, not just of Ethical Egoism, but Advance Ethical Egoism, or Mavellonialism. 

 Rachels continues: "Can such ideas be defended? Those who accept such views don't usually give arguments for them--racists for example, rarely try to offer a rational justification for racism. But suppose they did. What could they say?" 

 My response: No, such bigoted ideas cannot be defended. No sane, humane, rational individual or egoist, happy, contented and in love with himself, and through himself, in love with others and at peace with the world, could harbor such views antithetical to all that he is and stands for. Whenever one attacks, overpowers, enslaves, does violent against, oppresses or exploits another, that perverted relationship binds all involved together, and none are individualists and all are groupist beings, suffering, trapped and unhappy.

 Rachel continues: "There is a general principle that stands in the way of any such justification. Let's call it the Principle of Equal Treatment: We should treat people in the same way unless there is a good reason not to. For example, suppose we're considering whether we are considering to admit two students to law school. If both students graduated from college with honors and aced the entrance exam--if both are equally qualified--then it is merely arbitrary to admit one but not the other. However, if one graduated with honors and scored well on the admissions test while the other dropped out of college and never took the test, then it is acceptable to admit the first student but not the second." 

My response: This principle of equal treatment is moral and reasonable. But being courteous to everyone and treating everyone with respect, whether ingroup or outgroup members, and giving all equality of opportunity are i line with Rachels principle and that is laudable. When it comes to guaranteeing equality of outcomes or results, then this principle breaks down as the original protected classes become the new aristocracy and the old "privileged" (whether the preferential treatment for the privileged was actual or putative). We need to move away from group identity politics, quotas and body counts for every profession. Rather, we need to give each person from all groups the same liberating set of individuating values that makes their ascent to personal self-realization powerful, sustained and unstoppable should every or each person will to internalize these exceptional values. The Principle of Equal Treatment is to provide each person, extracted from his group affiliations, with the values to ignite in him the willful fire to succeed, and that is equality of outcome that is all anyone needs or deserves to end social justice whining about unequal treatment and the critical need for enforced, heavy-handed federal remedies to guide the career development of each budding young American citizen. As each young person maverizes, her liberty and power to be all that she can be, will lead to unequal outcomes, but that is set up by God and nature, not a cruel, unjust white patriarchy. Liberty trumps concerns for equity, inclusion and diversity, period. Rachels is correct in suggesting that the law student admitted to law school, that tried hard, being treated better and rewarded, while the unequally treated dropout that is in effect punished for nonperformance and goofing off--this unequal treatment is fair and reasonable, not unfair, unreasonable and arbitrary.

 Rachel continues: "At root, the Principle of Equal Treatment is a principle that requires fairness in our dealings with others: like cases should be treated alike, and unlike cases may be treated differently. Two points should be made about the principle. The first is that treat people in the same way does not always mean ensuring the same outcome for them. During the Vietnam War, young American men desperately wanted to avoid getting drafted into the armed services, and the government had to decide the order in which draft boards would call people up. In 1969, the first 'draft lottery' was televised to a national audience. Here is how it worked. The days of the year were written on 366 slips of paper (one slip for February 29) and inserted into blue plastic capsules. Those capsules were placed in a glass jar and mixed up. Then, one by one, the capsules were drawn. The first one was September 14--young men with that birthday, age 18-26, would be drafted first. The winners of the lottery, drawn last, were born on June 8. These young men never got drafted. In college dormitories, groups of students watched the drawings live, and it was easy to tell whose birthday had just come up--whoever just groaned or swore. Obviously, the outcomes were different: in the end, some people got drafted and others didn't. However, the process was fair. By giving everyone an equal chance, the government treated everyone in the same way." My response: I agree that the Principle of Equal Treatment requires fairness in our dealings with others: like cases should be treated alike, and unlike cases may be treated differently. Equal treatment up front or treating them fairly is equality of opportunity. Unequal outcomes are inevitable and is dependent on the individual competitor for how well she does nor not. Rachel continues: "A second point concerns the scope of the principle, or what situations it applies to. Suppose you are not going to use your ticket to the big game, so you give it to a friend. In doing so, you are treating your friend better than anyone else you could have given the ticket to. Does your action violate the Principle of Equal Treatment? Does it need justification? Moral philosophers disagree on this question. Some think that the principle does not apply to cases like this. The principle only applies in 'moral contexts,' and what you should do with your ticket is not important enough to count as a moral question. Others think that your action does require justification, and various justifications may be offered. Your action might be justified by the nature of friendship; or by the fact that it would be impossible for you to hold a lottery at the last minute for all the ticketless fans; or by the fact that you own the ticket, so you can do what you want with it. It doesn't matter from our point of view, whether the Principle of Equal Treatment applies only in so-called 'moral contexts.' Suffice it to say that everyone accepts the principle, under one interpretation or another. Everyone believes in treating people similarly, unless the facts demand otherwise." 

My response: I cannot disagree with Rachels here at all, for moral context is an issue for young people where moral choice might force the issue. 

 Rachel continues: "Let's now apply that principle to racism. Can a racist point to any differences between, say white people and black people that would justify treating them differently? In the past racists have sometime tried to do this by portraying blacks as lazy, unintelligent and threatening. In doing so, the racists show that even they accept the Principle of Equal Treatment--the point of such stereotypes is to supply the 'good reasons' needed to justify differences in treatment. If such accusations were true, then the differential treatment would be justified in some circumstances. But, of course, they are not true; there are no such differences between the races. Thus, racism is an arbitrary doctrine--it advocates treating people differently even though there are no good reasons to do so." 

My response: there are likely no significant differences between the races, black and white, or white and any other race, that would justify treating them differently. I would reject Rachels unstated assumption that it is whites that are racist; of course, all are born racist, favoring their ingroup against people of any other outgroup. With that in mind, all races and all groups need to be reminded not to treat outgroup members differently than ingroup members. It seems to be another unstated assumption at work here that it is individual egoists that are racist, when in fact racism is a group bias against outsiders. Group ethics are altruistic not egoistic, so racism grows out of altruist ethics. It would seem t me that racists do not accept the Principe of Equal Treatment. 

 Rachel continues: "Ethical Egoism is a moral theory of the same type. It advocates dividing the world into two categories--ourselves and everyone else--and it urges us to regard the interest of others in the first group a more important than those of those in the second group. But each of us can ask. What is the difference between me and everyone else that justifies me placing myself in this special category? Am I more intelligent? Are my accomplishments greater? Do I enjoy life more? Are my needs and abilities different from the needs and abilities of others? In short, what makes me so special? Failing an answer, it turns out that Ethical Egoism is an arbitrary doctrine, in the same way that racism is arbitrary. Both doctrines violate the Principle of Equal Treatment"

 My response: It is Ethical Altruism that advocates dividing the world into categories--our group versus every other group--and it urges us to regard the interest of others as less important than the interest of our group--even though we are all pretty much created equal by God. Ethical Egoism, especially individuating types, urge that people cannot be divided into different groups--all are beloved children of God, made in God's image, as fellow maverizers with a universal call to all humans to answer God's call to exist and excel as living angels. Identity politics or identity ethics are irrelevant, a distraction wasting the time and efforts and talents of individuals not tending to their own business, allowing neighbors and others to get on with doing their own thing. Each individual is special, but so are all other individuals. It is Ethical Altruism that allows individuals to lie to themselves and fellow ingroup hanger-ons that only they are special, and that inferior, immoral persons from outside group are subhuman, so treating them unfairly and arbitrarily is not only moral but is the duty of the dominant oppressor group. None of this garbage thinking has anything remotely to do with Ethical Egoism. It is Ethical Altruists Adherents that repeatedly violate the Principle of Equal Treatment.

 Here is Rachels final paragraph on Ethical Egoism from Page 81 of his book: "Thus, we care about the interests of other people because their needs and desires are comparable to our own. Consider, one last time, the starving children we could feed by giving up some of our luxuries. Why should we care about them? We care about ourselves, of course--if we were starving we would do almost anything to get food. But what is the difference between us and them? Does hunger affect them any less? Are they less deserving than we are? If we can find no relevant difference between us and them, then we must admit that, if our needs should be met, so should theirs. This realization--that we are on par with one another--is the deepest reason why our morality must recognize the needs of others. And that is why, ultimately, Ethical Egoism fails as a moral theory."

 My response:: We should care about the needs and interests of the Mother and Father first. Then we should care about our personal needs and interests next, especially as advanced, sophisticated individuators. After that, we care about the needs and interests of others. By setting three levels of moral priority out here, before acknowledging the needs and interests of others, it is apparent that our needs and their needs are not comparable, at least in deciding what is looked after first. Now Maverizers love themselves, love God and other people. They would provide others and their children starving or not, with enough sustenance, but primarily with modest means, liberty, the right set of Mavellonialist values and an unshakable sense of personal confidence that 98% or more of those starving children, their parents, and people from any identity group can hardly fail to succeed. These gifts that those that maverize give to others are powerful gifts and tools for other individually latching on to these superior values, willing themselves to bootstrap themselves up out of poverty, sin, hunger, want, enslavement and group-living. Yes, their needs and interests are as important as ours are, but it is also their duty and responsibility as individual persons and maverizers, to get after it, and make sure those personal needs and interest as self-fulfilled by person attempt. That Enlightened Ethical Egoism/Mavellonialism is so effective at lifting all boats that, by comparison, Ethical Altruism is a failed moral theory. It still has its place at the table of discussion in blending moral theories, but it cannot lead humans forth for the rest of the 21st century.

Choose

You can follow the crowd or individual-live. Make your choice and live with the consequences.

Minimums

What are minimum ethical standards for the average person? That is hard to say, but obeying reasonable laws, and following the Ten Commandments would not be a bad beginning.

The Soliloquist

I am a voice crying in the wilderness. I write and talk for myself, and almost no one listens, heeds or pays attention to me. So, it goes. I just keep thinking and writing. That is all that I can do or think to do. I bring wisdom, truth, goodness and God's word to the world, but am so radically rejected it is stunning. To be so resolutely ignored and suppressed, either I am very smart and very good so jealousy and inability to encounter so much that is wonderful drives people away from me. They are both scared and angered when they encounter me. Or they so drastically, globally, firmly and consistently because I must be a very crazy, evil or criminal person that they want nothing to do with, let alone be associated with. Instead, I have been persecuted for God's sake, harassed, attacked, discriminated against demonized and ostracized. Sooner or later, my ideology will break through into the public arena of idea for perusal and consideration.

Smoldering

The Marxist movement seemed ossified, discredited and tired by 1985; it was not at all obvious that the domino effect was even in consideration, but we conservatives and classical liberals had to be complacent and assume we had won--after all capitalism, constitutional republicanism, our powerful military, and the American Way made us the World Power. We were the careless smartalecks that figured we had won. We did not realize that college professors and pouting, defeated, demoralized leftists would find a way to rally. But through postmodernism, by preaching that the oppressed were intersectionally deprived rather underpaid, exploited workers whose needs were unmet, by abandoning the needs of the oppressed in favor of Envirostatism and the politics of equity, inclusion and diversity, they slowly gained ground. First, these neo-Marxists took over colleges, Hollywood, our big cities and our seminaries. Then mass media, corporations, the schools and the government became woke by the late 21st century teen years, and then the Progressives were ready to capture the whole society, slowly taking advantage of our trust, our sense of decency and fair play, our tolerance of the disloyal opposition and their revolutionary free speech. Now the enemy is at the gates of the city, and what smoldered is now a raging flame, and we are fighting for our lives to save our culture and country from these rabid, radical postmodernists.

Hillsdale College

I am short of time all the time, but I did, 2 years ago, take some online free classes from Hillsdale on the American system of government, and it was very instructive. The professors pointed out that God alone had the wisdom, love and goodness to have all sources of power concentrated in the Perfect Being, without centalized power corrupting God. God alone is the Judge, the Legislator and the Executive Branch. Humans, born sinners, cannot tolerate exposure to too much concentrated power for too long before the temptation to abuse overhwelms their self-restraint and they turn soon enough into violent, corrupt, venal, tyrannical monsters. The Founders of America realized how corruptible and susceptible to power abuse were the citizens, so they offered 3 branches of government, separate but equal, all to prevent the rise of tyrannical government that snatches and confiscates individual liberty, not working to protect individual citizen's rights, liberties and privileges. Angels do not need government, but men are beasts requiring government control. At best, trained, virtuous humans reason angelically but impperfectly at best. So much political wisdom in such a short class.

Classless Society

Marxists are obsessed with bringing about a classless society in which the oppressors, the wealth, the powerful, the exploiters and privileged are involuntarily forced by powerful government to redistribute their rank, power, wealth and privilege with the oppressed, the dispossessed and the poor, putatively and permanently to eradicate economic and political classes making up the status quo hierarchies. Now, Jordan Peterson has convincingly proved that hierarchies are a naturally occurring social structure, millions of years old, long predating the rise of capitalism and Western countries and cultures. We cannot eliminate hierarchies, even though such efforts were undertaken by and failed at miserably by totalitarian dictators in China, Russia, Cuba and Cambodia, The ruling elites brutally forced a classless society upon their peoples in the name of justice, and they destroyed the economy, and starved, impoverished and murdered tens of millions of citizens. The dictatorship of the proletariat did not wither away, and a new elite of comrades running to Communist Party at the top of the heap, the wholly corrupt and tyrannical hierarchy, bossing the little people in each country so afflicted. I believe that Marxists claim to be against hierarchies, but that they are lying or are willfully blind about their true motives. They push classless society as their reform or revolution for Western societies, to eliminate hierarchies, but they choose huge, bloated, vicious totalitarian government as their vehicle of reform and nothing is more corruptly and tyrannically hierarchical than totalitarian government. Once in power, they turn openly cruel and nihilistic, devouring the very people that they swore to uplift and protect. They claim to want to eliminate hierarchies in Western society, but this is their clever ruse disguising their true aim: to replace competent, relatively democratic, just Western hierarchies with Soviet-style, wholly arbitrary, cruel, tyrannical, corrupt totalitarian hierarchies. Power accumulation for the fervent ideological elite that head their Bolshevik Party is their target, not helping the poor and downtrodden. Hierarchies are natural and here to stay. To ameliorate this reality, let us take a cue from Peterson and make hierarchies as democratic, just, competent and fair as possible. Let us deinstitutionalize society as much as is practical and workable (not wholesale, immediate, drastic changes but gentle, gradual experiments to see where such institutionalization--or to what degree such is feasible--can be practiced, and then studied and modified as need be). Let the people become maverizers, and their very presence at every level of any hierarchy is the most powerful and effective way to prevent any hierarchy from growing corrupt or tyrannical. Allow Americans, in the future, to live as individuator-anarchist supercitizens, running their canons themselves in our constitutional republic. This is a great way to keep hierarchies existent but rather flattened, efficient and not too intrusive upon the individuator expressing his liberty as he sees fit. Finally, if each indviduator self-realizes, creating, learning, thinking, growing better and smarter over time, as he is growing up the personal hierarchy of value, farther along today than he was yesterday. This is how the biological need for hierarchies among humans can be met and satiated. As the supercitizen improves himself and runs society with other individuated supercitizens, he will make this God's country on earth, and then he will be serving somewhere along the great chain of being, a living angel in God heavenly hierarchy extending from heaven down into this world. Society cannot be completely classless, but these reforms should head it in that direction.

That Original Sin

I am no expert on the theological claim as to the actuality and origin of the assertion that humans suffer from original sin. I believe we do, but I do not think that we sinned willfully so much as our natural depravity is a biological condition of our natures (We were born nasty, and must act nasty because we mostly cannot act any other way, so therefore we are blameless for those wicked acts. To the degree that we are free willing, as we choose to sin, then sinning is our fault, with divine consequences imposed.) and would be the original sin afflicting any other species of sentient animal that would evolve up out of the animal kingdom as humans have done and are doing. Allegorically, Adam and Eve, disobeyed Yahweh and ate the forbidden fruit from the tree of life with its knowledge of good and evil, so they were the original sinners cast out of Eden, and our souls, generation after generation, are stained with sin due to this primordial sin committed by our Founders. Adam and Eve, in a state of pure goodness and bliss in the Garden of Eden, were somehow carboard characters, not free, not alive, just wholesome robots like the elves of Rivendell. When they disobeyed God, that is a sin and that is the original sin. I believe that God wants our obedience, but as free willing thinkers and feelers and sinners, alive and logical and questioning. Intelligent, principled obedience chosen as the wise way to live by alert, logical, principled, devout religious believers is what God seeks from us as individuators serving God's cause. It might be that there are two original sins, and they have never before been identified and bracketed apart from each other, so the confusion resulting creates a hopeless muddle. The first original sin is the one that I referred to above. It is natural human depravity, a powerful desire to sin, hate and destroy. That propensity to do evil is largely involuntary, but it will be voluntary once we are alert enough to understand moral alternatives, and still militantly choose to do wrong in defiance of God, our own well-being and in rebellion against Being itself. The second original sin is the act of disobeying God. The presupposition that applies here is that the disobedience is conducted by a sinning, free, alert, awakened moral being, knowing right from wrong, knowing that God is watching, knowing that consequences will follow, but still is determined to sin, and acts upon that willed desire. Going back to the Fall from grace: Adam and Eve are sinful when they freely choose to disobey God. They are innocent or morally neutral not required to be blamed or condemned for their actions. They were innocent, purely good angels when living as sleepy robots in Eden as part of God's team of purely good followers. Once they became awake and free and sinned, they completed the second original sin. Once they freely chose, God unlocked their true or transformed depraved natures, previously completed suppressed or sublimated by God's powerful, ruling natural law and instinctual rules guiding beasts that are rationally asleep. This transformed, basic human nature, depraved, lawless, poltroonish, rude, barbaric, selfish, mendacious, rebellious, vicious and violent, was the first type of original sin that governs the moral destiny of all humans unto the last day. This curse from God is also, ironically, human's greatest blessing. The Fall from Grace (God's grace that humans could take no credit for generating or sustaining.) can be the Reemergence From Natural and Earned Disgrace into a personal and societal state of Divine Grace on Earth as God and humans work to keep the land and people good and holy. God the Mother and the Father are logical Individuators, so they request and demand that we use our reason and our sentiment, more guided by our reason than our feelings, to individual-live and create and love God, oneself and others in one's family, one's community and one's nation. Now, let me digress for a minute and quote Stepen Hicks from Page 92 and 93 of his book, Explaining Postmodernism: "In his Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, Rousseau started his attack on the foundation of the Enlightenment project: Reason. The philosophes were exactly right that reason was the foundation of civilization. Civilization's rational progress, however, is anything but progress, for civilization is achieved at the expense of morality. There is an inverse relationship between cultural and moral development. Culture does generate much learning, luxury and sophistication--but learning, luxury and sophistication all cause moral degradation. The root of our moral degradation is reason, the original sin of mankind. Before their reason was awakened, humans were simple beings, mostly solitary, satisfying their wants easily by gathering from their immediate environment. That happy state was ideal: 'this author should have said that since the state of nature is the state in which the concern for our own self-preservation is the least prejudicial to that of others, that state was consequently the most appropriate for peace and best suited for the human race.' But by some unexplainable, unfortunate occurrence, reason was awakened, and once awakened it disgorged a Pandora's Box of problems upon the world, transforming human nature to the point that we can no longer return to our happy, original state." Rousseau contends that the original sin was reasoning, and that evil entered the world with this fall from natural grace, when people begin to think, and build immoral civilization. Rather, Leftist-postmodernists, the intellectual offspring of Rosseau, Kant, Marx and Rorty, are guilty of committing the second original sin, willful disobedience to the rule of God among humans on earth. Obviously, Hicks and I would disagree vociferously. He, the atheist, libertarian, Ayn Randian and conservative secular humanist, would insist that reasoning is what makes humans moral and civilized, that just choosing based on our feelings tears the world apart, as the postmodernists are doing. My concept of the second original sin, the sin of disobedience, is criminally activated and influential when people feel more than they think, run in cliques, and cling to nature and natural ways. The weak, natural first, original virtue would be our benevolent, kind impulses that can be strengthened into virtuous character in the human choosing to be good and serve God. The second, metaphysical, spiritual and unnatural and learned virtue is to obey God and serve God. In society, as logical (still feeling some) individuators, is how the humans of the future will be the new, enlightened children of light. Hicks would deny it, but he is unwittingly setting up the conditions for the religion of Mavellonialism to come to the fore.

The Inconsistency

Stephen Hicks has brilliantly uncovered an inconsistency central to how logically contradictory are postmodernist central claims. On one hand, their epistemology is a subjective, relativistic, claim that there is no Truth, no applicable metanarrative. Then their political outlook contradicts that completely for their major founders are all monolithically Leftist or Marxist, and classical Marxism self-identifies as Modernistic as scientific materialism, and that is a grand narrative. Are they ignorant of their central logical contradiction? No, they are too smart and too educated. Are they liars and hypocrites? Most likely, but they are also cunning revolutionaries as they use skeptical epistemology to undermine and gaslight the grand narratives that underpin the culture, values and beliefs of objectivist, Aristotelian, Modernist, capitalist, Judeo-Christian, republican, rational America and the West. Let me quote Stephen Hicks from his book, Explaining Postmodernism, Page 85: "There is a problem with making epistemology fundamental to any explanation of postmodernism. The problem is postmodernists' politics. If a deep skepticism about reason and the consequent subjectivism and relativism were the most important parts of the story of postmodernism, then we would expect to find that postmodernists represent a roughly random distribution of commitments across the political spectrum. If values and politics are primarily a matter of a subjective leap into whatever fits one's preferences, then we would find people making leaps into all sorts of political programs. This is not what we find in the case of postmodernism. Postmodernists are not individuals who have reached relativistic conclusions about epistemology and then found comfort in a wide variety of political persuasions. Postmodernists are monolithically far Left-wing in their politics." What does this glaring, practiced inconsistency lived by postmodernist reveal, that they denounce metanarratives epistemologically while simultaneously reintroducing an extralinguistic, political Marxist metanarrative about the world, an aim that they strive to bring about, with all their power and exertion? They are Progressive fanatics, a mass movement on the march blitzkrieging across the daunted West, and successfully attacking it too. They believe and live this logical contradiction in their moments of true believer fervor. When they are relatively sober, clear and reflective, they deny or admit that denouncing traditional metanarratives as a cynical plot to undermine Western presuppositions, all to serve their real, metanarrative goal of spreading Communism across the world. Marx is their prophet, Big Government is their god, and their radical Leftism is their ideology. Their self-contradictory view of the world is the delusional, perhaps mad conviction that true believers suffer from. I believe that we cannot know for sure that is an objective world out there, but our profound, instinctive need for meaning and purpose in our lives, as the basis for mental health and the sheer will to live and keep going, propels us to imagine and script metanarratives studded with values in order that we can make sense of things, and can motivate ourselves to keep moving on. For me, this is a very powerful, commonsensical "proof" that there is an objective world out there, that God exists and Lucifer exists, and that the world is an unending battle between good and evil, so we must craft our healthy metanarrative so that we may work with and for God to make the world and ourselves better. Stephen Hicks's warning about postmodernism is a wonderful blessing for the West, that perhaps we may yet turn the tide against the gaslighting, postmodernists radicals out to destroy first the West, and then the entire world. Stephen Hicks, a wise, principled, gentle, civilized Canadian atheist, is doing God's work for sure, and deserves accolades and huge thanks from all of us. Who knows how God works in mysterious ways.

Another Paradox

I uncovered another paradox that I may not be able to unpack satisfactorily at this time. Let me quote from Stephen Hick's book, Explaining Postmodernism, Page 46: "We can also get a universe that does not dehumanize us. Hegel argued that the realist and objectivist models had, by separating subject and object, inevitably led to mechanical and reductionist accounts of the self. By taking the everyday objects of empirical reality as the model and explaining everything in terms of them, they necessarily had to reduce the subject to a mechanical device. But if instead we start with the subject and not the object, then our model of reality changes significantly. The subject, we know from the inside, is conscious and organic, and if the subject is a microcosm of the whole, then applying its features to the whole generates a conscious and organic model of the world. Such a model of the world is much more hospitable to traditional values than the materialist and reductionist leanings of the Enlightenment." Let me lay out and define the poles of the paradox before referring to Hick's paragraph above. Here is the ontological paradox: is the world a monism, whose reductionism states that the whole is an arrangement of its parts, reducible down to an ultimate physical substratum, which can be epistemologically studied experienced and explained through a subject-object relationship observed and defined from outside of both? Or is the world a monism of the spiritual kind, a whole that cannot but be that the emerging whole is greater than the sum of its parts? Is this whole, and its parts, holistically to be perceived, experienced, conceived of and theorized about by the human thinker as a subject permanently divorced from external reality and its objects out there? Are Kant and Hegel correct is claiming that all epistemological endeavor can only study and make sense of phenomena, for the world of noumena and its objects are forever unknowable, outside the thinker's head, so to speak? Let me reformulate this paradox more concisely: What account of what the universe is and how it operates more clearly--a holistic or reductionist explanation for ultimate reality? As an ontological and epistemological moderate, I would say that we must study the object from the vantage of the subject and detached as would a scientist. I would also take the Kantian route and insist that we must exist, experience and study objects in their phenomenal representation only, for we cannot know or explain them as they really are. Now an Objectivist, the staunch law of contradiction-stalwart support of Aristotelian consistency and logic, would find my dualistic uniting and blending of the opposing theories of holism and reductionism to be false, illogical, meaningless, erroneous nonsense. But I am trying to make sense of a complicated, contradictory world, not easy to present through a logical explanation of probable certainty, so this is the best hypothesis that I can offer. Now let me give me response to Hicks as quoted up above: Hegel pans the Enlightenment mechanical, reductionistic model of reality as the dehumanizing result of separating the subject from the object. Hegel wants to study reality and its objects from the Subjectivist framework of making the subject primary, with its latent Kantian mental categories, to reorient the self to be free of mechanical and deterministic laws, as the self mentally studies and functions in the world of spirit and ideas, within the mind of God, and the universe then is utterly mental and organic, as the whole is the aggregation and interaction of these parts. Hegel's theory of truth is coherentism and Hick's theory of truth likely is one of correspondence, more or less. My moderate solution to the paradox (My solution is my best hunch, not the final world on the matter.) existing between these rival monists models is to recommend an Objective epistemology and ontology be primary, and the Kantian ontology and epistemology be of secondary importance in application.

Coming Around Again

The crisis generated from the conflict between collectivism and individualism is at least 100,000 years old. Jordan Peterson defines how individualism has slowly risen to consciousness, popularity and wide appreciation among peoples of the world, but it is no straight climb with no guarantee of backsliding. Peterson also recently noted that we must learn to be good and become good because we are too powerful to be evil anymore. With the rise of Modernism and science that fed the war technology of mass destruction, we have seen how mass murder and war could lead to the annihilation of our race. Collectivism in France over 200 years ago, coupled with Revolution and a vicious mass movement, led to a Reign of Terror. Collectivism in the 20th century led to many murderous wars and totalitarian reigns by collectivist thugs and criminals. Peterson warns that, when the 21st or 22nd arousal and arrival of a people like some Muslim nation or China, or here if the Marxist-Postmodernists should overthrow our liberal democracy occurs, the most terrible Reign of the Beast warring and devouring civilian and colonial populations, will come about, this time likely to wipe out our race. The conflict between collectivism and individualism is reaching its climax, and there is no guarantee at all that the children of light shall triumph.

Long Ago

In 1984 I had a dream of attending U of Minnesota graduate school to get my doctorate in philosophy. I was not to be allowed into the PHD program Professor Dahl warned me back then. I was not a rising star in the opinion of my professors. I would be allowed to finish the Master's program, but would not be admitted to the doctorate program, so I resigned. That dismissal was likely my fault more than theirs. In my own defense, my love of philosophy, my originality, my anticipation of philosophizing was speculative, romantic, idealistic and soaring. These drab, educated bureaucrats were epistemological pessimists, anti-metaphysical in their ontological disposition, with no time for the traditional kind of philosophizing that I was interested in.

What Is Going On?

I am well-established in my philosophical orientation towards the world: I have my own theology, my own metaphysical outlook, my own moral system, my own epistemology, my own political philosophy--mostly Mark Levin's political viewpoint, plus constitutional republicanism, run by supercitizens, individuators, pro-free market, citizen-soldiers and patriots--and my own psychology of human nature. I never had even an undergraduate degree in philosophy, so there are huge gaps in my knowledge and competence as a philosopher, a deficit which I am now trying to backfill and remedy late in life. That brings me to this blog entry issue. I have been wrestling for over a year with mastery sought in epistemological study, centering mostly on Ernest Sosa's virtue perspectivism, as a way into this daunting world. It appears that now, over two hundred years away from Kant's death, we are all still haunted and dominated by his convincing assertion that we cannot get outside our heads, to encounter perceptually that world of noumena. The epistemologists seem to accept that absolute reality is a realm that humans cannot know for sure. As an epistemological moderate, I agree mostly with the naive realists that we can know the world of noumena through our senses, ideationally through our awakened and function logical operations and our rational intuitions about how the premises and conclusions flow, and what we can emotionally intuit, in an honest, realistic mood of receiving sentimental glimpses from both internal and external sources of stimuli. As my minority stance of outlook, I am a skeptic and relativist: we cannot know the world out there or inside for sure, that the best we can achieve is knowledge about the world with high probable certainty. I believe we are complex, contradictory creatures, and that our epistemology reflects this--our epistemological orientation to the world is objective-subjective, as laid out just above. It could be that, for humans, the epistemology and psychology of moderation that they live with and operate by, works in a radical different way: perhaps these dogmatists are able to sense directly infallibly, absolutely and empirically, feel as experiencers and deciders, and rationally intuit about premises, inferences, conclusions and instant, cognitive generalizing about what the thinker experientially encounters, envisions, concludes and hypothesizes, on the one hand, while, simultaneously, living, experiencing, sensing, feeling and thinking about stimuli, internal and external, in a fallible, error-prone, subjective, contradictory, relativistic, falsehood-embracing, illusion-polluted, Stirneresque mode of mentally and experientially encountering, acting upon and reacting to inputs, internal and mental, and external and material, from reality. I am 67.5 years old, or thereabouts. I still work as a maintenance engineer full time as a nursing home in Minneapolis for mentally ill adults. The residents have their issues and disabilities, and that is one matter. The staff are college educated, some with advanced degrees in nursing and psychology, and others are administrators, managers. At times I wonder who is crazier, the residents or the ‘normal’ people caring for them. The staff are a microcosm of modern America. The management style of the building are strictly hierarchical. Jordan Peterson says that we cannot escape hierarchies and he is correct, where I work is more about those running the place being more competent, reasonable and just than being incompetent, callous, corrupt, inefficient, though profitable and tyrannical. And there is a caste system here. Owner, top managers, middle managers, nurses and mental health workers, and at the bottom of the rung, dietary staff and facilities staff of which I am one. I have addressed these issues elsewhere, so I shall not dwell on them here--where upper staff ignorance, worst practices, laziness, unworkable stinginess and wastefulness, incompetence, cruelty, selfishness, class-consciousness and general dysfunctionality run rampant, It is not as nearly as bad as what was depicted in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kasey, but there are eerie if faint parallels. Please forgive the digression, but I was trying to set the stage for my pondering about what is a good, wise humane practice and what is not, and I am trying to apply what I am learning in epistemology to what I encountered during an 11.5 hour shift yesterday. Part of the heating system was down so some pipes needed to be cut out in the boiler room, and new pipes welded in with a heavy, expensive, replacement motor and pump system. They were wired in and installed by the technicians from our mechanical company. Four white males, (from 25 to 50 years of age) extremely skilled union technicians worked for 10 hours, feverishly, nonstop to get the heating system up for these vulnerable adults so that they could have heat in the 34 degree weather. It was awesome, impressive and inspirational to view two pipefitters, a journeyman electrician, and the air-conditioning and heating technician from that company, working calmly but by stages to get the old pump out, and install and get running the new pump and motor. What Stephen Hicks refers to as the World of Modernism in America at work, and working beautifully and efficiently--the ethics, the epistemology, the ontology, the smooth cooperation demonstrated un-self-consciously and automatically by these union workers was something to see. I admire skilled, competent people that know what they are doing, what they are about, and get it done on time and well (for $10,000 or less)--that was the reality at work--that was no corrupt, male patriarchy at work. That is the world of America from Hofferian years in the 1950s that still functions and excels here in 2021 if we allow men, and all Americans, to function as Americans always did. Then I went upstairs at 700 pm to get a set of contractor keys from the security officer/night receptionist. He was a white male, nice, smart guy, nice-looking, with long hair (6 feet, 5 inches tall), wearing a dress with see-through nylon stocking and high heels. I handed the keys to the vendor and, as I was leaving before this tile repair guy would be done, I told him to return the keys to "this gentleman at the desk". The cross-dresser looked at me in a huff and answered: "I am no gentleman." I mentioned to the woman on duty that I think I hurt that guy’s feelings. She said gently that we appreciate you understanding that he deserves respect and courtesy, and he prefers to be addressed as she or her. I did not say anything. This same woke, nice, politically correct, Leftist, postmodernist, winsome Mom has made so very impractical, foolish management decisions on the floor for residents that she manages, that we in the basement are angered and horrified by, and we have to clean up needless crises, inefficiencies and mistakes, perpetrated and perpetuated by college-educated direct staff workers that act and believe that they are smarter and better than we sub-humans in the basement. But, she was spot-on, attuned with the needs that that transgender receptionist, at the front desk that they hired, because he is competent, but also to make a political and cultural statement at a desk, a few feet from the sign on the vestibule glass about prohibiting guns on this premises, a building where the night guard sleeps half the night, and a side door is often left unlocked all night, in a very dangerous neighborhood with well over 100 hundred vulnerable adults asleep inside. The insanity, inconsistencies and general hypocrisy and silliness allowed and sanctioned by the sane, humane people running the place would make a great TV sitcom. I left at 825pm and heard 10 pistol shots go off a few blocks away across the freeway along Franklin and 13th Avenue. Let me try to sum this up: the ethics, epistemology and ontology, the Modernist and American traditional culture gave us the greatest country in the world, and those technicians fixing that heating system in short order in a smooth, quiet, polite way. The Marxist/Minneapolis/Postmodernist culture with its ethics, epistemology and ontology give us transgenders at the front desk, guns banned at the door, hierarchical disrespect and mis-treatment of facilities employees in the basement by Leftist, caring, noble, elitist, snobbish, poor-functioning but endlessly self-confident and self-aggrandizing. I cannot agree, at least at this point, with the foundationalists, that we can have certain truth about the world of noumena, but there may be a way to be certain dogmatically. Until that point is made clear, if it can be made clear, I must posit that the world of Modernism is objectively wise, humane, desirable and realistic, as far as we can determine. The world of Marxism and postmodernism can only bring us pain, tyranny, poverty and misery, but their skepticism and subjectivist interpretation of the world add to our knowledge, wisdom and ethical stance towards how to live and function in the world today, as individuals and as a people. Perhaps the world is just a true paradox: we can know the real world and gather certain knowledge about it, and the law of noncontradiction and Aristotelian logic are consistent and represent the world, worked out logically as valid, sound syllogisms; we are Stirnerian, suffering from our ego predicament, never able to get outside our heads, never able to ascertain the nature of noumena, if it even exists, or is identifiable. We are alone in our own solipsistic dream and whatever truth we claim is our mere personal opinion. The paradox is reality, and we need to come to grips with it as it is. This may be ontological reality.

My Philosophy Of Moderation

My philosophy of moderation is offering that logical contradictions are true, desirable and superior much of the time, and to be disregarded elsewhere.

Successful World Religion

My speculation is that a soon arriving, effective world religion coming onto the scene and winning wide acceptance would be one that is a blend of Objectivism and Theism. Some additional elements like revealed relgious content and truth, and observations from natural religion followers will round out this blended faith, somewhat like Mavellonialism.

Am I Sure?

Since I was about 10 years old, I had a confidence that I was chosen by God to do great things. I did not know what I was to do, say or accomplish, but that feeling never wavered. Am I delusional? I think not but do not know that or anything else for sure. Am I just vainglorious and self-congratulatory? I think not. I believe that my sense of elevated, exceptional, august self-worth is realistic and that I am what I claim I am. I cannot prove or disprove this feeling of greatness in my soul but perhaps it will be validated should by my bhavior in the public eye.

Dennis Prager On Our Cultural Civil War

Dennis Prager wrote a profound, brilliant and seminal editorial piece carried in Article, Opinion, published on April 27, 2021. He writes about our cultural war; the headline of the article is: "PRAGER: The American civil war is over Judeo-Christian values." Below I will quote from his article, and then comment on what he writes. I select intermittently what I am most interested in. Dennis: "Conservatives often speak of Judeo-Christian values and how the current civil war in the United States and the rest of the West is essentially a battle between those values and the left, which rejects Judeo-Christian values. They are right. But they rarely explain what Judeo-Christian values are. Yet, without an explanation, mentioning Judeo-Christian values is useless." My response: there is a vicious cultural, civil war raging right now between traditionalists in America and the West versus leftists and secular humanists. It is a fight to the finish and there is little common ground left. I would add, as others like Ben Shapiro, have pointed out, that the brilliant rational and philosophical heritage, given the West by the ancient Greeks, is now under attack by the Left too. Dennis likely would not disagree with that addition, but, as a Jewish intellectual and theist, his religious outlook is paramount for him. He is correct in explaining what Judeo-Christian values are. Dennis: "First, a word about the term. some Jews and Christians find the term confusing, if not objectionable, since Judaism and Christianity have different theologies. But no one speaks of Judeo-Christian theology, only of Judeo-Christian values" My response: I had never thought of this distinction before, and it is a penetrating insight. The theologies diverge but not the shared values. Dennis: "Judeo-Christian values are essentially another term for biblical values. Judaism and Christianity are both based on the Old Testament--its God, its Ten Commandments, its admonition to love one's neighbor as oneself, to love God, to lead a holy life, etc. Christians also believe in the New Testament, but only an opponent of Christianity would argue that the New Testament negates the values of the Old." My response: For Dennis to clarify that Judeo-Christian values are synonymous with the term biblical values is a helpful reminder for traditionalists like I am to affirm the source of these shared values, and the New Testament does flow from the Old Testament almost seamlessly. Here Dennis lays out those Judeo-Christian values: "Here they are: 1. Objective moral standards come from God. As I have written and spoken about in a PragerU video and elsewhere, if there is no God who declares murder wrong, murder can be subjectively wrong but not objectively wrong. So, while there can certainly be nonbelievers who hold murder, stealing and other actions wrong, without God, those are opinions, not moral facts. Without God of the Bible, there are no moral facts." My response: I am not sure epistemologically that we humans possess a clearly communicable definition of what objective moral standards are or can intellectually and linguistically capture precisely what absolute truth is, but this metaphysical and epistemological moderate will concede that Dennis Prager's moral and theological claims to know objective truth about values and God are close enough to being probably true, that we should live by what he recommends, for the most part. God exists, and almost perfectly objective moral standards come from God. My minor subjective skepticism about Dennis's absolute moral and theological assertions are not strong enough, nor are they meant, to undermine that promotion of goodness, holiness and the worship of God, that this wise and good intellectual advocates. I believe that living in accordance with near moral facts, practiced by all sorts of religious believers and followers of good deities, should suffice to make this world a better, if not perfect place to live. Yes, Dennis, moral facts do come from God. Dennis: "2. God judges our behavior, and we are therefore accountable to God for our behavior. Outside of a religious worldview, there is no higher moral being to whom we are morally accountable." My response: I agree wholeheartedly with what he writes here. God is our judge, and we are accountable to God for our behavior. Moral goodness necessarily flows out from God's loving spiritual goodness, so if humans abandon God as they often do, then they will sink down into amorality and then immorality. Godlessness is the forerunner of satanism overtaking the whole society. Dennis: "3. Just as morality derives from God, so do rights. All men are 'endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights' declares the Declaration of Independence." My response: God is Logos, or Divine, Rational Consciousness, the Creator and Lawgiver of the natural laws that regulate and operation the natural and human worlds. Unlike Dennis, this Mavellonialist, declares that the Mother and Father are married, and that they are Supreme Individualists. Rights are innate to each individual and his natural desire to live his life anticipating the development of and external expression of his natural rights, demonstrated as he maverizes over a lifetime. Because the Divine Couple, Individuators Both, created operate with and enjoy developing their Rights, then of course their human children will inherit to natural gift of rights to assert and operate with in the world out there, while they exist. And these rights become encoded formally in our political system and Constitution here in America, but they predate that heritage, as gifts to humans and Americans, and all humans, from on high. Dennis: "4. The human being is uniquely precious. While the Bible repeatedly forbids cruel behavior to animals (cutting or tearing off the limb of a living animal to eat it as a means preserving the rest of the animal to eat while working in the field), only human beings are created in God's image." My response: To proclaim that humans are uniquely precious, and created in God's image, is to avow that each human has unique dignity and worth, and these elevating remarks are among the most pro-individualist stances ever announced in any faith. All of this while Judaism and Christianity remain altruist in their ethics. The famous Biblical underpinning of the require for mercy, justice and gentle treatment, implicitly applies to all humans, and even to animals that are not to be maltreated. Dennis: "5. The world is based on divine order, meaning divinely ordained distinctions. Among these divine distinctions are: God and man, man and woman, human and animal, good and evil, and nature and God." My response: This list of distinctions seems ambiguous to me, and troubles me a bit. Are the first-named beings of higher worth, esteem, rank or being owned deference and obedience, as commanded by God, by the second-named beings in each dual set of distinctions? That may have been God's intention, or perhaps it is merely a way of ontologically pointing out important pairs of opposites at work in the universe. God, humans, and good are ranked higher by God than man, humans or evil. Man and nature should not be ranked higher than woman or God, so this may indicate that these metaphysical pairs of dualism are just being noted as existing and competing and cooperating, not that the first one enjoys higher priority than the second one in the eyes of God. Still, God made the world and set in place divine order so that heaven, nature and human society operate in accordance with natural law. The dualistic pairs are primordial and inescapable structures of reality, so, not matter which side of the dualism that one leans towards, both sides need to be respected and balanced in the life of a loving, balanced, good, rational moral agent. Dennis: "6. Human beings are not basically good. Therefore, the most important moral endeavor is making good people. Religious Jews and Christians understand that the greatest battle in life is with one's nature. For the opponents of Judeo-Christian values, the greatest moral battle is not with one's nature; it is with society (specifically, American society)." My response: Perhaps no other set of religions in the world capture so clearly and truthfully, as moral insight at its finest, in highlighting those human beings are not basically good. Prager and the Judeo-Christians nail this unpleasant but liberating sliver of veritableness. The primary and highest priority or job of every parent, of every authority figure, of every rabbi, priest or minister, and is the responsibility of each moral agent born, is to make good persons. Implicit within this injunction to become good by battling and redirecting one's own fell nature is to make each person a good person as an individual. The good person disciplines herself and blames herself, much less than attributing her flaws and failings to other or to society, and here is another sign that individualism is a high Judeo-Christian value as each agent 'mans up" and pressures herself to amount to something good, loving and productive, no matter her natural abilities and environmental hurdles that press her down and hold her back. Note how the opponents of Judeo-Christian values--and note that Satan and Lera oppose those same set of divinely-written and legislated value--insist that the greatest moral battle is not with one's nature but with society. The opponents of Yahweh and Jesus, whether Leftists, Progressives or children of darkness, contend that the moral problem is not personal evil not personally overcome as the solution to the world's troubles, but, instead, any evil felt or possessed by each person is externally manufactured by society. Here again, implicit in Judeo-Christian values is the individualistic ethic: that internal sources of evil, for the individual and for the world, are best identified, isolated and conquered within the heart, mind and soul of each sinner, by that sinner, one soul at a time. It is a collectivist or negatively-altruistic ethic to assign moral problems, for each sinner, as externally impelled upon each sinner, so that the solution to bringing about moral good for each individual, and for all, is at the macro-societal level. Judeo-Christians, again are altruists, not egoists, in their moral theory, and likely would not interpret these remarks by Prager as I have as indications of individualism as ethically desirable in Judeo-Christian values. These Jews and Christians regard collectivism and universal moral-strategies as the finest ways to make good people, but, despite this anticipated disagreement--from Jews and Christians--with my reading of Prager's words under #6, I do not believe that my interpretation is forced or unreasonable. Dennis: "7. Precisely because we are not basically good, we must not trust our hearts to lead us to proper behavior. The road to hell is paved with good hearts. Feelings make us human, but they cannot direct our lives. This alone divides the Bible-based from those on the left." My response: Jews and Christians, I believe, believe that feeling, as the controlling psychological way of perceiving, concluding and deciding as practiced by each willing moral agent are willing the more evil, more foolish and less promising way to live and act. Reasoning and thinking should be the primary means and the controlling psychological way that each moral agent makes decisions. This means of willing will lead, overall, the agent to make better, smarter and more benign decisions. Note that I, unlike Dennis, insist that sentiment-based decisions, as the minority-way of willing how to act, does lead the moral agent to lead good lives, most of the time for most people. If reasoning is godly and from the Bible, and it is, then Yahweh and Jesus are benevolent deities that are supernatural embodiments of the eternal principle of Logos at work in creating and running the cosmos, so that rational principle needs also be at work in the willing of each moral agent, made in God's image. If those immersed in and loyal to the importance of Judeo-Christian values guiding their moral choices are guided mostly by their logic versus Leftists and secularists that make their decisions based upon what they feel, then I believe I am faithful to what Dennis means above. Dennis: "8. All human beings are created in God's image. Therefore, race is of no significance. We all emanate from Adam and Eve, whose race is never mentioned. That many religious people held racist views only testifies to the almost infinite ability to people to distort what is good." My response: All people are created in God's image, so each of us is called to maverize, like God as done, and all are worthy of happiness and good times. To be racist is natural for all of us, but to act upon these primordial, savage views is to live a lie, and to refuse to grow morally into a kind, tolerant adult. Dennis: "9. Fear God, not man. God is the foundation of morality. In the Book of Exodus, Egyptian midwives were ordered by Pharaoh to kill all newborn Hebrew boys. They disobeyed the divine king of Egypt. Why? Because 'the midwives feared God.' In America today, more people fear the print, electronic and social media than God." My response: Yes, we should fear God first and most. We should also fear--while refusing to be paralyzed or intimidated by those that one fears--our fellow humans, for as committed sinners, they may entice us to live in sin full time as they have succumbed to. We do need to fear God more than worldly media outlets. Dennis: "10. Human beings have free will. In the secular world, there is not free will because all human behavior is attributed to genes and environment. Only a religious worldview, which posits the existence of a divine soul--something independent of genes and environment--allows for free will." My response: even the most unaccomplished, undeveloped, mediocre, conformist, passive, hedonistic believers have some free will. Proportionately, as the agent grows in skill and talent, as her expanded, very aware state of advanced consciousness allows her to wield a will so free and powerful that she mostly recognizes right from wrong with a full positions-set to analyze each action. I admire Dennis's unique point that the religious point of view, with its advocate's positing the existence of a divine soul in the psyche of each person, that is where free will is strongest. Among the atheists, is unfree will is announced, where determinism of genetics and environment as controlled by various worldly tyrants--all of this reinforces those sinners do not enjoy free wills very much. Dennis: "11. Liberty. America was founded on the belief that God wants us to be free. On the Liberty Bell is inscribed just one thing (aside from the name of the company that manufactured the bell). It is a verse from the Bible: "Proclaim Liberty Throughout All the Land Unto All the Inhabitants thereof." The current assault on personal liberty--unprecedented in American history--emanate from those who reject the Bible as their moral guide (including more than a few Jews and Christians who have joined the assault, having been indoctrinated with anti-religious views in high school and college)." My response: Liberty is about the most important condition in the world for humans to enjoy, and we are far to willing to let government enslave us, or peer pressure, or being tyrannized by our lust, our materialism, our fanatical devotion to some abstraction (the substitute for worshiping God), etc. God wants us to be free, to be spiritually, morally, legally and socially free. If one follows the Bible, one would be inclined to defend our natural right to enjoy liberty. The secular tyrants that seek to imprison us within a nightmare society based on Marxist/postmodernist principles are against God and liberty. Dennis: "When Judeo-Christian principles are abandoned, evil eventually ensues. One doesn't have to be a believer to acknowledge this. Many secular conservatives recognize that the end of religion in the West leads to moral chaos--which is exactly what we are witnessing today and exactly what we witnessed in Europe last century. When Christianity died in Europe, we got communism, fascism and Nazism. What will we get in America if Christianity and Judeo-Christian values die? My response: I agree with Dennis's accurate and dire warning that once good religion and good religious values are abandoned, in Europe and in America, evil and evildoers fill the void. Just at the totalitarian isms of the 20th century wrecked Europe, so to can the loss of religion and good values in America allow a pernicious secularism and demonic, totalitarian hegemony to sweep our fair land.

Ayn Rand About Consciousness

Ayn Rand points out, on Page 17, in a footnote, of her book, The Virtue of Selfishness, that lower-life forms live goal-directed lives in preserving their lives and perpetuating their species, but that goal-directness for higher functioning rational creatures as smart as humans are--well, their consciousness, their awareness and alertness, renders their goal-directedness to unfold in a more complicated way, as their consciousness necessitates that they operate in a teleological or purposive manner, and I assent. Here is her footnote:  "When applied to physical phenomena, such as the automatic functions of an organism, the term 'goal-directed' is not taken to mean 'purposive' (a concept applicable only to the actions of a consciousness) and is not imply the existence of any teleological principle operating in insentient nature. I use the term 'goal-directed' in this context, to designate the fact that the automatic functions of living organisms are actions whose nature is such that they result in the preservation of an organism's life."

 

 My response: For Rand consciousness is the biological mind. For spiritual believers like I am, consciousness is that and more--it is the mind and the mind's higher level of consciousness as a soul. And 'insentient creatures" might think and choose some of its actions and implementable intentions over time, and we likely are more driven by deep-seat, unnoticed but powerful basic drives also operate to guide human goals, even the purposive, more than we know, perhaps for a life time.

Ayn Rand: What Matters

Let me quote from Page 17 and Page 18 of Ayn Rand's book, The Virtue of Selfishness: "In a fundamental sense, stillness is the antithesis of life. Life can be kept in existence only by a constant process of self-sustaining action. The goal of that action, the ultimate value which, to be kept, must be gained through its every moment, is the organism's life."

 My response: Rand is an activist and recommends that to live is to be moving, striving, working, planning, performing, and it would seem that the human organism's life is best enjoyed, nourished and cherished with teleological aims being chased perpetually. I like this outlook. 

 Here Rand is explicit about the teleological ends being significant for humans: "An ultimate value is that final goal or end to which all lesser goals are the means--and it sets the standard by which all lesser goals are evaluated. An organism's life is its standard of value: that which furthers its life is the good, and that which threatens it is the evil. Without an ultimate goal or end, there can be no lesser goal or means: a series of means going off into an infinite progression toward a nonexistent end is a metaphysical and epistemological impossibility. It is only an ultimate goal, an end in itself, that makes the existence of values possible. Metaphysically, life is the only phenomenon that is an end in itself: a value gained and kept by a constant process of action. Epistemologically, the concept of 'value' is genetically dependent upon and derived from the antecedent concept of 'life.' To speak of 'value' apart from 'life' is worse than a contradiction in terms. It is only the concept of 'Life' that makes the concept of 'Value' possible."

 My response: Our teleological aim is the standard by which all lesser goals are evaluated. To live is to run after that ultimate end, and that is good. To be thwarted in chasing that end, or to self-censor and self-restrict one's winning the race towards that end is to be evil or experience evil. Again, Rand's words here make more sense to me if that end is inferred to be the self-actualized that is unique and personal to everyone. One thing that I admire about Rand is her moral conviction. She is not one to mince words. She calls what is evil, evil and what is good, good. Now, such firm, clear language ordinarily clarifies semantical content. Occasionally it might be simplistic, or overreaching, but I feel that is not often the case with Rand. She ties together the worth of the ultimate goal that is the end in itself, that makes value possible, and value is recognized and earned as one enjoys and accrues it while existing in an admirable, satisfying way. I like how she weaves all of this together. This fits rather nicely within the framework of Mavellonialist self-actualization theory.

Rand: To Exist

Let me quote from Ayn Rand, on Page 16 of her book, The Virtue of Selfishness: "I quote from Galt's speech: 'There is only one fundamental alternative in the universe: existence or nonexistence--and it pertains to a single class of entities: to living organisms. The existence of inanimate matter is unconditional, the existence of life is not: it depends on a specific course of action. Matter is indestructible, it changes its forms, but it cannot cease to exist. It is only a living organism that faces a constant alternative: the issue of life or death. Life is a process of self-sustaining and self-generating action. If an organism fails in that action, it dies; its chemical elements remain, but its life goes out of existence. It is only the concept of 'Life' that makes the concept 'Value' possible. It is only to a living entity that things can be good or evil." My response: Humans, living organisms, must choose to live or die. Humans choose to live not just by propagating their kind or eating food so that they do not starve to death. In accordance with a hierarchy of needs, for a human to choose to live is to aim higher in pursuit of a worthy end, for reaching a valued or desired goal. If the person does not struggle to gain higher value, the soul or spirit of the human withers, dies or they plot to wreck and ruin, spreading lower values, evil, or the lack of values around himself. God put him here on earth to make things better, and he has denied that invitation, instead channeling his strength, power and energy to making things worse. To live indicates one is to biologically survive, but it also means that one is to get after gaining ends of higher value. So pursuing is living, not choosing living death. Rand seems spot on here. Rand continues: "To make this point fully clear, try to imagine an immortal, indestructible robot, an entity which moves and acts, but which cannot be affected by anything, which cannot be changed in any respect, which cannot be damaged, injured or destroyed. Such an entity would not be able to have values; it would have nothing to gain or lose it could not regard anything for or against it, as serving or threatening its welfare; as fulfilling or frustrating its interests. It could have no interests and no goals." My response: Rand is suggesting that humans possess free will, so they can choose to live or die. Only as a living creature do we mortals need to generate reasons to live, and goals to pursue. Only as living creatures do we come to scale and assess various actions as superior or inferior in quality. Only as innately moral creatures we will we fill the need and will provide answers for our urgent need to live and survive by ranking actions and choices as better or worse, good or evil, and desirable or worthless. To live we must impose moral values upon our assortment of potential actions and choices. To be alive is to be moral, and to be moral is to be happy, and for the average atheist agent that Rand envisions, that is a life well-lived, as each agent pursues his own rational self-interest. Now the religious believer that serves and follows God is also a person that must choose to live or lie, literally and spiritually. When she chooses to do nothing with her life or refuses to help God run the world as a holy place, or refuses to make the world a better place, by improving herself first, and indirectly assisting and uplifting all those around her, then she does evil, and her actions are of little value, and she is dying (slowly) physically, morally and spiritually. I believe that Rand's statements above apply to believers as well as to unbelievers, secular humanists and atheists like whom she is. Now let me react to her example of the immortal, indestructible robot (sounds like a deity-substitute to me): any immortal, superhuman being, unchanging and impervious to any attacks, worries or suffering around it. I agree with her somewhat that it cannot have values, in the human, fallible context of humans needing values so that they can choose to do good and serve with the children of light, or elect to do evil, and work with the wicked children of darkness. Humans, naturally more evil and good, but still good enough that, with will, good habits and consistent wise, loving choices, can do good and be good. As such good persons, they are alive, valuable and are adding value to the world, for society and in their personal lives, and this successful effort is most commendable, and approved of by the Divine Couple. In this contest the robot/deity cannot have values because he is unchanging and eternal, not becoming, evolving and changing like mortals do. Lifeless matter, animals and the robot/deity are all set and unchanging, so they do not have values in the way that Rand suggests, and her analysis seems applicable to the human condition. I would add that any deity will have values, good or evil, and they will not be able to do much good if they are wicked, or sin much if they are innately perfect and good, but whatever their value is (pure good or pure evil), they will work to extend that power in the world. To extend whatever value extreme that they would be their interest and goal in the world. Let me quote Rand further at the bottom of Page 16 and on the top of Page 17: "Only a living entity can have goals or can originate them. And it is only the living organism that has the capacity for self-generated, goal-directed action. On the physical level, the functions of all living organisms, from the simplest to the most complex--from the nutritive function in the single cell of an amoeba to the blood circulation in the body of a man--are actions generated by the organism itself and directed towards a single goal: the maintenance of the organism's life.*" My response: If God and Satan and their underlings have physical bodies and biologically exist, at least in some way to some degree--and they do and this is another mystery that I cannot explain but intuit that it is their ontological and biological status, they then also have free will, goals and can originate goals. This might imply that they are not perfected and unchanging like Rand's robot/demigod, but they are mostly perfected and unchanging. With that status established, by contrast, humans are mortal but living entities that are very vigorous and very active, for the few years that they live. In the mortal realm, in humans, half-angel and half-beast, is where god and beast mingle freely and complexly. There is where the cosmic, endless battle between good and evil unfolds, and that is how the universe seems to work. God may have created humans not because De was lonely (That may have been part of it.), but because the arrival of humans on the planet earth allowed some unknown, universal deficiency to be fulfilled, and divine balance and justice could thus be restored as humans live and clarify and instantiate values of good and evil, and their efforts might well be far more significant for the inhabitants of heaven and hell than we have been told. With this potential responsibility in mind, we must shoulder our responsibility to self-realize, to live and love and fight evil, to put the world right, and the serve the Mother and the Father, not Satan and Lera. Here is that footnote from the bottom of Page 17: "When applied to physical phenomena, such as the automatic function of an organism, the term 'goal-directed' is not taken to mean 'purposive' (a concept applicable only to the actions of a consciousness) and is not to imply the existence of any teleological principle operating in insentient nature. I use the term 'goal-directed,' in this context, to designate the fact that the automatic functions of living organisms are actions whose nature is such that they result in the preservation of an organism's life." My response: Rand seems correct in distinguishing between simple organisms and animals that are instinctive driven to evolve in the world in such a manner as to preserve their lives, not goal-directed, teleological and purposive as deliberate conscious choosing of human beings. It could be that God and Satan plan and execute their goals, but it is among humans where the main action happens. Note that Rand offers that humans enjoy active, rational minds (or consciousness), and that makes their lives valuational and their plans to be teleological, and I agree with her.