Atlas Society

 

I get regular emails from the Atlas Society and I wish to share several items or quotes of interest from that 9/7/2023 email. I will then respond to them. They carry a 60 second video called Takeover Spotlight, highlighting Stephen Hicks. He answers the question: “How does free will manifest itself in human nature?” Hick insightfully explains: “free will is a natural, emergent capacity of the human mind and lists 3 ways in which it is volitionally manifested.”

 

My response: I like Hicks and I cannot disagree with his characterization of free will: I would argue that free will is a natural, emergent capacity of the human mind and that it is volitionally manifested socially, personally, biologically in the world, but free will is also a supernatural, emergent capacity if the human mind and it is volitionally manifested at an initial level of human free will, that can be strengthened and increased in quality and quantity as one’s self-realizes, as one expands and deepens one’s consciousness and awareness. As the soul, the talents developed, the improvement of our initial bad will (to some degree sunk into slavery to the passions and instincts), converted to a strong, good, free will of great awareness, truth-loving, wise, smart and engaged personally in the struggle of good versus evil.

 

Our biological, natural free will also has its spiritual aspects, and these different dimensions of our free will interact all the time.

 

Hicks: “How does the free will manifest in human nature? Consciousness is a natural, emergent capacity of the brain and mind. It manifests itself volitionally in three ways.

 

One is the issue of intensity. We all have the capacity to dial up the intensity so to speak. We make our minds more relaxed and then think and attend in a more concentrated sort of way. That is under our control.

 

Another way that free will manifests itself is in our range of focus. We can focus in very tightly on things or let our mind, our capacity to expand out to take in more like the zoom lens on a camera.

 

The third thing is initiating action or not. We can think abstractly, hypothetically or imaginatively, or we can decide to pull the trigger and act on the basis of our ideas.”

 

 

 

 

The same email carries a lovely quote from Ayn Rand: “The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities.”

 

My response: She was so brilliant and often quite wise, and sometimes so off-base, but she nailed this one. The individual is the smallest minority in the world, and, as anarchist inividuator supercitizens, we would live very self-consciously and with legal, moral, social, divine, familial, and communal approval, as maverizers. We would insist upon exercising and controlling our individual rights, while defending and granting the same privilege and obligation to others, should they freely elect to so live and become.

 

The deemphasizing of group ethics, group identity and group rights—they still have some importance to a society of maverizers, but it would be a reduced, secondary level of emphasis—allows for majorities or groupists to no longer dominate, hold back and down or to persecute individuals and individualists. 

 

With the providing for the average citizen to live as a minority amidst billions of other such minorities on earth, the major emphasis for a social norm is to elevate individual ethics, individual identity, and individual rights to how, people that self-develop, ought to live.

 

 

 

That email contained another quote of interest, one by a Sam Altman: “Colleges prioritized making people feel perfectly safe over everything else . . . afraid to take risk, and thus on pace to accomplish very little.”

 

My response: Snowflakes do not grow into their supercitizen political and cultural roles, as expected by the Good Spirits.