Mandeville The Psychological Egoist

 In the introduction to his edited copy of Bernard Mandeville's The Fable of the Bees, Phillip Harth writes of Mandeville's lampooning the moral pretensions and pious hypocrisy rife among the English people at all levels of society.  Cynical and perhaps realistic, Mandeville denies that people are as virtuous, selfless, and other-centered as they claim to be and pretend to be.

But look at the Harth quote on Page 16 to reveal an unexpected twist in Mandeville's conclusions about people, not just Englishmen: "But there are several important differences which indicate, from the outset of his career, Mandeville's refusal to adopt conventional satiric norms. In the first place, instead of condemning the bees for their vices, he goes to great lengths to show that happiness and prosperity of the hive depend directly on these very faults."

I do not think it is a stretch to describe Mandeville as a psychological egoist, believing that people are naturally selfish and vain. He must describe morally such motivators as vice because altruistic Christian morality position selfishness and pride as the two most wicked vices. 

Mandeville is I believe an early normative egoist arguing that private vices lead to public benefits. If we apply Randian moral concepts that selfishness is virtue, and healthy pride and self-confidence as a self-referential disposition to believe in the self so that one acts to be worthy of such high self-estimation, then private vice or 18th century evil led to public benefit, a pure contradiction that does not seem to be possible.

But if private vices were moral, then it would make sense that they led to public benefits, and the rational egoism that I preach under Mavellonialist doctrine does promote such a view. Enlightened self-interest expressed in the inner and outer life of each individuating-anarchist supercitizen would result in huge public benefit--as well as deep and wide personal happiness and satisfaction with the way one is living, working and loving.

Mandeville's Influence

 The late Phillip Harth edited and wrote an introduction for 1970 published edition of Bernard Mandeville's The Fable of the Bees. He writes on Page 7 those intellectuals with a new idea, sometimes gain public sympathy and acceptance of their new idea, perhaps while they are alive.

Harth then proceeds to contrast that fortune enjoyed by those intellectuals with the cold reception received by a few less fortunate intellectuals like Mandeville. Let me quote Harth: "A few intellectual works, however, owe their importance far more to the controversy they excited and the opprobrium they earned than to any proselytes they were able to win . . . By acting as irritants which contemporary readers found impossible to ignore, each of these books stimulated men to reexamine their ways of thoughts in order to justify their exasperation."

I surmise, that getting one's narrative and original ideas into the public consciousness by being notorious rather than esteemed, that being negatively famous is better than remaining anonymous and unknown. Mandeville may have been excoriated but he did not back down or back off with his unpopular views.

I imagine if Mavellonialism ever comes up to being well known, it and I will be regarded as infamous rather than famous for a generation or two.

Be Alarmed

 All patriots that love America should be alarmed by the postmodernist, woke revolutionaries out to overthrow and remake the greatest country in the world. May we unite and fight back against these haters and destroyers.

Axiomatic

As an ontological and epistemic moderate, it obvious that I am unsure about certainty and indubitability of the correspondence theory of truth, and the infallibility of first principles upon which I could lay out my arguments. Probable certainty about my axioms is the best that I can offer.

Max Stirner on Dupes

 On Page 2 of his masterpiece, The Unique and Its Property, Max Stirner writes of the need for humans to no longer be duped by unselfishly serving the causes and purposes of the great egos. Instead, he challenges humans to wake up, smell the coffee and only serve themselves. He is correct in identifying the unselfish devotion that the duped give to the causes they serve, and that they do so as collectivists, and that it is not in their best self-interest. 

I am not as against serving causes and abstractions as Stirner is, for some of them are holy, virtuous, and good, but we need to serve them through enlightened self-interest more than as ardent, enthusiastic nonindividuators. Stirner's Unique seems rather selfish, and unwilling to serve humanity, whereas my version of enlightened self-interest goads the self to improve mightily to bolster God, the self and society indirectly All benefit. My egoism is value-laden and not selfish like that of Stirner's Unique.

Let me quote him and then make some comments: "And won't you learn from these shining examples that the egoist gets on best? I, for my part, take a lesson from them, and instead of serving those great egoists unselfishly anymore, I would prefer to be the egoist myself."

My comment: From Stirner we can glean that living life as an egoist is how a human advances. I would prefer that the egoist do it as an objective egoist, a value-laden living angel of God, not Stirner's merely self-seeking, subjective egoist. At least he got the egoist orientation right for people to follow and live by.

Let me continue with Stirner: "God and humanity have based their affair on nothing, on nothing but themselves. I likewise base my affair on myself, this I who am the Unique."

My comment: God and humanity, for Stirner are the great egos or abstractions that humans unselfishly serve. Stirner wants the self, the Unique One to base his affair on himself solely. This is a proper way to proceed and live one's life.

Let me continue to quote Stirner: "If God, if humanity, as you affirm, have enough content in themselves to be all in all to themselves, then I feel I would lack it even less, and that I would have no complaint to make about my 'emptiness.' I am not nothingness in the sense of nothingness, but am the creative nothing, that nothing out of which I create I myself create everything as a creator."

My comment: Stirner's unique individual will enjoy his emptiness, his loss of conscious, worldly ego, his rational bracketing of people and reality, his reliance on abstracting, his Eastern-hard-to-define sense of the annihilated ego, replaced by living, mortal consciousness empty of all universal concepts. Once the self is epistemologically free from such enslaving rational obsessing, his empty mind will be freed up as a creative nothing to create everything (and destroy his created ideas at will, should he want to terminate them). The Unique is a creator.

In what follows Stirner suggests that the Unique is only free and creative if he is neither good nor bad (he defies all labels, especially moral labels), and the only cause that he will serve is his own affair. He proclaims that nothing is greater than himself. He is an egoist, pure and simple.

Max Stirner And Prescient Germans

 One great historical irony that comes to mind for me is how Max Stirner and Eric Hoffer, both either born in Germany or of German descent, early on or having lived with mass movements, emphasized these movements’ mostly negative significance, with unnerving accuracy, foregrounding the danger of mass movements, when manipulated by unscrupulous leaders to gain power, conduct wars or seek world domination: these two German men predicted what mass movements could produce, and yet such warnings were not heeded by their own people--look at what the German people allowed to happen as they submitted to the Nazi thugs running Germany, demonstrating how murderous and destructive an unleashed mass movement can become.

Let me quote from Max Stirner from the Byington translation of Stirner's book, The Ego and Its Own, pages 1 and 2:  "I have no need to take up each thing that wants to throw its cause on us and show that it is occupied only with itself, not with us, only with its good, not with ours. Look at the rest for yourselves. Do truth, freedom, humanity, justice, desire anything else than that you grow enthusiastic and serve them?

They all have an admirable time of it when they receive zealous homage. Just observe the nation that is defended by zealous patriots. The patriots fall in bloody battle or in the fight with hunger and want; what does the nation care for that? By the manure of their corpses the nation comes to 'its bloom!' The individuals have died 'for the great cause of the nation,' and the nation sends words of thanks after them and--has the profit of it. I call that a paying kind of egoism."

Rarely has the dangers, of wholesale, unrestrained, and overly enthusiastic or fanatical devotion to an empty word, abstraction, cause, or ism, been so graphically delineated and skewered.

Stirner was an arch-individualist and he intuitively recognized that indiviudal-living was the route to go, not group-living with herd power of suggestiveness plus emotional excess, making such a social dynamic ideally suited for turning an abstraction into a cause to die for and sacrifice all for.

Stirner underrates and under-values the human need for finding God, purpose, structure, and rational order to be intellectually satisfied and made meaningful by linguistically framing one's thoughts with universal words and concepts generalizing and categorizing what one has discovered and understood.

Stirner and Hoffer worry rightly that our abstractions are often distorted and perverted, by us, into a numbing, dead-end cause to serve, a false god, a graven image, an idol with feet of clay, a poor substitute for fulfilling our a priori religious appetite for meaning.

Though Max Stirner is not regarded as an ethicist, and indeed, firmly discredits and rejects prescriptive ethics as spooks, he does offer wisdom regarding mass movements.

He wants people to be egoists and not altruists. If Rand is right--and she is--that virtue is selfishness (self-interest) and vice is selflessness (collective), then Stirner is an unintentional moralist advocating that people not run in packs passionately and zealously serving a collectivist cause and the false idol or word that that symbolize that fallen cause.

Dennis Prager and I counsel that we should make decisions based more on our reasoning than on our feelings. Reasoning as an individual thinker and moral agent makes us more moderate, temperate, and sensible in our thoughts, word, and deeds. When we are calm and reasonable then the truth appears to us more readily.

Conversely feeling as a group creature makes us too enthusiastic, too judgmental, too rigid and overly confident in our conclusions. We are then unhappy, and unhappy, resentful people tear up the world as compensation for their feelings of wretchedness and unhappiness.

Stirner is wrong is completing refuting universals, but he is correct in worrying that living by or under the structure of a universal value and its accompanying attributes yields spiritual and moral benefits to its adherents if they embrace it logically, coolly, and sensibly as individuals. Their need for meaning is met by abstracting their ideas as their interface with objective reality.

Where it goes south occurs when they so group-live that the collectivist principle, that they cling to,  is  cemented into one ego and individual souls of followers no longer exist. That ism now is not a cause to worship but their ideology which they support in a most injudicious, totalistic way, as the absolute truth and final answer about everything and anything.

Before I forget, I wish to highlight that Stirner configures the whole world, and all conscious entities as psychological egoists. Either the self, the Unique, serves itself as its only cause and the only cause worth serving, or the self becomes selfless and serves another Egoist, be it God, the nation, the religion, the political party, the environmental movement, the Sultan, or nature itself. Either the Unique serves its own cause, or it serves the cause of another Ego, and it will do so enthusiastically, serving a cause that it does not really want to serve as the only cause worth serving.

Max Stirner And His Cause

Max Stirner wrote that all things were nothing to him for he set his cause on nothing but himself. He felt that each person, as an individual, should spend his life pursuing his subjective interests. Therefore, I feel free to define Stirner's brand of egoism as subjective. What this indicates is that for him self-interest is the primary human focus, and that mental effort for him is highly introspective and immediately experiential. All moments, of his psychological experiencing, throughout his life, whether internally applied, or externally operational and commercing in the world, would be centered upon his private concerns, his private interests.

By contrast, I would define the egoism of Ayn Rand as objective egoism. For her self-interest is not only a human's natural and primary focus (psychological egoism), it is morally preferable, or normative egoism. Her egoistic agent would enjoy and experience a rich inner mental life, but this lived experiencing of inner life would always be oriented to constant, reinforcing, lived interacting with, and the self's exporting one's intentions and aims upon the external world, knowable, known, and whose incoming sense data are directly or indirectly intelligible for the agent and perceiver. Stirner would take issue with her radical epistemic optimism that sense data can be rational explained, converted to abstract propositions about the world and our place in it. I appreciate Stirner's corrective epistemic pessimism as a needed corrective for Randian excessive epistemological enthusiasm, but I favor Rand's approach over Stirner.

Returning to Stirner's subjective egoism, his subjective materialism (I do not want to classify him as a subjective idealist because he posits that there is no God, and only the material world exists.) indicates that one lives for a few decades in whatever this world is, and one is to enjoy one's chosen interests and taken from the world and others out there, what contributes to one's enjoyment of what interests one. To worship or dedicate one's life to anything else was to worship a spook, a universal that did not even exist.

He has a point, but God is a cause, the rational principle of Logos, and God's essential nature is perfect or mostly perfect.

We cannot what each human requires--truth, love or spiritual comfort without serving some ism, but we do it as objective egoists, mostly idealistic, not as subjective, materialistic egoists like Stirner.

Still, he did humankind a great favor when he urged that we must not join the mob in worshiping and serving an ism, an empty abstraction.

Vicious Abstractions As Revealed By Max Stirner

 F.H. Bradley denounced  empirical facts as vicious abstraction, based on a false, realist ontology. The entire world is mental, he taught..

Max Stirner would likely denounce facts as vicious abstractions too. I would like to quote a paragraph by Stirner from his book, The Ego and Its Own, translated by Steven Byington, Page 7: "As I find myself back of things, and that as mind, so must I later find myself also back of thoughts--namely as their creator and owner (Eigner). In the time of spirits thoughts grew until they overtopped my head, whose offspring they yet were; they hovered about me and convulsed me like fever-an awful power. The thoughts had become corporeal on their own, were ghosts, such as God, Emperor, Pope, Fatherland, etc. If I destroy their corporeity, then I take them back into mine, and say: 'I alone am corporeal'. And now I take the world as what it is to me, as mine, as my property (Eigentum): I refer all to myself."

Bradley the Idealist believed in the Absolute, which may have been God for him. Stirner the atheist and subjective materialist dismissed all abstractions. (For Stirner, facts might exist but to objectify them as scientific atoms is an illusion or distortion of their realitv as illusory fantasy. )

My response to the quote above: Stirner insists that thoughts are his creations and do not exist in objective reality. To allow private thoughts to become public abstractions or universals that one worships is to enslave oneself to what is not real, an illusory ghost. He wants the reader to control his thoughts and to knock them down to size and keep them down to size, so to speak, so that the individual rules his ideas, not allowing them to be "universalized", and worshipped by him. Only the self is corporeal or real, and ideas do not exist. The self exists and the world exists, but the self acts upon and grabs the world as the property of the self, and all is referred back to the self.

I regard Stirner as a subjective egoist and I am an objective egoist, not quite as pure an objective egoist as Ayn Rand is.

Stirner is to skeptical, too amoral, too relativistic in his epistemology and ontology, but he provides the reader and future generations with two excellent pieces of advice. First, let not an abstraction become an ism or cause to be worshipped, or it enslaves and sickens all its adherents and damages society. Second, people become true believers as group-livers and then their fanatical devotion to their universal, now objectified into a creedal ism to show devotion towards. People must grab ideas and their personal ideas especially to consume them, and bring them down to size.

Eric Hoffer described  how true believers followed an ism, and Jordan Peterson reminds us that our need for meaning and religious stories that satisfy or help feed our spiritual cravings for a positive relationship with the divine can be perverted or distorted into an ism that we fanatically follow, and that sickens and harms all. The innate religious appetite is mutilated beyond recognition. Our cause, our ism, must never be what we worship.

We need control it, not allow it to control us Now, unlike Stirner, I go with Dennis Prager that espouses that there are objective, universal moral truths, and spiritual verities. We may or may not be that certain about these ultimate propositions as Prager insists, but we know enough to lean towards Prager's ontology and epistemology and away from Stirner's bleak epistemology and ontology, but there is no denying that Stirner providers a corrective admonishment to believers that are drifting over into true believership.

I do not know the ultimate truth, but I feel I can describe it with a degree of high probable certainty. if I am wrong and we can only know objective reality as epistemic pessimist Stirner posits, then let me recognize the truth of that state. We cannot live well, prosper, be good or serve God or save our souls unless we embrace the truth as wholly as we may. If that essence is that there is no truth to be had or that it is not knowable, then that is acceptable. I love the truth, and seek the truth, wherever it takes me, pleasing or unsettling as the journey may be.

I will now quote that same paragraph from Wolfi Landsreicher's translation of Max Stirner's The Unique and Its Property (The Ego And Its Own): "As I find myself behind things, that is, as mind,, so I must later also find myself behind thoughts, namely as their creator and owner. In the time of mind, thoughts grew in me until they were over my head, though they were its offspring; they hovered about me and shook me like the fever dreams, a horrifying power. The thoughts had become embodied for themselves, were ghosts, such as God, emperor, pope, fatherland, etc. If I destroy their embodiment, then I take them back into my own, and say: 'I alone am embodied.' And now I take world as what it is to me, as mine, as my property: I related everything to myself."

Stirner introspects and concludes that when he gets back of worldly facts (maya) and his thoughts about these facts or other issues in consciousness, are spooks that do not exist, but are mental fabrications made up and shared with the world--or not--and he is their creator and owner. Thoughts now embodied in the world become a mass fantasy, like emperor, pope or fatherland that deceives, mind-controls and enslaves millions of devoted followers of this empty, meaningless creed. Only the private self exists and the world out there and its objects are his property.

I am an essentialist more than an anti-essentialist, so I believe that universals are real, and perhaps our ideas or just pale copies of universal forms. Ideas and laws and the Word come from God, but Stirner is wise in complaining that these abstractions must not be isms that we idolize and bow down to.

 

To Rationalize Failure

 Dennis Prager is a genius intellectually. He is also a good, truly good man, a man of deep piety and wisdom. He is correct in his views most of the time, as far as I can tell.

To paraphrase him, with the right values, there is no holding a people, their culture, their nation back. With the wrong values, there is no hope for people. Postmodernism, atheism, that people do not recognize that they are engaging in devil worship, groupism, socialism, and their collectivist ideology have all contributed to the downfall of Leftist strongholds in Chicago, Los Angeles, Haiti, Venezuela and Mexico. 

There must be law and order, first off so gangs do not run society. Politicians, the police, the administrative state and judges must be honest. 

The people need a new set of values. They need to individual-live and maverize. As maverizers, a presupposition is that each private citizen is sovereign and runs the show alongside other citizens. They refuse to live in slavery, lawlessness, a totalitarian or stratified society. Their motto will be: give all of us liberty or give all of us death, and no thug or Gestapo enforcers can dictate otherwise.

They, the people, also need God in their lives. With Mavellonialist values, American values, Modern Values and their local culture, customs and traditions blended in, each nation, each city, each citizen need live in poverty, tyranny, deprivation, hunger and want no more.

Sunday, October 23, 2022

 The articles in the StarTribune usually drive me crazy and this article on Page E12 of the Variety Section was no exception. Reporter Rachel Hutton wrote an article titled "Taking Aim At Gun Culture--A Minneapolis firearm instructor shoots down myths about weapons and power--and his own toxic masculinity."

She interviews burly gun instructor Mick Sharpe. She writes: "But on a Sunday morning, above a south Minneapolis storefront, Sharpe is preaching. Under a Black Lives Matter and rainbow pride flag, the 47-year-old firearms instructor unleashes aphorisms by the round:

'Your goal is not to win a fight. It is to realize a fight might happen and not be there when it does.'

'We don't shoot to kill. We shoot to live.'

My response: one of the Dorr brothers from MGR, my heroes, would not have a Black Lives Matter or rainbow coalition flag in their office. Sharpe is a legitimate gun instructor, but his politics are decidedly not conservative. He is a Leftie all the way through.

His aphorisms strike me as wise and true. Guns are for self-defense and one is to avoid trouble if at all possible.

Hutton continues: "'Gun culture sucks' is not among the things you would expect to hear at a carry permit class. But Sharpe defies expectations--as do many of today's new gun owners."

My response: Neither MGR, the NRA or other gun rights groups have any issue with women, people of color or other groups owning or carrying guns. We all believe and support the rights of any law-abiding American to enjoy and exercise her 2A rights.

As for Sharpe's remark that gun culture sucks, he is entitled to his opinion, even though he is totally wrong. Our gun culture does not suck, but it a glorious tradition. Never has a civilian population been so well-armed to enjoy their naturally rights and constitutional rights to keep and bear arms. It is a magnificent tradition that has kept big government in this country from turning tyrannical--up to now.

Hutton continues: "About 400,000 Minnesota civilians now hold a valid carry permit, triple the number from a decade ago. Roughly 40% of Americans lives in a home with a gun."

My response: These figures seem accurate and are great news. All civilians that are law 

abiding should be armed.

Deeper in the article, Hutton continues: "Though Sharpe now embodies a tough guy aesthetic, he rails against an industry that markets Ar-15-style rifles as a prereq for one 'man card' and what he describes as the 'angry murder fantasy crap' that some firearms enthusiasts espouse, His efforts to take the tox masculinity out of gun culture are, in a sense, personal--a way to atone for his past as a self-described 'toxic man.'

'Guns can be considered a useful tool, but they can also be a tool of mayhem and destruction,' Sharpe said. 'And guys like me created the culture that allowed that to happen. So guys like me have to be the ones to fix it.'"

My response: I will not deny that there are people that regard gun ownership as proof of their masculinity, but most guns owners I know like and want guns for sporting, target shoot, hunting, self-defense against tyrannical government, criminals, mobs, and crazies shooting up people in restaurants and churches.

These gun owners have usually been conservative, rural white males but the new people getting into gun ownership are diverse and that is laudable. Males are not toxic, and the gun culture is not toxic. These are just stereotypical tropes and generalizations,  intentionally hurled at white males, conservatives and gun owners by the toxic Left. There is no merit in these demonizing stereotypes about white male gun owners, and we reject wholeheartedly any and every attempt by the haters of guns, conservatives, whites, males, and rural people to define who and what we are and think.

Guns, in the hands of sane and law-abiding, decent, moral American civilians make us peaceful, civilized and law abiders. 

Guns are a tool and a useful tool that can be deadly if wielded by gang members, criminals, the insane or federal police out to enslave disarmed masses. These minority gun owners, many illegally doing so, are the toxic gun culture. The high murder rate and high crime rate today is not caused by conservative white males and everyone no it.

We need 90% of American households to have guns, and we need to teach ethics so people know how and when to use a gun or not. Technical skill in weapons training is a plus too.

Sharpe warns those attending his carry permit class to use less lethal weapons whenever possible, to retreat and deescalate whenever one can. Hutton seems to think this is part of Sharpe's effort to make gun culture less aggressive, toxic,and confrontational, but the two firearms instructors that I have had talked the same as Sharpe's did and most of the class students were white males. Hutton seems to characterize the "toxic male' gun culture as one that is shoot first and ask questions later, but it does not exist. Almost no one I know thinks remotely like that. I am deep into the gun culture, and I see skilled ethical, patriotic gun-wielders everywhere. She needs to spend a weekend with my family and me at the gun ranger at Walker.

Handling a gun--let alone discharging a firearm to wound or kill someone--is an action that can lead to arrest, even jail time.

The more one knows about guns and the law, the more careful and hesitant one becomes to use one. Most males know this The USCCA is training thousands of gun owners on knowing their rights and legal obligations while carrying a firearm. I carry a million-dollar liability policy on myself in case something goes wrong. A liberal county DA in Minnesota would love to throw the book at me if I got in gun trouble.

Hutton continues: "Sharpe would like to see carry permit-seekers receive 16 hours of classroom and range training, funded by a tax on firearm purchases, and perhaps submit to a psychiatric evaluation boy a provider of their choosing. He finds Minnesota's current requirements too lax, 'like throwing the keys to a Ferrari to a 16-year-old kid."

My response: We gun rights advocates will allow no additional extensions of classroom mandated training, no taxes on firearms, and no psychiatric evaluations mandated for all gun buyers. We have learned over the last 70 years that Leftists hate liberty, constitutional rights, gun rights and the free exercise of these rights by the private citizens. Government is inherently evil and big government is a monster. We dare not allow government to control every aspect of our lives, let alone the gun right. Leftists are fanatics, and have but one aim: to confiscate, register gun owners, and then take away all guns from private citizens. They lie all the time. They promise that their incrementally increased throttling of and regulation of the citizens’ 2A rights is not ominous or about confiscation but is only common sense, and reasonable.  There will be no compromising with these totalistic gun confiscationists disguising their Marxist, totalitarian agenda as Fabian incrementalism.

Sharpe is too apologetic and too confessional, and Hutton seems to demand that he be that way to meet her preconception of white men as toxic, violent brutes and thugs that pick on women, children, the environment, and minorities. He seems not to grasp that he is being used by her. I reject all of this discriminatory Leftist stereotyping of white males as false and slanderous.

One final quote from her: "Sharpe, in some ways, straddles both cultures. He looks like he might belong to the tough-guy, guns-make-me-powerful cohort he initially joined and he clearly understands that mentality--because he once had it."

My response: most men I know do regard owning guns and something manly and empowering, but it is not a theatrical guns-make-me-a-tough-powerful-guys as it is guns are a tool of preserving one's safety and liberty in a violent world. Competence, skill, morality, patriotism, home-defense and moral self-restraints are what gun owners manifest, not the weird, insecure strutting, cowboy image that Hutton envisions and is a figment of her suspicious, erroneous imagination.

Sharpe may look like a tough guy, but his gun culture is not my gun culture, and his gun culture will lead to the government having all the guns, and Americans have no guns. None of these officials can be trusted even a little bit. 

Jordan Peterson, if I may paraphrase him, defines a good man is someone that is dangerous (or conceivably so) but virtuous. He needs to be gentle with women, children, and pets, while retaining his warrior side enough to fight to defend his family and country should the need arise.

This good man, the average gun owner, refuses to be abused by anyone, by evil sadists of any kind. He is virtuous and self-controlled; he is powerful, armed, but self-restraining and civilized. He will not hurt others, and this is virtuous masculinity, typical of male gun owners, that people like Hutton need to acknowledge as white males as they actually are, not some incel/red-pilled villains haunting the nightmare imaginings of Lefties.

We should dig into the psyche of Hutton and all of the various rainbow groups that she alludes to in her article. Let us dig into their imperfections, their frailties, their toxicity. If a Lefty is for Big Government and big government regulating firearms, that view is evil, because people are born evil, and those fortunate enough to be part of the elite running any society, will be corrupted and turn abusive and oppressive of the masses their rule. Centralized power always corrupts those wielding it. Leftists eagerly work to bring about a totalitarian regime in America that enslaves all reduced to serfdom in stifling hierarchies.

Leftists tell and live many lies, including that Big Government is a benevolent force and that the elite and Party running the totalitarian state are implicitly trustworthy, and will do what is best for the masses they rule. This vicious Big Lie is one the Marxists truly believe.

Gun onwers, especially white male, rural, conservative ones, admire political freedom, gun rights and they favor constitutional republicanism and constitutional guarantees that they can keep and bear arms as private individual citizens.

These individual citizens are alert and principled, and will not stomach being suppressed and oppressed by Big Government, Big Business, Big Church, Big Military, Big Universities to rule over them and confiscate their guns, their liberty and their rights. In unique America the people are well-armed and proud, out to defend America and our fine way of life. That is the gun culture that Hutton needs to recognize whether she accepts it or not.

I refute her version of what gun culture should look like. It is obvious that the Left and Right are polarized and divided as bad or worse than before the civil war. But we are opposed to their version of gun culture and American culture in general, but our war is verbal and nonviolent. I am convinced that Leftists taking aim at our gun culture and our overall culture mean to take us out. Whites, males, Christians, conservatives, veterans, patriots, and gun lovers are to be reduced to bondage, slavery and reversely discriminated against as the new undesirables in a new caste system. It will not be a classless society, and those in the bottom caste could very well end up in newly constructed gulags here, or even sent to extermination camps. Our enemies hate us totally, and their active capacity to kill, maim, destroy and overthrow is without any bottom for how radical they can and will act. These are real scary people.

They aim to take us out, but we do not and will not work to take them out. We will loudly, proudly, willfully organize to defeat them at the ballot box, and to get them out of power and keep them out of power at every level of government across the land. If they are not violent, terroristic, or rioting, they are to be left strictly alone to swim in their own fantasies. We must not let them or their allies at the pulpit, in Academia, in legacy media, in Big Tech or Hollywood brainwash us any longer with their dark, twisted narrative about America.

Sharpe may look like a macho tough white male, but he is regarded at an ex-toxic white male that at least repented but is still being held to account for his past toxic sins. Other white males have not even admitted to their oppression, violence, and toxicity so they are beyond redemption.

White males are not perfect, and none of God's children are, but white males, gun-owners are not, for the most part, are seemly, logical, lawful, peaceful, civilized, and responsible so they should continue as Americans to enjoy their 2A rights to have and bear arms as individual citizens without government interference or direction.

Just Say No

 Let no one misuse you. You deserve better than that--this is the essence of self-love, not selfish self-concern.

Natural Rights

 Here is what Prager U is offering tonight on Facebook: "Your rights come from God, not men. If rights are endowed by men, men can deprive you of them."

I do not know who is the original speaker or writer of these wonderful, true words, but our rights do come from God, so they cannot be taken away from us, so they are unalienable, though secular despots decree that such rights are taken away regularly in tyrannical societies.

Egoist Statement

 If I were to write out the Golden Rule as an egoist anthem, it would go like this: You are to abuse others, just as you allow none to abuse you.

Last Gasp

 One of the indications, that the Democrats are soft-tyranny Marxists bent on remaking America in their image, has been their consistent, militant eagerness and willingness to get as far as they can get while in power.

Trump was subpoenaed this week to appear under oath before the January 6th committee. Now the 2020 election was stolen, and Trump never has done anything wrong or illegal--that I know of--but these fanatical ideologues, these Leftist true believers in bringing Communism to America, are in cahoots with the Biden DOJ and its federal police powers to imprison Trump illegally for being their loyal opposition. They want to get him under oath to "perjure" himself so they can send him to jail.

They are sentencing Steve Bannon to prison for 4 months for not appearing before this kangaroo court committee. These people are rotten clean through and mean business. They are wicked, dishonest, and shameless. They are on the march to amass absolute power over all the people and all their enemies.

Under a dictatorship, there is one system of justice for party loyalists and another for the public and especially the opposition to be imprisoned, silenced, and suppressed.

These Democratic representatives and Liz Cheney know that if--and likely they will--the Republicans under McCarthy take back the House in 2 weeks that, in January, this committee will be dissolved and none of their illegal crap will amount to anything

Still, with just a few weeks or months left in power, realizing that everything they “accomplished” is soon to be abrogated, they push against their political opponents as hard as they can, as long as they can, while still in power to spread the cause of tyranny as far as they can. Such people are fanatical, utterly ruthless, and extremely dangerous. They should be in charge of nothing, ever.

They and their Deep State cronies have unjustly and illegally hounded and defamed the former President for 6 years. Trump may not realize how close to being jailed he could be for the steady, fraudulent, unprecedented, and constant attacks against his supporters and him. All should be alarmed and outraged that his home illegally invaded by heavily armed federal police.

Th Left and the Democrats are scheming tirelessly to take America as close to that dictatorship as they can, and they are getting the people used to living under tyranny so when they return to office, they can make the softy tyranny official and the law of the land, on their way to hard tyranny and totalitarianism as a permanent political reality here. They are eager to install their Marxist strongman here. They lust after the ruination of America, humanity's last best hope.

Their postmodernist/Marxist/Envirostatist ideology is one that these true believers would gladly die for and their ferocious willingness to advance their cause, each and every time, in each and every political cycle, is how we got to the point of soft Leftist tyranny being our political regime.

In this light what the Liz Cheney did in subpoenaing Trump makes total sense.

They want power and suffering. These people lie about everything, and their vicious and cruelty is monstrous. They are not for the downtrodden. They are not compassionate and for justice for the underdogs.

Raw power over others is their addiction, their sole and only ambition. All other claims are covers for this naked power grab. And they are cunning and very successful at accruing power to themselves. They must be met with legal, nonviolent, fierce, sustained, principled conservative resistance if we are to shave our country and make it great again.

What RINOS, vacillators and fence-straddlers do not comprehend is how willful, resolved, determined and pugnacious are fanatics pushing forward their mass movement of interest. It is their only reason for living and there are dead serious about expanding their dominion by any means, fair or foul to enslave all under their fell cause.

Republicans never fight have as hard as Democrats do, and we willingness to push their agenda relentlessly without wavering, without regard to personal loss or sacrifice is impressive. Their goal is not impressive, but their attack strategy is. They are not so strong as the rest of Americans, are too decent, temperate, willing to coexist with those they disagree with, without any desire to control dissenting neighbors. The rest of us are too weak.

We need to be fighters, assertive, even militant where necessary to keep fanatics and fascists of all stripes at bay. They announce that they mean to do harm, they believe they are right in bringing harm to all, and they will bring that harm if empowered and franchised. We must not let them run things, at great cost if need be.

 

 

 

Up At The Cabin

 On October 15th, I drove into Park Rapids to run a few errands, and offload some junk at the county dump.

I picked up an early edition of the StarTribune early Sunday edition so that we would have a paper to enjoy after lunch that afternoon.

I read an editorial that got my blood boiling. This article, under Opinion Exchange, was from Page A7 of the early Sunday October 16, 2022 newspaper. Its title was: "Lessons From LA--Supremacy isn't just for white people anymore. Some see being able to oppress as aspirational."

The article is from the New York Times by Charles M Blow. He is a smart, educated black journalist of some prominence. He also is a Leftist true believer, which means what he writes is false, slanted, prejudiced and to be discredited.

I want to lay out a compare-contrast methodology to differentiate between his approach and my approach to how one would write and read and react to such an article as the one that he wrote.

My first axiom: People are born wicked.

Blow's first axiom: People are born good or neutral, to tormented and twisted by hostile social forces, beyond their control, that work on them.

My second axiom: The individual is good and selfishness or self-interest is the primary good.

Blow's second axiom: The collective is good and selflessness and service to humanity are how one fulfills one's destiny.

My third axiom: All are born evil or racist and prejudiced against others from other faiths, ethnic, national, or racial backgrounds. What we are is all good and what they, the outsiders, the strangers, the enemies, is all bad. 

Blow's third axiom: Only whites are racist because they have power. Those with brown skin or that are poor cannot be racist. Whites must apologize and listen to be lectured to lose their unconscious residual racism.

My fourth axiom is that racism is universal and is part of our altruist, collectivist worldview. We are born tribal and always compete with and war against rival groups. The only cure for racism is for all to admit openly that they are naturally racist, and then live as individuals to respect and to cooperate with others as individuals, and then most can do their own thing without tearing society apart.

My fifth axiom: The West and its ideas are not perfect, but it is fundamentally just and is the best value system that the world has to offer and should be blended with all other rival value systems to improve them. The West, with its optimism, scientism, love of reason, individualism, capitalism, objectivity, Christianity and Greek philosophy, its great books, its materialism, its technology, its democratic and republican traditions--all of these wondrous gifts to humanity need to be restored, made great again, further researched and added to, but to serve as a foundation for the high culture of the future world of Mavellonialists.

Blow's fifth axiom: there is nothing special about the West and its values. Indeed, it may be the most inequitable, unjust system, racist, sexist, homophobic, class-conscious society that the world has ever been introduced. It is so rotten that it must be cast aside and replaced wholesale.

My sixth axiom is best expressed by Jordan Peterson. If I am state his view in my own words, Jordan espouses that Western, male-flavored culture is not deeply toxic, unjust, or harmful. It is not a patriarchy, and women are equal to men. Rather it is healthy, beneficial, liberating, empowering and progressive. It Enlightenment/modernst presupposition is that European culture with its emphasis on reason and individualism helps people cooperate, elevate each other and the community, and share power and resources for the enrichment of all.

Blow's sixth axiom: those adhering to the postmodernist/Marxist/Envirostatist view of the world believe that to exist is to endeavor to gather as much wealth and power to oneself and one's group at the expense of vying, competing individuals and groups. This struggle is endless and inevitable.

Men, Westerners and white heterosexual males have hoarded wealth and power for hundreds of years, and they day is over, so now it is time for an intersectionally presented host of rival groups to gain ascendancy and turn the tables on their former and current oppressors in the name of restoring justice to society, and to right the ship of state and culture.

My seventh axiom is the doctrine of essentialism. I mean by this that human nature is fixed more than it is malleable. We suffer from original sin. We are determined more than we exercise free will. We are more beast than angels. We are herd creatures. We are selfless more than we are selfish. We have binary gender assignments at birth. We are born depraved. We are emotional more than we are logical. We are selfish or selfless more than we are selfish/self-interested and generous to others and ourselves.

We are not socially constructed or determined by whatever cultural, generational and forces that we grew up in. 

We require moral training to know how to live, to form a good moral character to keep us out of trouble. By strengthening our will and our reasoning, and our willingness to think for ourselves, our implicit free will manifest itself and flourishes into our consciousness.

The Western tradition with its Greek and Judeo-Christian heritage, along with our cultural and scientific blessings gleaned from the Modern Age, is very effective in helping people live civilized lives, and we cannot have Marxist totalitarian types blowing it to smithereens to replace it with their hellish dystopia.

Blow's seventh axiom: human nature is plastic and infinitely malleable. We are products of the environmental situations out of which we arise. Our values, our gender selection, our outlook is all contingent upon the groups form which we were formed.

 

On 10/22/22 I read Scott Hogenson's column in Townhall, and he sagely averred that love of God, family and country stand in the way of totalitarians and their political systems.

This leads to my eight point—not a axiom really:  Leftist or American Marxists want government to be worshipped by Americans, and for a strongman running the federal government to utterly control peoples' lives. They detest love of God, family and country, all themes that I preach and love.

Dennis Prager repeats often that love of the truth is not a Left-wing value. I agree. I do not if Blow is mistaken or just believes lies that he offers as factual. 

Lying is a left-wing value because as true believers, pushing ahead their postmodernist/Marxist mass movement, their whole ideology, world view is a l massive web of lies that they believe. They are without morals so they would lie, false promise, betray to win. Winning, spreading the cause, and acquiring more power--these are what they value.

With this in mind, let me go through his article.

Lessons from LA--as mixed up and poorly run as LA and California are, who would want to take lessons from them on anything?

Then the title: Supremacy is 't just for white people anymore. That is a vicious lie. Since the 60s or earlier even, white supremacy has not been a reality for a desire for white people. It was the British and Americans that worked to end slavery, and Americans fought a civil war to end it.

Blow writes: "It is a theory that worries me and that I have written about with the browning of America, white supremacy could simply be replaced--or buffeted by--a form of 'lite' supremacy, in which fairer-skin people perpetuate a modified anti-Blackness rather than eliminating it."

My response: "First, of all his theory of existing white supremacy is false and misleading. White supremacy does not exist. If non-white but lite-skinned minorities in LA or wherever are practicing a form of ethnic supremacy, as soon as they amass political power, they did not inherit it or learn it from whites. They learned from their woke-CRT peers and trainers, and they exhibit it due to natural racism and prejudice against others of any other group affiliation. Racism cannot be eliminated for it is natural, but by training people to be Mavellonialists and egoists, we can elevate individual consciousness and its values that used fair, equal, just, courteous, peaceful, cooperative, and tolerant intermingling with people of all other groups. So trained, people will learn to be non-racist and non-groupist sufficient to build social cohesion, comity and sustainability.

As blacks become more and more maverized in America, they will be so powerful, competent, confident, and resilient that any effort by anyone to discriminate against them will fail as they easily brush it aside. The Left's obsession with race and group does not eliminate racism but makes it far worse for they insist that race and group affiliation define each person, and that is tragic and false. Your skin color and group connections are interesting and informative, and a source of real pride, but it is what you do with your life as an individuator serving the Divine Couple (That greatest adventure of your life is what is interesting, informative, and self-authored and self-willed.) as individualists should be doing, that is how you amount to something fine, and build a great life for yourself and your people.

Blow wants America to be less white in the future. And why is that desirable? That sounds racist to me. I have long argued that the CRT mindset is cover for a seething, ugly, vicious reverse racism against whites that will lead to revenge attacks on whites, even genocide one day. We whites need to stay armed, loud, heard and on the political stage, feisty and unapologetic, and let no one define us in terms of our racial views. We are not racist. We are good people just fine as we are. We need to move into the future where all, white or non-white, are individuators, where group and racial status are not that important, where we are a color-blind people and the content of one's character, not the color of one's skin is what counts.

 The way of the race-baiters will lead to racial and civil war, and that is what they actually desire.

 

Social Creatures

 That is what we are, social creatures. This condition is our greatest comfort and our greatest vulnerability.

My radical individualism is not against our enjoyment of being social creatures, but this value system suggests that we spend more time alone than with others, and that individual-living is proper, fulfilling, and what God wants us to do as mature, adult human beings.

I have known for decades that we are born wicked, that Satan exists, and that he rules this world. Far and away his most effective tool for gaining control of people and keeping sway over them is to threaten to withhold social rank and connections to those that dissents from living by his wicked ways, as ordered by him to do.

People live to belong, to be popular, to enjoy social rank as joiners and insiders ever on the make to enhance their social standing. They will do most anything to get there and stay there.

This is well-known by the children of darkness and their master: threaten most people with being cast out of the group with complete isolation and decline of social standing, unless they continue to mouth the party line, and most people will embrace sin and desert the few individualist children of light, to curry favor with worldly elite practitioners of sinful ways..

The Alignment

 Goodness is more individual and rational, and evil is more tribal and passionate. Good people are sensible and expect that choice is personal and voluntary. Bad people are often foolish, fanatical, intolerant, demanding conformity and uniform from others.

Keep Praying

 At times our prayers do not seem to be answered, and no humans knows why. All we can do is keep praying, and ask God and the Good Spirits for their blessings, advice, guidance and protection. Eventually we will get an answer, whether it is the one we prayed for or not.

We Need Science, Materialism, Worldliness and Secularism

This is right from the lips of the Divine Couple to our ears--if we would but listen: the Good Couple admire, enjoy, and encourage human culture to be widened and deepened by the presence of capitalism, materialism, physicalism, scientism, worldliness and secularism. 

Now the mainstay of a reformed earthly culture would be one where holiness, otherworldliness, immaterialism, faith, prayer, and miracles are very prominent in the lives of the people.

Evil is fanaticism, totalism, one-dimensionality. There can be where there is too much emphasis on religion--say in a theocracy.

Dennis Prager is really down on secularism now, but I have to disagree with this fine man, a bit. We need secularism and worldliness to keep our faith healthy and multifaceted.

The Fabian Revoutionaries

 

 

 Stephen Hicks, in his warnings about the Marxist roots of postmodernist undermining of America, and Mark Levin's dire shouting in American Marxism that the revolutionaries are overthrowing America, have awakened us to the fact that the postructuralist/neo-Marxist mass movement now on aggressive march across America must be stopped cold.

One way to restore America and make it great again is to remember how Eric Hoffer in The True Believer suggested how citizens being subjected to mass media and federal BIG LYING, indoctrination brainwashing and gaslighting techniques and campaigns,  citizens can be sustained to withstand the separating them from their government, values and culture so they will submit willingly even enthusiastically to the Great Reset.

Here is what biographer Tom Shactman wrote of Hoffer in Schactman’s biography on Hoffer, Page 76 and 77 (Shactman above noted that true believers had become deracinated and willing to join any passing mass movement, and Hoffer was trying to say mass movements sometimes are reformative not bad and revolutionary under a humane leader like Lincoln. Hoffer in the following quotes suggests how to strengthen citizens against mass movement pressures and this is relevant today for our citizens to push back against the current Marxist/postmodernist mass movement out to destroy and end America.): "Hoffer stressed that a democratic society must be home to both the majority who were content with the present--the 'well-adjusted' autonomous individuals who in a crisis would band together and leap to defend their society--and to the leavening of malcontents, the incipient true believers who were needed to point up society's faults. He also suggested how an individual could avoid becoming a true believer: through cultivating self-confidence, pride in one's skills, a sense of individuality, and "a dispassionate attitude towards the world.' He also suggested that groups such as the best unions could take collective actions that bred 'stability and permanence,' thereby preventing their society from succumbing to the lures of true believership."

We want American citizens to be individuator/anarchist supercitizens that realize that inherently evil elites--like all people are wicked--are inherently attracted to amassing power to themselves as they oppress, abuse, tyrannize and exploit the masses under their thumbs. We need skeptical, optimistic powerful, logical, engaged, fearless citizens to run society and give their bosses their marching orders.

Hoffer's suggestions in the quote above provide us with idea for how the average supercitizen to ward off becoming a true believer.

We want each supercitizen to know and communicate that elitism is preferred, but only each maverizer developing his mind and skills in an excellent way. 

Elites as holders of power and wealth are undesirable and socially dysfunctional.

Failure

 Tom Schactman, an Eric Hoffer biographer, on Page 76 of his biography about Hoffer (American Iconoclast The Life and Times of Eric Hoffer) wrote that: " Hoffer's exaggeration quotient was more obvious in such lines as, 'Failure in the management of practical affairs seem to be a qualification for success in the management of public affairs . . .'"

I have two reactions. I have very mixed feelings about Shactman. I do not trust him completely, He understands Hoffer to some degree, and to some degree I dislikes him and does not understand him. He admires Hoffer, but in part disapproves of him.  I sense that Shactman thinks Hoffer is racist, or not a good man, not as wise or truthful or original as he claims. I deny all these assumed accusations of Hoffer's character and nobility. Shactman misconstrues Hoffer's exaggerating as lying and self-indulgent ranting, and it is neither. Part of what seemed to offend Shactman about Hoffer may have been Shactman's recoiling against Hoffer's extroverted, sometimes loudmouthed, bombastic expression of opinion.

Hoffer exaggerates (not in truth content) but his exaggeration is more a rhetorical device to drive home the point that he is making, for the sheer artistic expression, and somehow Hoffer moderate ontology requires paradox (expressed as exaggeration) to capture how complex life is.

My second reaction is to pinpoint Shactman's own example of Hoffer's distorting the truth or exaggerating: "Failure in the management of practical affairs seem to be the qualification for success in the management of public affairs."

Dennis Prager and many modern conservatives decry public experts (Well-credentialed and specialized so everyone assumes they are the educated elite to run every aspect of society, allowing citizens increasingly little freedom to manage their own affairs in their own bumbling, amateurish way.)--public employees and their consultants--for wrecking everything they touch.

Somehow their failure or lack of experience, skill, competence, and success in practical matters and in the world of business makes them fit to run society. Common sense would seem to indicate that if one cannot even run one's own affairs well, that should be the red flag for one's inability and unworthiness to run society. It is not: these fools are running society into the ground through their control, operating and directing the public institutions. They are stupid, arrogant, dishonest, mean, evil and arrogant. 

That is the gist of what Hoffer was describing above with his exaggerative tone, words, and prose.

 

Genesis 41: 37-40

 Joseph brilliant and accurate interpretation of Pharaoh's dream so impressed Pharaoh that the latter selected and promoted this Hebrew slave to run the entire kingdom on the Pharaoh's name, because he so trusted him. Joseph, with God's favor upon him, would do very well in the world as a blessing from God because Joseph was such a fine and upright young man. His remarkable promotion and drastic improvement in his lot does indicate that all things are possible with God.

Read this quote from The American Family Bible: "This advice pleased Pharaoh and all his officials. 'Could we find another like him,' Pharaoh asked his officials, ' a man so endowed with the spirit of God?' So Pharaoh said to Joseph, "Since God has made all this known to you, no one can be as wise, and discerning as you are. You shall be in charge of my palace and all my people shall dart at your command. Only in respect to the throne shall I outrank you."

Let me share the same quote from the Holy Bible (KJV): "And the thing was good in the eyes of the Pharaoh, and in the eyes of all his servants. And Pharaoh said unto his servants, Can we find such a one as this is, a man in who the spirit of God is? And Pharaoh said unto Joseph, Forasmuch as God has showed thee all this, there is none so discreet and wise as thou art. Thou shall be over my house, and according unto thy word, my people shall be ruled: only in the throne shall I be greater than thou."

May you go forth in life endowed with the spirit of God, a bit like the great Joseph, so that fine things will come your way.

Genesis 41: 14-16

 Pharoah in ancient Egypt was troubled by rich, vivid, disturbing dreams and all the summoned sages and magicians of Egypt could not interpret his dreams. So as was suggested, it was mentioned that Joseph the imprisoned Hebrew youth could interpret dreams. Let me quote the The New American Bible: "Pharoah therefore had Joseph summoned, and they hurriedly brought him from the dungeon. After he shaved and changed his clothes, he came into Pharaoh's presence. Pharaoh then said to him: 'I had certain dreams that no one interpret.  But I hear it said of you that the moment you are told a dream you can interpret it. 'It is not I,' Joseph replied to Pharaoh, 'but God who will give Pharaoh the right answer.'"

Joseph is right with God, and totally honest, so he gives God the credit for interpreting dreams accurately because God is truth, so God always has the right answer or interpretation. To Joseph's credit he realized that and immediately gave credit to where it was due -with Yahweh--in public. May you rely on God for detecting the best solutions, and then praise God openly as the source of your wise choice.

Now, here is that same quote from the Holy Bible (KJV): "Then Pharaoh sent and called Joseph, and they brought him hastily out of the dungeon: and he shaved himself, and changed his raiment, and came in unto Pharaoh. And Pharaoh said unto Joseph, I have dreamed a dream, and there is none that can interpret it: and I have heard say of thee, that thou canst understand a dream to interpret it.  And Joseph answered Pharaoh saying, It is not in me: God shall give Pharaoh an answer of peace.'"

Genesis 40:8

 Joseph was in prison in Egypt when two imprisoned court officials had dreams that no one could interpret. Here Joseph's answer to them, from The New American Bible: " . . . They answered him, 'We have had dreams, but there is no one to interpret them for us.' Joseph said to them, 'Surely, interpretation comes from God. Please tell the dreams to me.'"

God can interpret dreams because God is the source of objective truth, and his preferred human contact, Joseph, is blessed for his faithfulness, piety and probity, with unique insight into meaning apprehension for dreams and likely discovering patterns of any kind.

Here is that quote from the Holy Bible (KJV): "And they said unto him, We have dreamed a dream, and there is no interpreter of it. And Joseph said unto them, Do not interpretations belong to God? tell me them, I pray you."

RULE XII

 On Page 355 of his book, BEYOND ORDER 12 MORE RULES FOR LIFE, Jordan Peterson lays out this rule: "Be grateful in spite of your suffering."

He goes on: "However, even though I regard the inevitability of suffering and its exaggeration by malevolence as unshakable existential truths, I believe even more deeply that people have the ability to transcend their suffering, psychologically and practically, and to constrain their malevolence, as well as the evils that characterize the social and natural worlds.

Human beings have the capacity to courageously confront their suffering--to transcend it psychologically, as well as to ameliorate it practically."

Jordan like me is not an easy optimist, but he is an optimist when the smoke has cleared. We can be grateful to be alive, and to be given life by God, and an opportunity, despite our challenges and afflictions, to improve our lot, and make the world a little better place, to assist the Good Spirts in making earth just a bit more heavenly.