The Right System

 

Ethicist Dennis Prager wisely cautions that without values, especially the right values like the Ten Commandments and Biblical teachings, humans will not live in a civil, peaceful society.

 

I argue that rational egoism, that utilized by the self-generated anarchist-indiviudator, would complement and support Judeo-Christian and Western values.

 

Now, without intending to contradict myself, and I do not believe that I do, I would like to offer the reader some warning examples of how these “right” value systems can degenerate into the “wrong” value system.

 

As usual, I start with certain moral presuppositions meant to inform and guide us in selecting, shaping, and implementing our finished ethical system.

 

First, any ethical system adopted must increase love in the universe as a result of being practiced: love of God, love of the self and the love of others are some important ways that love can be produced and disseminated resulting from being good and doing good.

 

Second, the moderate stance selected must be slightly one polarity more than its opposite polarity, whether this opposition is constituted by contradictory or contrary opposites.

 

Third, bad means to a just end always corrupts and transforms good values into bad values. When force, terror, tyrannical threats, peer pressure, federal punishment, or forced obedience impelled on the masses by thugs armed with swords, guns or batons, the cure is worse than the disease, no matter the noble end used to justify such hateful means. If someone is to accept one ethical system, it must be wholly their choice, not forced upon them by pressure, trickery, bribes or deception.

 

Fourth, objective moral truths are the ones its proselytizer may claim to be championing, and he may be utterly correct (doubtful) or mostly correct (more likely), but he must not worship his valued ethical abstraction as his one true cause, or his objective moral truth as been degraded and perverted into an obsession, and his totalistic, absolutistic support for it, favoring it at any price, and to be forcibly spread by any means necessary and successful. Once the champion of any ethical system has declined into true believing that he has all the answers, his cause is demonic, and this dangerous moral monster serves the Evil Spirits.

 

Fifth, if the agent group-lives, if he is emotionally and passionately in favor of his cause, not calm, dispassionate and rational about it, his fanaticism will be his moral stance, and that is a bad ethical system. It trumps all other moral considerations.

 

Sixth, if the moral advocate is a proponent of living in hierarchies of one or several interlocking kinds, he is a cog in the machine, no matter what level of stratification he resides at within the institution. This ‘bureaucrat”, suffers from reduced self-esteem, and this is equivalent to admitting that he is filled with self-hatred. Evil is altruism, low self-esteem, self-loathing. The Good is high self-esteem, self-love, egoism, and self-appreciation.

 

Only those that exist as living angels, anarchist-individuator supercitizens, in a capitalistic, constitutional republic, are raised and operate as adults in a environmental, institutional, social and legal ambience that is conducive to them loving themselves and others (this is being good and spreading goodness), and reducing hatred of self and others (reducing hatred of self and all else in the world).

 

Seventh, power relations are critically central to forestalling the ruination of any proffered value system. If the typical moral agent is an anarchist-individuator, serving God and the Good Spirits, he is powerful but restrained by a huge group of powerful, liberty-loving, liberty-wielding, liberty.

 

Humans are born depraved, but can learn to be good persons with trained/acquired good wills (they still sin a little all their lives). In this way, each free agent insists that he has power and money to do his own thing and develop his remarkable, fecund talents. He also is self-limiting so that he never deprives any neighbor of a roughly comparable degree of power for her to do her own thing.

 

A society of such upper middle-class adults, tens of millions of them, agree socially and legally to abuse none, to be abused by none, to rob none other of his power and money, and to disallow—by weapons and force if need be—anyone, anyone at all, to deprive him of his liberty, his power, his property, his life, his ideas, or his money.

 

This list of seven structural categories is not exhaustive or final in providing a complete list of the kinds of problems, embedded in society, that together work to serve as a bad means that derail and pervert a noble end, the implementation of a program of adopted values on behalf of do-gooders, idealists, and well-wishers.

 

Some value systems are better than others, and all likely have sensible suggestions to be absorbed by ethical rivals. All must be humble, and agree that these powerful, destructive means of implementing their favored ethical values, will lead to unintended consequences, a world made worse—even nightmarish--by failed ethical dreams.