Stirner: Not A Philosopher

 

Paul Strathern in his short book, Kierkegaard In 90 Minutes, on Page 7 writes this: “Kierkegaard wasn’t really a philosopher at all. At least not in the academic sense. Yet he produced what many people expect of philosophy. He did not write about the world, he wrote about life—how we live, and how we choose to live.

 

Kierkegaard philosophized about what it meant to be alive. His subject was the individual and his or her existence: the ‘existing being’. In Kierkegaard’s view, this purely subjective entity lay beyond the reach of reason, logic, philosophical systems, theology, or even ‘the pretenses of psychology.’ Nonetheless, it was the source of all these subjects. As a result of such thinking, philosophers, theologians, and psychologists have all at some time disowned Kierkegaard. The branch of philosophy—or nonphilosophy, for many purists—to which Kierkegaard gave birth has come to be known as existentialism.”

 

My response: I have tried to read Kiekegaard, but he is hard for me to grapple with but, if I had the time, it would be worth the arduous undertaking. I am concentrating on Max Stirner, and do not see if the literature that anyone is much analyzing Max Stirner in light of the seminal work of Soren Kierkegaard. That simple comparison is one I will undertake as I read this short book.

 

First of all, Max Stirner and Kierkegaard were either students of Hegel or learned of his philosophy while students in Germany. Both were existentialist, though Stirner does not mention existentialism. Stirner is a subjective egoist and a subjective materialist. Kierkegaard seems to have no interest in egoism, but his radical subjective individualism is rather similar to Stirner’s unwavering championing of the egoist living his concrete existence.  Kierkegaard is an eccentric but devout Christian, but Stirner is an avowed atheist. Stirner will worship no abstraction, but Kierkegaard is idealistic enough to believe in God and the realm of spirits.

 

They are both irrationalists.  They pushed or seemed to promote that existence precedes essence, not the other way around. They hostility to abstract, formal thought and the construction of metaphysical castles. This radical deemphasizing reasoning and the use of abstraction to categorize, name, define and make sense of the world in effect makes philosophy, as commonly understood, not doable. They were intellectuals but not philosophers.

 

Strather points out that Kierkegaard’s interest was about the private, subjective individual and how he was to live, how he was to choose to live, having been thrown into this world of Being. Stirner the rational egoists insists that the focus for the ego’s energies and consciousness is wrapped up in his own interests, concrete existence, and his property.

 

Stirner is an unannounced existentialist and Kierkegaard is the founder of it. As an ontological, moral, ethical and epistemological moderate, I would side with Aristotle more than with Stirner and Kierkegaard but these existentialists remind us that though essence does precede existence, we must not forget to take seriously and address the ontological needs, desires and challenges that each individual encounters, so existence follows essence in priority but it must be enjoyed and studied too.

Stirner: What Is Real

 

Stirner: What Is Real

 

I have been reading a fascinating little book by Paul Strathern on Soren Kierkegaard. The book, Kierkegaard In 90 Minutes, is of much interest. On Page 14 it a paragraph that I wish to quote and then comment on: “It was the German philosopher Kant who eventually devised a suitable dwelling to house this poor defenseless creature. Kant constructed a grand mansion in the form of an all-embracing philosophical system based on reason, which accommodated the subjective ‘I” in magisterial splendor. Kant was followed by Hegel, who built an even more grandiose, all-embracing system based on the notion ‘All that is rational is real, and all that is real is rational.’”

 

My response: The poor defenseless creature that Strathern is referring is the existent individual trying to get by and make sense of everything. Now my quick take is that Strathern typifies Kant and Hegel as rationalists, but that representation though accurate, does not teach us much about reasoning and reasoners. Kant and Hegel deceptively--but likely unintentionally--laid the groundwork for the slow rise of the epistemological, ethical, political, economic, cultural ontological and philosophical revolution so prominent now in the 21^st century, eclipsing Modernism, the Western and American Way.

 

Returning to consideration of Hegel and Kant, they are subjective rationalists or subjective irrationalists. They are what I would refer to as soft rationalists or weak rationalists or subjective rationalists.  Professor Stephen Hicks has satisfied me that these two giant thinkers accept that the world out there as it is cannot be known by the self as subject perceiving an object out there.

 

Kant and Hegel made possible the current skepticism about values and knowing undercutting belief in the potency of reason, individual agency, and the miraculous power of theoretical and applied reasoning. This victorious ascendancy of Postmodernism and Marxism is a refutation of what I refer to as strong rationalists, powerful rationalists, objective rationalists that insist that the world of noumena is directly or indirectly knowable by the perceiver and thinking individual, whose simple apprehension of objective reality gives rise to his internally conceived and named propositions that give us real knowledge about the nature of the world, its inhabitants and their operations in that every day world.

 

I am indebted to Ayn Randian scholar Stephen Hicks for distinguishing Subjective Rationalists like Hegel and Kant from Objective Rationalists like Aristotle, Rand and Hicks himself. I used the descriptive phrases of subjective rationalist and objective rationalist—Hicks did not use those phrases.

 

I must separate our my weird epistemology from the epistemology of Hicks and other Randians who seem to assert that the rule of noncontradiction applies universally to all dimensions of Being: ontologically as well as logically and epistemologically;  that the world is fundamentally internally and externally consistent and coherent, that there are laws that govern all aspects of Being, and that our science and reasoning can make those laws and their operations intelligible and accessible in clear, precise ordinary language. We can come up with a metaphysical account of it that is true, makes sense and is meaningful.

 

My moderate ontology and moderate epistemology roughly amounts to this: humans should apply their powers of objective reasoning more than subjective reasoning, but they should apply both when studying anything, and that they should also gain knowledge of the world through their whims, their feelings and their subjective experiences as existing beings. These pluralistic but cooperative epistemological investigations and interactions with the world, when conducted with scrupulous, impartial honesty and love of truth will give us knowledge of high quality, probably certain knowledge, if not certain knowledge.

 

A bit like Hegel, I believe that the law of contradiction applies in the world ontologically, logically, ethically, spiritually, and epistemologically. I have not the technical words and concepts yet to define precisely what I just said means—and it could be beyond my intellectual capacity or any human ability to apply words and concepts to my axiom of logical, ethical, epistemological, ontological moderation as the core of what the world is.

 

 

My epistemology should inform the perceiver and thinker about what and how the world is. My moderate, pluralistic epistemology should allow any perceiver’s sense impressions of physical objects to describe how those objects are as they are as well a how they appear to us.

 

My epistemology, when applied in a priori or spiritual ways to the immaterial objects of the world, should provide us with expressible knowledge about these immaterial ideas and spirits as they are as well as how they seem to appear to us. I would add that through our reason, internally or externally operating and perceiving, we can when, clear-minded, ascertain the essence of forms, logical truths, and spirits of all kinds.

 

It is obvious that Kant and Hegel are idealists, that reason in the perceiver mind does not capture the essence of objective reality. They both promote reason, but it is within the subjective world of the perceiver’s mind, and he can never get outside of his personal perspective to encounter the world as it is, or other people.

 

Kierkegaard was even more of an anti-realist and anti-essentialist than were Kant and Hegel. He was turned off by the impressive, huge metaphysical structures that these idealists fabricated to house their subjective reasoning and ideals.

 

Keirkegaard, like Max Stirner, were turned off by Hegel’s absolute idealism, so they turned to subjective idealism/theism (Kierkegaard) or subjective materialism (Stirner).

 

I as an ontological moderate cannot agree with Hegel that all that is rational is real or that all that is real is rational.

 

He is more correct than not, but I would say that what is rational (The rational is psychological or are mental operations in our biological brains and is also the reason as a spiritual force, our soul function in our personal consciousness.) in our minds is real more than not. What appears to us phenomenologically in our private minds as sensing, living beings, here in the physical world of appearances, is more illusory than not, but it is objectively accurate about the word out there.

Outrageous Speech

 

The main objective for any honest, well-intentioned person is to know the truth, speak the truth and live the truth.

 

One useful way to do this is to curb one’s speech, not so far as one speaks freely, but as one uses outrageous assertions or speaks half-truths.

 

One should make one’s point, saying what one needs to say, no matter who is offended, but the speech should generally be accurate, dispassionate, sincerely shared, and temperate. If we seek to know the truth, and share the truth, the speech by which we convey our ideas is critically central to speaking truth and speaking it clearly and effectively.

Outworn Values

 

Traditional Western and American culture may seem, to Progressives, to be outmoded, unscientific, superstitious, and barbaric.

 

We conservatives see things in sharp contrast to this false narrative. We see the Western and American history, great books, its political systems, it religious and ethical heritage as the shining light on the hill for all humanity to study, appreciate and emulate.

 

I would not replace much of it at all, but would add Mavellonialist values to this great, fine cultural foundation.

The Scoop

 

If you want to scare the hell out of a joiner, or a quasi-loner just leaving the group, one that is seriously thinking about being a creative egoist, just warn her that she will live alone, poor, bitter, alienated, shunned, hated, and disowned. She could die alone, without family, a significant other or friends of any kind.

 

This is more likely in this time because most humans are normative altruists that group-live: their prime motive is to please their group, to increase their popularity and rank within that group. Their values, for the sake of exhibiting personal loyalty to group expectations, are what they will set aside. They will betray all they hold dear just so they can continue to belong.  Even if the pressure to group-form is fairly innocuous, they will still go as far—and sometime beyond—as they ethically dare, to do what illicit or immoral act is commanded by the group to serve the group interests. It is easy to set a sense of guilt and conscience aside, to justify however one wants to misbehave.

 

One day, after Mavellonialism catches on, then individual-living and self-realizing will be common, expected and much practiced by every day, ordinary people. In that generation, one could be alone without being lonely, socially punished, or unpopular. At the juncture, people will be able to move in and out of groups of all types, as they freely choose to do, and no one will pay much attention to their coming and going. The majority of the population, constituted by upper middle class supercitizens, will be rather tolerant of people coming in and out of whatever familial, communal or national groups, such that prevail at that time.

 

Even if Satan and Lera take over the world fully, using fascism, ideology, communism, postmodernism, wokeness or a religion converted to a fervently worshiped fixed idea, even if the Evil Spirits, through the monsters running Russia, North Korea, Red China and Iran, conquer all across the globe, even if the children of light are vanquished and exterminated from the face of the earth, even if the children of darkness rule all of the world, one world government, one permanently institutionalized, totalitarian state with its ruling party elite, with its hierarchies, its groupist minions and omnipresent police state, there is still hope for the loner-individuator.

 

For we are only totally alone if we insist upon living inside our solipsistic bubble, a whining, self-pitying tub of psychic mush, feeling victimized by Fate, the world, and others, hating oneself and others, but never working to fight back with love, idealism and resolve to bring as much Good Spiritsim, goodness and creativity as one can in a harsh, cruel world.

 

This is our duty, demanded of us by the Divine Couple. We as a reward, in this world or the next, even if we are martyrs in the gulag or to be shot in front of a firing squad or actively being tortured by some future SS police unit, we are never alone, never without friends, never without comfort or companionship if we accept that God and the Good Spirits are with us always, and we can survive the most vicious, painful, nightmarish treatment possible. If nothing else, if we die of our wounds, we will be welcome in heaven, and that has to be comfort enough for those of us hurled by Fate into this terrible, world, but we are to man up, and keep going and make the better place, and fight the good fight for God’s sake.

Consequences

One of the startling moral surprises that a moral agent, sincerely dedicated to making the world a better place, must accept as likely, were she self-aware, is that the unintended consequences of the solution she introduces to the world makes things worse, maybe a lot worse.

 

For example, a social justice warrior is angry that the rich have so much, and the poor have so little. To remedy this she advocates socialism, mandatory governmental force brought down on businesses and the wealthy to redistribute wealth to end economic disparity, and to move wealth from the haves to the have-nots. Let us say her program takes hold: here are three results.

 

Now, the capitalist economy, for all its faults, the greatest engine of prosperity ever known, is now crippled if not outright shut down, making all poorer, and relegating the poorest to an even more grinding poverty, even starvation.

 

By giving the government that much power, it is now a totalitarian monster oppressing all citizens. Democracy and liberty have been routed and disappeared.

 

By making all dependent upon the state, the individual initiative to work hard out of self-interest and the reasonable materialistic desire to enjoy prosperity is diminished, even gone, so permanent poverty is the lot of the entire people.

 

Unless she is a nihilist or misanthrope, she would not intend these dangerous consequences.

 

We are, to some degree, responsible for the thoughts, plans and actions that we introduce to the world. A wise person will learn to be cautious about what she introduces.

 

Take the social justice warrior mentioned above: if she wants to come up with an economic plan that lifts all boats, her most effective solution would be to teach all youth, but especially the children of the poor, to live as individuators that bootstrap their way to prosperity through hard work and economic prudence.

 

This way they will be successful, feel good about having done it on their own, and they will not have had to overthrow a free market, constitutional republic to satisfy the flawed, idealistic ambitions of the social justice warrior mentioned above.

 

 I keep hearing on talk radio a putative quote attributed to Abraham Lincoln that what is taught in the classroom in one decade, 10 years later is the political philosophy of the entire nation.

 

We must get better at anticipating the consequences of the idea, plan, and actions that we originate and choose to implement. Everything we think, do, do not do, and propose has influence on God’s plans for the world, for the community, for others, our family and ourselves.

 

It is not enough that we are motivated by noble motives: it may well be more important how we choose to achieve those goals, and what will the outcome create as it ripples out onto the world.

 

We currently do not lack for arrogance, self-confidence, will or energy to do what we think is correct, but are we actually doing any good, if indeed we are not making things a whole lot worse than they otherwise needed to have been?

 

I am a normative and rational egoist, and I approve of people believing in themselves. This is  not at all the same as complete lack of epistemic humility and a willingness to research consequences, to study history for parallel pitfalls to sidestep. We should ask peers to review our plans. To act unreflectively because we feel noble and superior, utterly incompetent, wallowing in insane pride, recklessly plunging into a quagmire predicated on willful ignorance. Most of us are far too willing to experiment upon society—these macro-collective solutions are worse than the disease we aim to cure.

Rufo On Language

 

Christopher F.  Rufo sends out a weekly video that I subscribe to, and he had one sent out on 3/23/23, entitled Winning The Language War, a video that I will respond to. He is complaining that conservatives did not use language well, and the public political and cultural narrative has been dominated by the Left, and they have been winning. Perhaps not much longer: “ . . . I realized that there is an opportunity for a significant shift in rhetoric for the political Right.

 

For decades, conservatives made their arguments primarily through a statistical frame, using the language of finance, economics, and performance metrics. Think ‘running a government like a business.’ But in recent years, the rise of left-wing racialist ideology—BLM, CRT, DEI—has created an opportunity, even the necessity, for conservatives to make their arguments through a moral frame, speaking to the conflict of values that underlies the division between Left and Right.”

 

My response: If I may interpret Rufo, he is chiding the Right for having tried to win over the public with dry, rational, statistically framed arguments, while the public responded much better to more moral, emotional arguments effectively deployed by the Left. Rufo argues that we need to use mora arguments too, and I agree but am concerned that abandoning a rational/statistical frame of arguing may be watering down our message. We should use both the statistical framework and the moral framework to argue our case to the public, but we also want citizens to self-upgrade themselves, over time to live and be political as an individuators-anarchist supercitizen. Those rational citizens would grasp all arguments, no matter how framed.

 

Rufo continues: The linguistic shift is already happening—and paying dividends. . . . Yes, we should improve test scores and balance the budget. But the deeper purpose of government is to secure the rights of the people and to establish a principle of justice. Conservatives must speak to the ends, not simply the means. And, in our advanced managerial society, this will require a new moral language that appeals to the interests and emotions of the common citizen, who wants to be protected from the institutions and ideologies that have arrayed themselves against him.”

 

My response: Rufo is right to worry about this. In life we are either gaining ground or losing ground. The Right needs to gain ground by taking back America and making it great again, and if  a more interesting moral language helps, fine, but dry analytics must not be sacrificed.

 

Rufo continues: “one of the problems that we’ve had as conservatives is that we’ve ceded the moral language to the Left, to the point that you have even conservative political candidates using identity politics as their framework and as their pitch to voters, because it’s really the most available moral lens. For example, you have someone like Nikki Haley—an ambassador, a governor, a successful administrator—who is pitching her candidacy as: “I am the minority female. Hear me roar.’ What she doesn’t seem to understand, however, is that when you operate in your opponent’s frame, you’re guaranteed to lose.

A conservative will never win in a battle of identity politics against the political Left, because they are setting all the rules and terms of debate . . . the anti-woke movement has reawakened the possibility of a conservative moral vocabulary . . . the new frame for the most successful people in this movement is through the language of values. To say: This is what we believe. This is who we are fighting for. This is what we want to see at the end of the day . . . this new approach that foregrounds values and moral expressions is much more persuasive, because it taps into human emotions and it lends itself to human narratives.”

 

My response: It is hard to argue with success. I have long asserted that we need to use our own words and define who we are, what we stand for and where we are headed—to provide the voters with a conservative metanarrative that out inspires the stagnant, jaded Left, winning the voters over..

 

Rufo continues: “And so the ultimate style of communication, the ultimate approach to these issues is to combine both the economic or rational argument and the values—or principles-based argument.

 

My response: Well said.

 

 

Hoffer Spouts Off

 

 

Eric Hoffer was an atheist—he might have been Jewish—if he was Jewish, he was a cultural Jew as I am a cultural Catholic, a lapsed Roman Catholic.

 

His believed people were not basically good, That is how he was a conservative. A strong conservative does not believe people are basically good. He never talked of individualism and egoism, but these concepts are implicit in his love of all things American, capitalist, free democratic, run by the masses, not elites.

 

Hoffer the atheist had a brilliant, original mind: he thought for himself and possessed a wondrous knack for discovering the truth.

 

He wanted people to live in democracies and he wanted the common people to run the country as the mdddle classa nd business class ran America for its first 150 years or so. He believed that the people should run things, never elites, especially those that the clerisy wish to be a part of, the ruling class.

 

He believed that the only lasting reform comes from the bottom up, run by amateurs and ordinary people, not experts with too many college degrees. Nothing good or lasting comes from the top down.

 

On Page 10 of the Tom Shactman biography on Hoffer (American Iconoclast The Life and Times of Eric Hoffer), Hoffer is shown recounting how the bums from Skid Row went up to the San Bernadino Mountains and built a road. They organized it themselves.

 

This taught Hoffer that people were smart and did not require elites and overlords to rule them. This is the miracle of America and Hoffer admired the common people: he did not think he was better or worse than any of them.

 

And he was correct. Any person of any race, ethnic group, or gender orientation, anywhere, can achieve and should achieve great things. He gave Americans hope during the Viet Name War, and the people were lost and depressed. He was right that America was worth preserving. war and he was right.

 

On Page 11 of the same book, Hoffer scoffs at various groups in the 60s saying America was racist, colonialist, violent and corrupt. He knew it was all crap. It was not perfect here, but it was better here than anywhere else.

 

He instinctively knew the radicalized students, race hustlers and ideological professors were revolutionaries that would bring hell on earth to America. He wanted peaceful, gentle protest and reform, but because America was so fine, that anything else would tarnish and tear down this fine place, about the best this worldly arrangement the world has yet come up with.

 

I have often thought that his insights anticipated and may have been a pioneering influence on the current conservative counter-revolution at work in America, all that is are anti-statist, anti-postmodernism, anti-Progressive and anti-Marxist.

The Goodness Of Reason

 

As an amateur philosopher, I have been studying classical logic to learn more about logic and to understand how to think more clearly, to lay out better arguments.

 

One of the logic texts that I am perusing is An Introduction To Traditional Logic by Scott M. Sullivan.  He wrote something that I disagree with, at least in part.

 

Let me quote and respond to what he wrote on Page 1 of his text: “The philosopher Aristotle once wrote that all human beings by nature desire to know. We are knowing creatures and when confronted with questions and problems, we seek to find solutions. But although we are all knowers and thinkers by nature, it is of course true that we can always improve our reasoning skills.”

 

My disagreement with Sullivan is partial,: in part people are curious and ambitious to gain knowledge, but mostly people seek to know little as possible so as not to anger their peers in the pack they belong to.  Besides, being intellectually ambitious is difficult: growing and learning are very hard work. Why bother? My take is that by nature people do not want to know what is what, what is good, what is their duty, what are they, and if what they are is insufficient in some way or immoral in some way--they are not eager or curious about figuring out how to remedy these imperfections and shortfalls.

 

Because people are born depraved, overly fatalistic, and lazy mentally and otherwise, lacking in self-love and sufficient individualistic focus, they do not think much but feel much more.

 

It is only as their free will and conscious deliberation to know things grows and expands as they self-realize as a life mission, then they learn how to think wise and deep, and learn how to think logically. As people, from an objective perspective, learn to perceive empirically and rationally, in conjunction with a realist ontology, their acceptance of the correspondence theory of truth (and a love of seeking truth) and their ability to translate these perceptions into terms and language that includes moral, qualitative and spiritual values, they will be able rationally to put into words a thought or action that is moral or immoral. At that point, they use reason not just to fabricate syllogisms, they also have the values, framework, experience and cultural outlook that allows them to know good, do good and fight for the good.

 

Another way of stating this is in a civilized, unnatural, maverizing mode of higher being, then people will have learned to think, and then it becomes a pleasurable way of life.

 

I also think reasoning is morally good more than not, and feeling, more than not, is not good. We adults need go get our kids to individual-live more than group-live. and individual-living is the foundational mode of existence that will trigger in the student the understanding of how to think well and live right.

 

Reasoning and knowledge can lead to wisdom if one is open to hearing from the Good Spirits..

Kept In The Dark

 

When the fallen majority of every generation freely choose not to answer, their ethical obligation, that divine call to live life of maverization, to grow into a life of a living angel serving the Divine Couple, this majority demonstrates the intimate connection between evil altruism (staying in the pack, obeying the pack, doing its bidding in pressurizing all outlier dissidents moving away from pack-living) and selfish choice.

Each morally failed person staying with the pack, betrays himself and those farther out that have left the pack and are traveling the noble, difficult self-actualized route.

By staying with the pack, each failed person is rewarded with many worldly rewards: group acceptance, group popularity, lower standards of performance expected, higher group rank, never feeling so lonely, easy access to wealth by being hired and promoted in the who-you-know community economy and institutional layout, a sense of belonging, a satisfying echo chambers of other people lying to one that one is normal, good, beautiful, correct and fine, just the way that one’s non-individuating, mediocre, sullen self  is.

To make all of this accessible, sustainable and ongoing, there are more sinister acts required of each failed person lest they be cast out of the pack and then targeted by the pack-turned-mob if enraged. This entails acts of cruelty and real harm that they volunteer to visit upon loners outside the group, and upon members of other groups. If they fail to obey the pack leader command to actively hurt an outsider, then that rebel will be cast out, and attacked by other packs members. Very few humans being have the strength of personality or moral will to say no: to preserve themselves, most people selfishly, cowardly obey the command to scapegoat upon innocent outsiders as a way of demonstrating their group solidarity in action.

The sense of group, its narrative, its values, its aggregation of willing altruists (somewhat akin  to Max Stirner’s  unwilling egoists: I define a willing altruist is someone that goes beyond his fallen, natural altruist orientation to consciously elect to live with and perpetuate dark, false, cruel group policies upon the hurting world.) are really one personality, one collective ego, of great power and force in the world, usually to further destructive goals. This single collectivized personality or group will is the unitary demonic consciousness constituted by the group members, the self-sacrificing altruists that serve its bidding and populate its power amount.

One important way that the selfish altruists serve their pack is by keeping outsiders and outlier individuators out of the loop, without access to group secret’s, their agenda, their plans, their schemes for amassing more souls, and through that amassing, more negative but concentrated power.

The technique is to keep the maverizer in the dark, to surround them, with joiners, jostling them day and night to wear them out, to make them feel solipsistic, to make them doubt their point of view (Do I exist? Am I right? Am I all alone? What is real? Is it all a dream? Is there any hope of moral victory? What is true and who is telling the truth? What is false and who is lying. Can I trust anyone, even myself? Am I correct in my lonely perspective when all around me see the world differently and bombard me with disapproval and disagreement all day long so that I give up and accept their view, their narrative, expressed in their language and in their terms?).

It is very difficult--usually insurmountable--for the isolated, group-assaulted great soul to keep going and counterattack against the majority groupists, all around and closing in on him.  He has great courage and will, but it requires almost superhuman determination to keep fighting the lonely, good fight when there are so few other maverizers alive and in communicative proximity to provide comfort, backup, and support. It is hard to find someone to talk to that knows the truth, and who will make one feel heartened and uplifted to keep fighting the good fight. The mob, surrounding him, hunting him, trying with all their might and cunning to take him, know how deserted and troubled he is, so if they can take him out, it sets a powerful deterrent effect on anyone else planning to stick her head up, even leaving the group.

Both voluntarily, consciously, teleologically and instinctively, nonindividuating pack members are taught and sense that their job is to attack, undermine and forever harass lapsed pack members, now individuators or independents for having joined an rival cause or pack. 

One important way that the selfish altruists serve their pack is by keeping outsiders and outlier individuators out of the loop, without access to group secret’s, their agenda, their plans, their schemes for amassing more souls, and through that amassing, more negative but concentrated power.

The technique is to keep the maverizer in the dark, to surround them, with joiners, jostling them day and night to wear them out, to make them feel solipsistic, to make them doubt their point of view (Do I exist? Am I right? Am I all alone? What is real? Is it all a dream? Is there any hope of moral victory? What is true and who is telling the truth? What is false and who is lying. Can I trust anyone, even myself? Am I correct in my lonely perspective when all around me see the world differently and bombard me with disapproval and disagreement all day long so that I give up and accept their view, their narrative, expressed in their language and in their terms.).

It is very difficult for the isolated, group-assaulted great soul to keep going and counterattack against the majority groupists, all around and closing in on him.  He has great courage and will, but it requires almost superhuman determination to keep fighting the lonely, good fight when there are so few other maverizers alive and in communicative proximity to provide comfort, backup, and support. It is hard to find someone to talk to that knows the truth, and who will make one feel heartened and uplifted to keep fighting the good fight.

The pack wants the maverizer gaslighted, in the dark, fearing that all is hopeless so that he might as well give up, surrender, and return to the pack to be abused forever in some outcast, enslaved role at the bottom of the social heap forever for having dared to go against the group.

 Satan and Lera, the spiritual sources of the invention of pack living biologically and as a social construction, use all of these pack bullying and intimidation techniques, with practiced effectiveness, to retain their power over insiders and to force the surrender of independence by rebellious individuators and nonjoiners.

If the maverizer can made to feel lonely, isolated overwhelmed , surrounded by overpowering, insurmountable opposition (or the illusion thereof, believed and accepted as fact by the beleaguered maverizer), it is hoped that the maverizer will surrender, accept being self-alienated, enslaved and no longer free by becoming a fellow nonindividuator serving the pack, its hierarchy, its ruling elite and the fixed idea that is their god or demon, that they worships and unite around and die and fight for.

The maverizer must rise up out of crippling, enervating, corrupting collectivism and become a living angel and a great soul, serving the Divine couple, not any longer the Dark Couple.

As he becomes better know and more successful even if martyred and killed by the mobs, over time truth and goodness and love and reason and maverizaiton will triumph for God’s children cannot be kept down and back forever.

In summary, the group-living children of dark in each generation have an objective: to grow their evil cause, their range and add all human members to their mass movement. Working in the dark, their intent is to spread wicked groupism as far as they can before the forces of good can discover that they are under attack and so will be unable fight back before it is too late. Keep the good, the outsider, the rival pack in the dark, ignorant of the groupist plotters and their secret knowledge and their nefarious agenda.

All of this is in play, in the background while the pack surrounds and seeks to break or crush a great soul in their midst. That great soul is likely a former member of their pack. By keeping him in the dark, they are depriving him of an understanding to what is up against, so that he cannot come up with effective ways to thwart or defeat them, and by keeping him in the dark, they often can get him exhausted or fearful, so he just will  give up, leave God and forsake maverzing and return to the group, to nonindivduate, and thus serve the Dark Coup le and their Evil Spirits. It is a sin of huge proportions for the pack to defeat a maverizer. The Good Spirits will remember that come Judgment Day.

The  mob of joiners want to win, to have its cause be victorious, and the in-the-dark and thwarted maverizer is not to win or have his good cause increased in number, range or influence.

The war between good and evil is unending and bitter, and the combatants are playing for keeps.

Complex Hoffer

 

Tom Schactman wrote a biography of Eric Hoffer, American Iconoclast, The Life and Times of Eric Hoffer.

 

On Page 8 Schactman writes this about Hoffer: “Hoffer’s tone was colloquial, and at a seeming distance from that of the writer whose thoughts were often described is icily precise and pessimistic. And Hoffer was a man continually at odds with himself, caught between what he said was the ‘terrible gloom . . . oozing out’ of his notebooks, and his joyous, celebratory sentiments about America and the common man, which emerged more in the interviews than in his writing.  Sevareid, perplexed and intrigued by this split, tried to approach it by characterizing The True Believer to Hoffer as ‘cold.’

 

Mu response: I think the gloom that Hoffer expressed was an exemplification of his honest approach to life, discovering that humans are weak and fallen, and that they can do just about anything against anyone or themselves.

 

Still, in America, where personal virtue, Christianity, the constitutional republic and the free  market system were constructed, here a cultural condition grew up that was ideal for fostering personal liberty and happiness. The individual self-control and the culture of optimism and can-do improvement of society and life here allows moral pessimists like Hoffer and me to be pleasantly surprised at how good people are and how kind. But we knew what made this occur here was that the people received instruction in the right values under God. Then they became good (earned goodness). They became morally good, and that allowed them to be kind and orderly, nd encountering such virtuous people is a pleasure

Mandeville & Ethics

 

Mandeville was a psychological egoist. He insisted that people were solely motivated by selfish and depraved desires.

 

They would admit it if they were open about it, but most were not and hypocritically claimed to be altruistic and virtuous. They just attributed to themselves kind natures, and generous motives.

 

People are born bad--that is altruistic and groupist, which leads to selfishness--openly displayed or hidden as noble.

 

What must people be taught as youngster to over overcome their fallen natures and lead a good life.? A background in virtue ethics would tell them to act only in building an honorable self, whose virtuous, ethics practice would leads that individual to be good, wholesome  both self-interest when appropriate and other-centered when necessary.

Incrementalism Works

 

When it comes to the spread of evil within a person, or as it spreads across and destroys an entire people, the Evil Spirits and their human agents do their best work, in secret, in disguise, under the cover of darkness, though they operate too in broad daylight.  When their attacks are undetected, and their façade of decency is not uncovered and revealed until it is too late, and they have already taken over a person or a community or country, and then they wield the power of government, military, and police to force the people to accept wicked ways and adopt them or go to prison, it is too late to stop them. They now openly drop their masks of decency and civility. They are brazen and open about their vicious natures.

 

 The job of the children of light is to fight the children of darkness in each generation. They must not trust and keep an eye on these cruel liars always plotting to hurt individuals and hurt society. The children of darkness always craft a narrative so veil their naked power accumulation strategy. The good and the wise are to figure out what they are up to, their goals, their tactics, their strategies, and their rationales.

 

The children of light must then go public with their findings, waking up the sleeping majority. If the adults and children of that sleeping majority can be trained up and possess the skills, strength and courage of maverizers, armed with the knowledge of how to defeat the evildoers  by countering their attacks on society with benevolent goals, tactics, strategies and rationales, the good can block or defeat the Evil Spirits and the children of darkness, ever scheming to take over the world and bring damnation to the earth, and own the soul of every enslaved, cowed human wretch.

 

 Most people are naturally cowardly, sheep-like and inclined to submit and conform to what heartless, wicked oppressive rulers demand of them. The supercitizen program is my effort to undermine that easy human desire to go along to get along.

 

A month ago as I was driving around the south Metro of the Twin Cities in my service van, I liked to listen to talk radio. Some celebrity gave his analogy as to how gender identity politics and woke conformity slowly gained strength over a 30-year period. It really is a story of evil incrementalism overtaking society. He describes how the heterosexual, white Christian majority were conditioned to tolerate the LGBT agenda. Then once the majority agreed and did tolerate it, including legal gay marriage, then the radicals in that movement demanded acceptance, and they received it.

 

After 2000 then the public were pushed to celebrate the LBQT agenda with gay pride parades etc. And many Americans did. Then that morphed into a blame and shaming culture of straights if they did not actively and openly celebrate the LGBT movement, especially publicly. To refuse to think and hold values contrary to Biblical teaching were considered evil, vile, and bigoted. The straight society had to agree with the views of these radicalized minorities. The next logical step would be to outlaw free speech and independent thought of those who are not fervently on board and conforming to the thinking, speech and values brought forth by the LGBT activists and Leftists.

 

 Then this guy described a meeting on a podcast where some straight guys at the meeting were urged to mate with some gay guys at the meeting and when they refused to, they were yelled of the stage as bigoted.

 

I am not saying that the LGBT movement is inherently evil. I am not and it is not. But, as a woke, revolutionary, identity group out to wipe out traditional values and have largely done so, that identity mode of social justice attacking, and the concomitant group politics push is pure evil, and it is a spread as part of a series of intersectionalist parties comprising the front for the spread of Communism and totalitarianism.  And those are utterly collectivist, anti-capitalist, anti- western, anti-individualist and as cruel as it gets.

 

They very cleverly and incrementally overthrew America and are close to winning the culture war and gain compete power over society as that their revolutionary scheme all along.

 

Another way that the incrementalist turns evil over time is how a person commits a slight sin and then does another and then another until his soul is rotted out and he is a fallen person of bad will that could end up in hell.

 

Perhaps a person could bring goodness to the self or reality incrementally by steadily and consistently growing over time in love, piety, and wisdom, talking to the Good Spirits all the time.

 

 

AI Worries

 

It has been a scary revelation for me to see how many employers now saturate the workplace with cameras, tracking devices on work phones and company vehicles. Workers have no privacy. Their loss of independence, privacy, and the ability to make decisions for themselves at work is drastically reduced. They are monitored all the time, and that seems creepy and dehumanizing Workers should be able to unplug such devices when or break, etc.

 

Preteens and teenagers are now tracked by their parents through the cell phones that the kids carry I think, unless a child is latchkey alone, and getting home alone, or a budding criminal, or mentally disabled, this should not be done.

 

Moral, normal, sensible kids need their privacy and room to run their own affairs and make their own decisions. Parents should not be tracking them and following them all day long and tracing them every place they go. This constant Orwellian spying on children by parents distorts and wipes out the loving relationship, the honesty, respect and mutually decent treatment between parent and child.

 

We must give a budding individual or individuators freedom and privacy from constant supervision to come up with his own solutions to run things. He is to be given power, freedom, the chance to think and make decisions, the space and the noninterference and the non-monitoring so he can maverize and become a great soul.

 

This requires parents not to micromanage children through the electronic tracking and surveillance technology available.

 

In a world where non-individuating, groupism, hierarchies and group-living, that is where tyrannical institutions and hierarchies require one half of the population to manage and supervise the other half of the population as Erich Hoffer famously noted decades ago.

 

Such micromanaging and over-supervising of employees, citizens and children lead to a society that is completely collective with a utter loss of individualism, freedom privacy, goodness and choice.

 

Those running such authoritarian cliques trust no one because they are completely untrustrworthy

 

All AI to the contrary, such devices for the children, citizens and workers need to be turned off. When people are not trusted and not enjoying any privacy, they are lessened and become non-performed and potentially wicked people.

 

Mass surveillance increases tyranny, social unhappiness, and groupism. These are very bad, unintended consequences of current, obsessions with installing cameras and tracking devices everywhere watching everyone. Cell phones are now electronic narcs betraying their owners. Wait until the government implants chips under the skin of citizens..

Born To Be Sheep

 

People are born sheep, waiting to be sheared by bad shepherds and then slaughtered and consumed.

 

Yet, there is the spark of the shepherd in each shepherd. The maverizer is a supercitizen that has taught himself to lead, to lead himself, to save society, to fight for what is good and noble. Reform starts from the bottom up when the people are feisty, unafraid of and bossy to their leaders, demanding what they need, giving orders, not meek, subdued, docile and servile..

The Quote

 

We have lived in the Twin Cities area for over 40 years, but I keep a soft spot in my heart for the farming area in northeastern North Dakota that we originated from. The conservative, traditional Western (Western civilization, not Western United States) values, honored by most North Dakotans, are my personal set of values.

 

I continue to subscribe to the home county paper, The Cavalier Chronicle. I do this to attempt to stay grounded with the sensible, humane culture of my youth. One of my favorite articles weekly in the Chronicle is a Christian message shared with the public. Now I am not a Christian, but I do believe Jesus is divine and the son of God. I am quite fond of Jesus and Christians, so I hope no one holds it against me for being influenced by the analyzing the messages that this public sermon provides weekly.

 

Here is the sermon from the week of March 1, 2022. It was on Page 7 and was entitled: The New You: “When we receive God’s Holy Spirit, a new life begins. Life no longer turns on rules imposed on us. Our inner self governs, bringing goodness and integrity. We live from the inside out, not outside in. This week in church, join others who are born anew.

 

You must be born from above. John 3:1-17.”

 

My response: My first impression is admiration that so many rich ideas are presented with so few words, and how those concepts are interwoven to create a Christian narrative: The adult is born again, this time spiritually, once she has invited the Holy Spirit into her heart, soul and being; now in a state of grace, a free gift from God, freely given by God, not earned. Her new life as a born again Christian now commences. For a Mavellonialist like me, a parallel experience would be asking the Divine Couple or the Good Spirits to deliver into our hearts and psyches, the gift of divine grace so that we can be born again as thinkers, believers, loving adults, and existers.

 

I do not quite agree that life no longer turns on rules imposed upon us. Rather, I suggest that a living angel will make the rules of the world—politically, socially, and economically—that he agrees to live under--as a citizen socially self-contracting with others to live in this federal state of ordered liberty.

 

What happens in the world, in all areas, deeply influences how the private person is succeeding or failing to be a spiritually and morally good person. Remember how groupist we are innately, so willing to suppress our personal desires and our consciences to gain or keep cheap, fleeting social approval. We need, as living angels, as individuators-anarchist supercitizens, to be very politically active running the affairs of the world around us, so that the conditions optimum for personal and collective well-being are instituted and perpetuated, the rules governing all of us from outside of us.

 

 

 

The aim of the citizens in a community, a county, a state and a nation is to bring about a free market constitutional republic where the people are governed by leaders and rules that do not conflict with the knack and power of citizens to govern themselves from within, where goodness and integrity are pervasive.

 

With a state of society where most people were supercitizens and living angels, the worldly conditions would be God-centered and yet secular and material, but organized in such as way as to not be corrupt or conflict with the inner life of believers living like monks, in this world, not of this world, ruled by inner forces, while not going against rules generated by rulers in the outer world.

 

For God to return to earth, it would be that the secular world would be a world of grace and justice and liberty, and people could speak and live their spiritual openly and publicly if they so wished, or quietly and internally withdrawing from this world in prayer and meditation while still in this world.

 

I would define being born again as a worthy and achievable goal. It is not only doable but is consistent with self-realizing, and maverizing may be the most powerful, empirical evidence that once is born again and is living this rebirth.