Moral Definitions

 

 

Before I lay out my ethical system, it makes sense to define good and evil, and I will try while admitting that these moral terms are tricky to define accurately and with perfection.

 

One definition of goodness is being an independent person. The Mother and Father created each moral agent with sufficient free will to render her accountable for the moral choices that she makes. This implies that she thinks for herself, makes her own mind up about how she will act, and that she is an individual, independent ,and self-reliant, use her free, strong will to decide how to act. This also indicates that there is a power allotment element here: she will run her own affairs, and bully none other, depriving that other of the independence, free will and empowerment to run their own lives as he sees fit. She also will let none bully or enslave her, and this is her natural right because all people are made more or less equal.

 

One definition of an evil person is one that is dependent upon authority, her mate, her boss, her clique, her church, or family to make decisions for her and wield power her, power that is her natural right and obligation to wield. She has freely chosen to be bullied by others, and as a pack-creature, she would willingly join the mob passively or actively to bully some group-rival, some outlier or group-dissident. She is selfless and self-loathing with little self-esteem, and as angry and bitter as she is, she will accept living in a hierarchy, group-living, nonindividuating and seeking social rank and popularity imbued with countless, interlocking sadomasochistic games centered on the power of powerless that hold her and each other inside conformist down and back.

 

Evil is collective, hating, destroying, passionate and excited to suffer needlessly rom others causing one pain, or inflicting needless suffering upon a victim as an active sadist.

 

Good is individual, loving, creating more than destroying, reasoning more than feeling, and determined to inflict no needless pain or anyone, nor allowing anyone to abuse the self.

 

Moral good flows from spiritual goodness, so worshiping and adoring a benevolent deity is a good way to be good.

 

Moral evil flows from spiritual evil, and pack-living and causing or allowing needless suffering to be inflicted upon oneself without resisting—or worse-- actively worships a demon is an efficient way to grow in malice and menace.

 

Moral goodness, Dennis Prager notes, stems from the Bible, a positive attitude, and attitude and gratitude, wisdom, and thankfulness.

 

Moral evil, Prager adds, stems from satanism, or excessive secularism (godlessness), a bitter, negative, resentful attitude, knowledge and expertise without wisdom, resentment, and ingratitude.

 

The morally good person blames himself for his problems, and the morally bad person blames others, and the world out there for his mistakes.

 

Evil is hating the self or others, and good is loving the self and others.

 

When the evil person without values tears down the status quo, a benevolent, free culture and tradition, replacing cosmos and civilization with lawless, bad anarchism and chaos, that person is wicked.

 

None of us can live without abstractions, but the good person is loyal to his ideals and causes, but does not become a true believer in them, turning them into an idol or fetish to be worshiped, and spread by the sword by his totalitarian government, on orders from his guru and his mass movement.

 

The bad person has perverted his abstractions that his lives by into stereotypes and caricatures, an ideology that he enslaves himself to, and will use violence, big government, and intimidation to force others to side with him and join his cause.

 

Evil is unnecessary or excessive violence. God is just war, self-defense (we need guns in private hands) but it is not excessive, the only resort, or does he initiate violence for its own sake.

Will You Ever Be Enough?

 

I think so, if you are a spiritually and morally good person that loves others and oneself. If you maverize and bring new knowledge and art objects into the workd, and raise loving children that are ethical champions, that should be enough get you considered for Purgatory for a while, and heaven eventually.

Am I The Problem?

 

Since thinkers like I am insist that people are naturally flawed, do we assume that the individual is the source of all evil, and the problem to be resolved, if it can be surmounted, if the world is to survive?

 

First, we are mortal, limited and finite, so being powerful and smart enough to cause most of the world’s problems, or being capacitated to find answers for the world’s problems is beyond human ability and ken.

 

Second, the individual is responsible for most of what is wrong in society. This means if individuals are the problem, then only individuals can solve most of society’s serious, permanent problems.

 

How are individuals to solve the problems in this world, personal and collective?

 

I suggest that once 80% of sane, healthy adults worship a good deity, and lead productive, amazing lives as individuator-anarchist supercitizens, then most human difficulties will be reduced to manageable proportions.

My Ethical System

 

I would like to believe that ethics is my strong suit, but for sure it is a primary interest of mine.

 

My basic system is in place, but this layout is an attempt to make it more clear, internally coherent, and understandable.

 

First, a set of definitions. I think a moral or spiritual conservative is a thinker that accepts that each person has a human nature that she is born with, and that she is born in sin, so she is basically evil, more than basically morally neutral or basically good.

 

A moral or spiritual liberal is the person that denies people have an essential nature, or if they do, they are basically good or born moral neutral.

 

Second, traditional Christians and Jews posited that people were born depraved, and I believe that is how we are engineered by nature and God. All of we moral conservatives assume that people are still good enough naturally that bringing up a child right, to be a good person, will usually work if the child is disciplined, loved, and provided with exemplary modeled behavior by parents and other adults. At some point, each child that becomes civilized or socialized, does so only from her own free will, internalizing the lessons taught by her elders. She at some point chose to do good and be good, and then is willing for a lifetime to control and limit her natural self and do battle with her savage nature. As a virtuous, religious adult of fine moral fiber, she will become a good person who will lead a virtuous life.

 

Third, traditional, conservative Christians and Jews define evil as the selfish, egotistical, egoistic, and undisciplined natural child. To become a good person, the child must learn to be well-mannered, self-curtailing and other-centered most of the time.

 

I define the naturally evil child as instinctively altruistic or evil. She needs to learn to be good, which is loving herself and seeing to her personal but enlightened self-interest most of the time. By caring for and loving herself, especially if she comes to lead a life of self-realization, in service of the Good Spirits, she then will be filled with wholesome self-esteem so that she loves herself, loves God, and other people, and thus is kind most of the time to all three categories of sentient  beings.

 

Traditional Christians and Jews define evil as selfishness, and, selflessness or altruism as noble-natured.

 

I, like Ayn Rand, identify selfishness or self-interest as virtue, and selflessness, or group-living, and an inferior,  nonindividuating existence of low self-esteem as so filling the mediocre non-achiever with self-loathing, that in their anger, rage, ingratitude, pessimism, nihilism, hatred, resentment, and bitterness, that he takes revenge on himself and others, and may well might ally himself actively with evil spirits.

 

In light of these ethical codes held by traditional Christian and Jewish thinker versus myself, I suggest that they are psychological egoists that preach that each sinful child needs God for incoming spiritual goodness, and a healthy dose of living in accordance with the Golden Rule and the Ten Commandments, which are tantamount to favoring normative altruism and rational altruism.

 

I, by contrast, am a psychological altruist, maintaining that each sinful child is self-loathing and other-loathing, because she is born in self-hatred, and group-lives and that reinforces her wicked living style.

 

She needs primarily to learn to individuate, follow the Divine Couple, Jesus and the Good Spirits in an ethical mode rational egoism/rational altruism and normative egoism/normative altruism

Ayn Rand's Humanism

 

Ayn Rand on Page x her Introduction to her novel, The Fountainhead, points out that she is a man-worshiper: “The man-worshipers, in my sense of the term, are those who see man’s highest potential and strive to actualize it. The man-haters are those who regard man as a helpless, depraved, contemptible creature and struggle to never let him discover otherwise. It is important to remember that the only direct introspective knowledge anyone possesses is of himself.

 

More specifically, the essential division between these two camps is: those dedicated to the exaltation of man’s self-esteem and the sacredness of his happiness on earth—and those determined not to allow either to become possible. Most of the mankind spend their lives and psychological energy in the middle, swinging between these two, struggling not to allow the issue to be named. This does not change the nature of the issue.”

 

My response: I wonder if Rand was a psychological egoist. For sure she was a rational egoist and a normative egoist. She probably thought people were born neutral (neither depraved nor kind) or basically good.

 

I am a psychological altruist, but a rational and normative egoist. I do not believe people are born basically good, but I believe they are born with a weak sense of conscience and goodness that can be strengthened through self-control to the degree that the person can become essentially a person of virtue and find character and good will.

 

I also define evil as selflessness and altruism (mostly) and I define good as self-interest and egoism (mostly). The law of moderation requires ethical retention of some selflessness and altruism (partly).

 

The Good Spirits are our masters and mistresses—whether we believe they exist or accept their supremacy over us or not—so we are to worship them, but not ourselves. Still, because the Father, Mother, Jesus, and the Good Spirits are all individualists and individuators, they strongly salute human endeavor to grow self-esteem earned through merited knowledge gleaned, art and inventions privately produced, and by growing spiritually and morally.

 

The good deities invite us to grow in self-esteem and talent, but we are not to worship ourselves or exalt ourselves over them (that would be blasphemous and hubris) but we are to be proud of our accomplishments but sensible and respectful to our spiritual superiors at the same time. As self-actualizers, humans are to be living angels, actualize the highest human potential possible.

 

Humans are born depraved man-haters—hating ourselves, others and the good deities, while loving and gravitating towards the evil deities. Humans naturally are groupist, nonindividuators and sometimes satanists who may seek to further degrade naturally depraved humans, reducing them to pure evil, contemptible and beyond redemption, kept down and back in this world and the next.

 

The benevolent deities greatly seek and bless humans, of their own free will, striving after happiness in this world and in the next.

 

The benevolent deities seek to invite and nudge the majority of people to introspect and discover that they have boundless talent and ability if they just believe in themselves, and if youngsters are brought up to worship God, to individual-live and to  individuate. and to know love and wisdom, then the great majority will not be fence-straddlers any longer, but will become living great-souls, heaven-bound after death.

 

The benevolent deities greatly seek and bless humans, of their own free will, striving after happiness in this world and in the next.

 

There is much in Ayn Rand that I agree with and respect, but her fanaticism, black-and-white categories, her atheism and excessive secular humanism need scaling back into sacred humanism. Still, she has much to teach us about how to live, and how to act so that the Good Spirits are pleased with our growth and divine ambition.

Craig Biddle's Advice

 

I was driving up to Mora to pick up my repaired tractor last week and I listened to a YouTube video by Objectivist thinker Craig Biddle, a lecture on Objectivism, Independence, and Thick Skin. Biddle is smart, a Randian and very practical, and this conservative atheist offers some great advice on how to live. Below I will take notes and comment on his video of his lecture on June 10, 2022.

 

Biddle wants to talk about Objectivism and Independence, and for each Objective virtue there is an inside, intellectual part to it, and outside, existential part of it in the world. The inside or mental part of independence is thinking for yourself as a matter of principle, in all areas of your life. We think for ourselves and occasionally we may need to modify what we thought earlier.

 

My response: we cannot be individualists and individuators unless we think for ourselves all the time in all areas of our life, even though we may go along with what someone thinks or proposes: we do so because we thought about it, and like what they propose and can see no flows in their thinking or suggestions.

 

Biddle: thinking for oneself is a virtue and that is desirable, but my lecture today is about the other side of being independent as an individual—one must act existentially upon what one has decided, out there in the world: one must put one’s plan into effect. One must put into action what one thought about and has decided to do.

 

The existential side of acting on one’s plans and decisions is not the same as being productive, though productivity is subsumed under existential acting out what one plans. If one acts on one’s plan it is life-transforming.

 

In an earlier life, I was a furniture designer and furniture-maker. There were two types of people that designed furniture: those that planned to design and make furniture, and those that actually went ahead and designed and made furniture. The first group of designers never acted on their knowledge and plan. The productive designers designed the thing, and then went and built the thing, and made something happen out here in the world.

 

Procrastinators just never act upon their plans. They don’t. Years later when I switched careers and became an Objectivist scholar, editor, and writer, I noticed the same problem there. Some writers were procrastinators that would read up on Objectivism and on how to write, but over time wrote nothing or very little. I too procrastinate too, and have produced less than I could of.

This is a real, serious problem. Life is not thinking; life is goal-driven, self-directed action.

 

Living is not thinking. That is important but a first step only.

 

Why is it that people hesitate and never get around to acting on their life plan? There are several reasons why they fail to act. One reason is fear, but it is not fear of failure. It is fear of judgment, not just judgment from other people but judgment from yourself. When you make something and put it out in the community for scrutiny and comment, and judgment, and people procrastinate to avoid being judged. If it is crappy, then I will feel bad about myself, so I just will not make anything. This fear of judgment is one of the main reasons why people fail to live and act.

 

My response: I just love the way that he laid this out, and I can find no fault in his reasoning. He seems sensible. Anyone a bit familiar with existentialist ethics (I am not an expert.) would see that Biddle is, from a very different and competing philosophical view of the world, have reached a similar conclusions: Life is not just thinking and planning or adopting a moral code: one is not independent and an individual unless one puts that plan into action as a thinker, a moral agent, a worker and a member of the community. We are obligated to get moving and try to act well, morally, and expertly, even if we fail and are criticized by others, oneself, or God—if one believes in the existence and presence of the Higher Power as I do.

 

Biddle: I realized that when one acts, works, and produces one will be criticized by oneself and others so I thought that one should have thick skin to not let the barbs penetrate one’s mind and hurt my feelings. Later as I writer, I changed my thinking. I did not need thick skin.

 

Incoming barbs or judgments—are they inherently a bad thing? No, they are not. Judgments from oneself or others is just information. We need to think differently about incoming judgments as if all of them are good, so we are able to hear and perhaps learn from all of them. We find out where we have erred and have fallen short, and then we iterate the product fabrication, and we get better and better based upon receiving input.

 

Receiving input makes you grow and improve, and you get better and better, and your life gets better. This is not a bad thing. All feedback from self or others is good information, even if it is harsh, off-base, or unfair.

 

On the other hand, this does not require that one is egalitarian about all incoming information. Some input is helpful, and some is not but you do not need to make a big deal out of it, one just deals with this sorting of helpful or unhelpful input internally.

 

I need to tell myself that how would I react to input of any kind if I had thought of it myself first before receiving it. That way I can absorb and adjust to the input quickly and first-hand without bogging down on it. If people are intimidated by criticism of their submitted articles as their editor, they say they will agree to my criticisms because I know more, but that is not how they should respond. Rather I may know more or be an expert, but experts can be wrong. Always think for yourself and try to objectively decide what is good input versus unhelpful input but you make the decision about how to act upon what you are told.

 

We need to rid ourselves of the false idea that input should stall us out, especially critical feedback. We want to act so we sort out this feedback as helpful or unhelpful, and then we act, produce, and create so that we keep living, and doing out there in the world based upon our plans.

What is a value that we never pursue? It is a fantasy or dream but never become reality and that is not living. Plans acted upon, goals put into effect become achievements over time.

 

We need the first part of independence which is thinking about what we should do with our lives, but then we must put it into action, and that is living, the second part of independence.

 

This applies to the philosophy of Objectivism. What is Objectivism? It is a set of principles or ideas about how to live. Reason, the center piece of this philosophy is a tool not an end in itself.

 

My response: I have not disagreements with Biddle’s wise suggestions for his young audience.  Implicit in his argument is that independence is a virtue instantiated in living by reasoning or doing as an individual, and when one is passive, group-oriented, engaging in groupthink and planning nothing and never acting upon such a plan—that is not living but is an evasion of the duty to live.

 

Biddle: Reason is not an end in itself. It is a tool so you can act, so you can live. Objectivism is knowledge, a tool so we can act on it and live and love our lives. Objectivism is not an end in itself. It is not life. Your identity is what you do with your life. Rand has reason, purpose, and self-esteem as the cardinal virtues. I want to set aside self-esteem for not. What is the relationship between reason and purpose? One is a means and one is an end, Your purpose is your end, to build a career. Reason is a tool to get your there, to fulfill your life purpose.

 

Reason is not just what David Hume described as a slave to the passions, but is a tool that helps your define your purposes. Passions are just your emotions, but your purpose is the goal that you are going to go after. Reason and the philosophy of Objectivism are but tools to help you get to where you want to go. Objectivism is a philosophy for living on earth.

 

I know good Objectivists leading full lives, and I know Objectivists that have done very little, leading stagnant lives in spite of having access to the best philosophy every devised, and they could be living beautiful lives. We have this powerful tool (Objectivism) about how to live, and how to act and what kind of society that we want to live in, but we have to act, and put this philosophy to work in your life or all is for naught.

 

We know and then we need to act on our knowledge that we already have.

 

My response: I approve of all that Biddle recommends. Our philosophy, our values and our knowledge are all inputs that allow us a moral adults to lead productive, useful, purposeful lives as parents, supercitizens, moral creatures, workers, soldiers (citizen militia defending the homeland), self-realizers and as children of the

Good Spirits leading good lives in this world, and likely in the next. We have to act and commit or it is all for nothing: the failure to act is an immoral act.

 

Biddle: We do not act for fear of judgment but we also fail to act on our knowledge because we have been told to live life for ourselves to be happy and fulfilled is selfish and we do not have a moral right to do our own thing, instead are to be selfless like the saints. That is nonsense.

 

We have this Objectivist philosophy that works. But you must act upon it. You are not living. Life is action. This virtue of independence is so crucial to good living. You think for yourself but then you must act upon your conclusions: you know what you should do. What is life? It is a process of self-generating goals and actions.

 

My response: Amen.

 

Biddle: Question/answer session: Perfectionism is a consequence of fear of criticism from self-judgement, For example, his daughter is a perfectionist. Self-criticism is okay, just one must reconceptualize all criticism as mere information so you can iterate and improve yourself.

 

Our products are always flawed, so not worry about it, just keep redoing it until you get better.

 

Rand does the serenity prayer, a wise statement. Replace God with self: God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. Biddle wants the Objectivist to replace God with self, and this teaches people how to work through the perfectionist dilemma or impasse.

 

My response: it is a wise prayer but let us keep God in it.

 

Biddle” Do not waste your life, because when it is gone, it is gone and irretrievable. You must produce the life that you want, or you will not have the life that you want.

 

The future of Objectivism? Biddle is optimistic that the young are using and learning Objectivist principles. He said these values can threaten altruists and the faithful, but he does not want to attack those with wrong premises but want to offer Objectivism to their right premises which are flourishing and freedom, the master values. If one is not crazy or nihilist because one went to a Ivy League college, one likely wants freedom and flourishing.

 

If you do not want to flourish, you are not well. You want freedom to some extent. Most people do not know what these master values are. People do not know where rights came from—they think they came from God, government or nature and we know not how. We have rights, they are realm and it is right that they are morally protected.

 

My response: I like that master values in Objectivism are freedom and flourishing and that can be achieved in my Mavellonialism as a striving individuators and living angel in service to the Divine Couple. Rights do come from God as ethical and spiritual first principles, and through nature for us as living creatures in nature, but they do not come from government.

 

Biddle: Young libertarians want liberty, but they need philosophical base for that desire and Objectivism can provide this.

 

Be a jack of all trades or specialization expert at one thing—both work; a constellation of skills that you like to pursue. If you write well, and learn some acting and directing, then you become a better writer. Then your constellation of skills they become a superpower. You make yourself a value in the marketplace. Not a false alternative, not either or. It is contextual or personal. Form follows function.

 

Can we get moral principles from the facts of reality as Hume denies? Rand we need morality so we can know how to live as rational beings and thrive as such a being. All values and morality rest in the existence of life, so if you act well, you can live and live well.

 

Values are derivative of the requirements of life.  So, we can get oughts from is.

 

Objectivism to save a drowning person—an obligation to save a life? Rand pointed that we do not derive moral principles from emergency situations but from the ordinary circumstances of life.

 

Moral impasses or emergencies: so we cannot make good moral choices. One moral principle is that human life has moral value and is our standard, we have moral principles so we can live and thrive. We could save someone because we assume they deserve to be saved so we could save them.

 

If you can paint prisoner dilemma-type situations, like philosophy professors weirdly concoct but are not real.  In everyday life reason works pretty well so ignore prisoner  dilemma all is relative and reason cannot work

 

My response: I think Rand is right that we can accept her view that we can know moral facts on how we ought to live and reason works pretty well most of the time to find answers to problems and how to live.

 

.My response: I approve of most of Biddle’s suggestions, but would add God and the philosophies of moderation and maverizing to make Ojbectivism more complete and successful.

 

 

One World Government

 

6/25/23: I just read an article on Breitbart News, an article about President Macron of  France suggesting international or global taxation to subsidize his green agenda, fight global poverty and fun the Great Reset.

 

Notice that the Marxists and globalists always push policies that would strengthen a one-world government.

 

 

I like our American sovereignty just the way it is, and there should not be one inch of conceding to these totalitarian, global imperialists and Communist aggressors.

 

Leave us alone, leave our economy alone, and keep your damn hands off of our guns.

Ayn Rand's Religious Ideals

 

On Pages viii, ix and x of her Introduction to her book, The Fountainhead, Rand self-attributes that the highest, ideal conceptions of artistic products or brilliant inventions of humans are like the most elevated religious aspirations of believers. She is right that there is a connection because the creator, producer and inventor utilize their reason, their hunches, their instincts, and imagination to envision the object that they will be inventing or creating.

 

Since idealists from Plato forward ontologically and often point out that reason and spirit are but respective worldly and otherworldly aspects of the same universal force or rational process and reality (though Rand the atheist denies that spirit exists), it would make sense that the high ideals that Roark conceives of and then produces architecturally in the everyday world, are of such brilliant and rare excellence, that such a product of creative reverie from one mind is a near-religious construction.

 

Rand wants to mine the same mine as do religionists, though, “ . . . I said that religious abstractions are the product of man’s mind, not of supernatural revelation. I would counter that religious abstractions and high-end art of a product of our minds, and are also divinely inspired, but I know that the Good Spirits are creators and artists, and they do guide and inspire us, though what we invent and create is still in part original.

 

Rand goes on: “What I was referring to was not religion as such, but a special category of abstractions, the most exalted one, which, for centuries, had been the near monopoly of religion: ethics—not the particular content of religious ethics, but the abstraction ‘ethics,’ the realm of values man’s code of good and evil, reverence, grandeur, which pertains to the realm of man’s values, but which religion has arrogated to itself.”

 

My response: it seems patent that Rand the secular humanist has made plans for humans to self-realize or at least an elite few of them like Roark will, and that these paragons of secular, rational virtue will be like gods, and their rational ethics of personal, life-long, full-tilt pursuit of the creation of objects exemplify these exalted values, will self-impel them to seek to replace religious artistic ambition with human dedication to secular, worldly production of objects and art of comparable excellence. Humans pursue excellence in line with self-worship as gods, and their productions and creations are undertaken ethically as humans, not servants of divine beings.

 

Rand continues: “Religion’s monopoly in the field of ethics has made it extremely difficult to communicate the emotional meaning and connotations of the rational view of life. Just as religion has pre-empted the field of ethics, turning morality against man, so it has usurped the highest moral concepts of our language, placing them outside the earth and beyond man’s reach. ‘Exaltation’ is usually taken to mean an emotional state evoked by contemplating the supernatural. ‘Worship’ means the emotional experience of loyalty and dedication to something higher than man. ‘Reverence’ means the emotion of a sacred respect, to be experienced on one’s knees. ‘Sacred’ means superior to and not-to-be touched-by any concerns of man or of this earth. Etc.

 

But such concepts do name actual emotions, even though no supernatural dimension exists; and these emotions are experienced as uplifting or ennobling, without the self-abasement required by religious definitions. What, then, is their source or referent in reality? It is the entire emotional realm of man’s dedication to a moral ideal. Yet apart from man’s downgrading aspects introduced by religion, that emotional realm is left unidentified without concepts, words, or recognition.”

 

My response: it seems that Rand the atheist want to wrest from the clutches of religion and belief in the supernatural, to give humans that are secular the ethical, rational, cultural, and elevating values that will release them to invent and create and produce, to fill their worldly, mortal lives with value and meaning, sans acceptance of God’s existence.

 

I am not opposed to her project for worldly fulfillment, finding meaning and value to live by here and now, enjoyed by inventors, creators, and producers, but as a follower of the Good Spirits, I attribute to the latter the traits of being individuals, individuators, scientists, capitalists, inventors, and moral leaders, so they would heartily endorse, bless, and support Rand’s project. Through Mavellonialism, my moderating rational religion, faith and humanism complement and include each other, they are not exclusive, competing, and conflicting.

 

Rand continues: “It is this highest level of man’s emotions that has to be redeemed from the mark of mysticism and redirected at its proper object: man.

 

It is in this sense, with its meaning and intention, that I would identify the sense of life dramatized in The Fountainhead as man-worship.”

 

My response: we as living angels can become mini-gods but this is suffuse with mysticism, reason, life and matter. Faith, worldliness, science, matter and inspiration and values are intermingled and uniquely defined by the individuator as his personal interpretation of what reality means for him embodied in his inventions and creative objects.

 

As living angels, humans need not worship themselves, for becoming inherently is an act of worshipping the Divine Couple, and they are welcoming and accepting of human self-improvement; and they are neither jealous of nor intimidated by human striving but believe that becoming and striving are actually human obligations instilled in them by their Creators.

 

We may want to take back our exalted and exalting emotions, values, and ethics from traditional altruistic religions, but this can be sorted out without losing faith and that divine connection and love through rational religion and a faith of self-realization becoming popular among the people of a society.

 

Rand continues: “It is an emotion that a few—a very few—men experience consistently; some men experience it in rare, single sparks that flash and die without consequences; some do not know what I am talking about; some do and spend their lives as frantically virulent fire-extinguishers.”

 

My response: it is traditional that there are a few naturally occurring or self-occurring great souls that will feel those rare creative sparks that inspire these people to originate and create, but the ethical science of self-realization gives people the training for the masses to become individuators. All had that divine spark, but few choose to act upon it as a dedicated way of life.

 

Rand continues: “Do not confuse ‘man-worship’ with the many attempts not to emancipate morality from religion, but to substitute a secular meaning for the worst, the most irrationalist elements of religion. For instance, there are all the variants of modern collectivism (communist, fascist, Nazi, etc.), which preserve the religious-altruist ethics in full and merely substitute ‘society’ for God as the beneficiary of man’s self-immolation. There are the various schools of modern philosophy which, rejecting the law of identity, proclaim that reality is an indeterminate flux, ruled by miracles and shaped by whims—not God’s whims, but man’s or ‘society’s.’ These neo-mystics are not man-worshipers; they are merely the secularizers of as profound a hatred for man as that of their avowedly mystic predecessors.”

 

My response: Let me unpack this rich paragraph: Rand sees morality that is pro-human and good for humans (rational egoism) only if morality is freed from the clutches of traditional religions by secular humanists. Secular ideologies of many types, over the last 100 years, substitute society for God, and remain a mass movement where collectivist and irrationalist ethical worship of a cause keep people addicted to a self-immolating moral system that degrades and crushes all in its path, and these ideological causes are what Rand, Eric Hoffer and Max Stirner all rail against.

 

Fanatics, their beloved ideology, and their true-believing followers are not potential individuators and nor are they rational or kind, but rational religion can provide us with everything good that Rand offers, without losing spiritual sources of love, strength and hope that belief in God provides, and what humans desperately hunger for.

 

Ayn Rand--Ideal Man

 

On Page vii of her Introduction to her book The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand admits that the purpose of her writing was to projection of ideal man, but the artist in her always reigned supreme, for she wants the protagonist of her novel, Howard Roark, to be an end in itself, and that is as it should be otherwise a creative work is not concrete, real and original.

 

Still, her general purpose, as she writes on Pages vii and viii is: “’Since my purpose is the presentation of an ideal man, I had to define and present the conditions which make him possible and which his existence requires. Since man’s character is the product of his premises, I had to present and define and present the kinds of premises and values that create the character of an ideal man and motivate his actions; which means I had to define and present a rational code of ethics. Since man acts and deals among other men, I had to present the kind of social system that makes it possible for ideal men to exist and to function—a free, productive, rational system which demands and rewards the best in every man, and which is, obviously, laissez-faire capitalism.

 

‘But neither politics or ethics nor philosophy are an end in itself, neither in life or in literature. Only Man is an end in himself.’”

 

My response: Rand the writer and artist is part-didactic ethical lecturer, part-philosopher and part whimsical artist allowing her original work to flow where is want to without structure or overburdensome, artificial design.

 

She likely is not the most talented, or most brilliant artist and philosopher in the world, but she strikes me as an original thinker and ethicist that comes close to discovering the truth about the human condition, and how people must live to be happy, fulfilled, and virtuous.

 

I admire her for defining man’s character as the product of his premises, and this may be roughly equivalent to suggesting that one’s character is the product of one’s choices, which typically would be grounded in one’s presuppositions about the world, and the premises that one acts upon.

 

She succeeds in laying out her ethical system, (rational selfishness), a rational code of ethics built upon the premises and values that motivate him to act as he does.

 

And his rational egoism is acted out by him in the social world of other people, a complex, interwoven world of political, structural, commercial, familial, and economic relations tying people to each other. She is not an anarchist or radical libertarian. The social structure is optimal for human happiness and success where rational egoism motivates citizens in a democracy whose economy is a free market one to demand and reward the best effort by every human.

 

Her social utopian vision has a lot to commend it.

Fireside Chat Episode 291--Pride Month: Why Do We Do This?

 

Minneapolis this weekend has hundreds of thousands of people celebrating LGBT Pride month, a month-long (June) celebration and remembering and prideful awareness of all things lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender.

 

A lot of conservatives are starting to pull back on this. I have not thought much about it one way or the other, but to get up to speed on this important topic, I am taking notes on an excerpt of Prager’s 6/1/2023 Fireside Chat on this subject, and then will respond to his criticisms of this celebration.

 

Prager: LGBT Pride Month is not a meaningful phrase though he knows why it is being done. This movement and event is an extension of group pride rallies. Prager does not believe in group pride, even those celebrating his Jewish group.

 

Dennis never had in him the concept or idolization of groupthink (I am similar, and would argue that individual-living individuators could not engage in groupthink or worry about group pride steeped in the groups that they grew out of, though they would enjoy being members of those  derivational personal associations that they sprang from organically.).

 

 

Dennis offers that the great American ideal that the individual is sacrosanct,(I add:  this fetishizing one favorite or dominant group-affiliation as one’s cause for living is what collectivists and Leftists engage in, and they seek to take over America and the world to gain power for their group, supreme over all other rival groups, and this is assuming that life is an endless strife and warring of group versus group, the eternal power struggle between the victors and rulers versus the vanquished and ruled.), and he accepts that so any movement of group pride like LGBT Pride Month flouts this American tradition, so he opposes them on these grounds, and he is correct and I side with him.

 

I say: we should develop as individuals and our group-affiliations inform our moral choices, but are not moral ends in themselves. Prager accepts only two groups as being worth noting—dividing people into the decent and the indecent categories (And our moral worth or status is what we have created for ourselves by our actions and choices, and this character-assignation is individual and personal, not collective, and general to thousands of people, I add.)

 

Prager does not divide the world into gay and straight, or Jew and non-Jew, American or non-American. Black and white. He learned this wisdom from Viktor Frankl, and it is illuminating. He is only concerned if you are a good person or not, and it is hard to be good, and that is the greatest achievement of one’s life.

 

One’s group association is natural, a given, and one did not achieve anything so why are you proud of what you are, but you did not work hard to become it, like what happens when you control yourself and become a good person.

 

No group is good or evil, to be condemned or praised or celebrated, because goodness or praiseworthiness (I add as implicit in Prager’s argument here.) is not a choice but is what one is born with, but individual choosing to become a good person can be celebrated, or denounced and communally shamed if one elects to be a bad or wicked person.

 

What does this all mean, Prager asks. It means that society must celebrate the LGBT movement, not just tolerate it, the old liberal idea. The Left-wing idea (command for all Americans to groupthink and elevate LGBT prominence and social elevation, I add) is that we must celebrate the LGBT movement, but Prager refuses to celebrate it, though he tolerates them and would not bother them in any way if they are sane, consenting adults. I agree.

 

Prager criticizes the Pride movement as an imposition upon society that you MUST celebrate this movement. Dennis refuses to go along, although it is our duty to treat all kindly. He thinks it is tragic that men and women seek to transition, and he loves them and wishes them well, but he will not celebrate their worldview. He would accept their transitioning, leave them in peace, and call them by their preferred pronoun but not celebrate them. He will not allow children to transition. He will not be joining the celebration of the Pride Month, and I agree.

 

Dennis wants no pride months for groups of any kind. For example, black pride movement celebrates blacks if they are not conservative blacks like Larry Elder or Thomas Sowell, and Gay Pride groups denounce conservative Dave Rubin.

 

What Dennis is criticizing is that all these group-pride movements are intersectional but identical movements that are just fronts for Marxism, groupist and collectivist values and power-grabbing, and they are not for the individual members in those groups. These fanatics reject you if you do not submit immediately and wholeheartedly conform to their Left-wing values.

 

Jordan Peterson and Dennis Prager both celebrate the sacrosanct prominence of the ideal of the individual in Western culture, and they are close to understanding my individuators emphasis on individual-living and maverizing first as the ethical choice for the good person, while secondarily in one’s life non-individuating and group-living as a minority behavior and personal life style.

 

To conclude, Dennis is right in urging the ending of pride months of any kind, for groups should be enjoyed but not culturally celebrated as in need of ascendant worships as superior by all members of the society.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dennis Prager: Human Nature

 

Last night I reviewed a 30-minute Fireside Chat by Dennis Prager filmed on 9/10/2020, and I took notes on it that I wish to respond to.

 

Dennis talked about how his son taught his grandson that the boy had a dual nature, a very old Jewish and Christian concept of our consciousness being divided up between to ever-contesting, struggling, opposite forces, wills or set of urges.

 

Prager lays out that the angelic (my word) or good urges part of our nature battles against our bad urges or will, the demonic side (my phrase).

 

I enjoyed and agreed with Prager’s account that psychopaths only have the bad voice, not the good voice.

 

He adds that non-psychopaths that are evil suppress the good voice because the conscience is weak and it is easy to ignore and downgrade to personal invisibility, allowing the self to do whatever it wishes to commit.

 

He brilliantly points out that great damage (collectivized evil in the name of saving humanity to advance one’s ideology) by many people engaging in bad behavior for the sake of serving a putuatively good voice, even though the consequences of their group behavior is catastrophic for society; in short, they do evil from good intentions.

 

Human Nature must be directed so youngsters learn to be good. Dennis is mistaken as usual in going against self-esteem theory (egoism: I’m okay—you are okay) in favor of a moral stance of anti-self-esteem control of the basic, arrogant, selfish, self-indulgent self as the basis for raising good children (I am not okay—you are not okay).

 

Dennis’s rejection of self-esteem theory is based in his belief in psychological egoism (each natural sinner is born selfish), and my endorsement of self-esteem theory is grounded in my denouncing psychological altruism (Each group-living natural sinner is born selfless which makes him selfish, violent, and mean.).

 

It is interesting to me that Prager and Jordan Perterson both reject self-esteem theory, but both are promoters of the Western and American ideal that the individual is sovererign.

 

The wise Dennis goes on to urge the young not to blame society for their problems but to blame themselves. If you live in Communist, totalitarian China, then you may be more justified for blaming society for your problems than yourselves, but you even there must fix yourself first before you try to fix society.

 

In America there is very little excuse for blaming society for your problems because you have freedom, wealth, opportunity and law and order here, so you are empowered to make something of yourself.

 

The insightful Dennis adds that many people hate a free society because their making a mess of their personal lives there makes it nearly impossible to excuse away: they can lie to themselves and others that it is not their fault but is society’s blame, but no one really accepts that flimsy excuse.

Private Property

 

I work as a maintenance technician for a private, religious college here in the Twin Cities. We take care of their commercial buildings and they have about 500 apartments and dormitories for their students that we turn like apartments over the summer while the majority of students have moved out for the summer or due to graduating.

 

I am shocked and saddened at the damage that students do to their rooms. All dormitories, for example, have no smoking policies for pot or cigarettes, but maybe 20% of the students puncture a hole in their window screen to push the cigarette, or smoked marijuana, through to vent the smell and stench outside; this way they can smoke in their rooms, and we have to rescreen those screens that they have destroyed.

 

My older brother is a retired professor and I asked him if the students 50 years ago when he was in college were not more respectful, on average, of the college property, including their rooms, and he said yes.

 

Private property, whether it belongs to a person, a campus, a government entity, or a corporation, belongs to other individuals or to many individuals in joint ownership.

 

If a young person—or anyone—steals, smashes, vandalizes or does graffiti to someone else’s property it is a disrespectful attack on that other person, and that is immoral and sometimes illegal.

 

Young people in America cannot be moral, individualistic, or self-realizers without recapturing and expanding the traditional, general American citizen respect for private property.

 

Any American that throws trash outside or pollutes or rapes the earth—it could be argued--are disrespecting and abusing nature, the property of the Divine Couple, especially our Mother.

 

We should be able to mine the earth and use its resources for our own gain, comfort, and survival, but this also means we should be wise stewards of the earth and reclaim it to the extent possible.

 

To disrespect the private property of others is to attack them, and degrade the self, and that is evil.

Kind Youngsters

 

One of the primary ambitions for introducing youngsters to moral training is that they will learn be kind to each other. This is successfully socialization of each natural sinner, each child not born nice or courteous.

 Dennis Prager is correct that if we are not good persons, then we will not and cannot esteem ourselves: I insist that esteeming the self is based on action and merit, so if we are not kind to others and ourselves, we will not esteem ourselves, or others.The two acts of esteeming the self and others depend on being kind to the self and others at the same time.

How is this lofty but reasonable ambition to be gained? Christian ethicists would argue that each child should be taught to be selfless, humble, and kind. 

 

I am not against the inculcation of these selfless, altruistic virtues but suggest that they are best taught and learned by children where kids learn to maverize and achieve their enlightened personal interest, thereby achieving a high, healthy sense of self-esteem on average.

 

I would argue that if the boy or girl does not love himself or herself, he or she will not love others, and most kids are not encouraged, not taught to esteem themselves, ergo general callousness and other vices abound. When children do not like themselves, they are mean to themselves and are unpleasant to others, not liking them either.

 

To socialize a child is to maverize a child.

 

Life is confusing and the truth is hard to discover even when we are smart, alert and seeking actual truth. We can still miss the mark.

 

I think I know what needs to be done to produce a generation of kind youngsters and I refer to this challenge as the self-esteem paradox.  To enable youngsters to esteem others, they have first to esteem themselves.