I quote from my 2010 book, Notes Towards A New Age, Vol. 1, Page 55: “As individuators we should seek to empower ourselves more than live under the centralized control of another. But since freedom is the power to self-direct, we must place some sensible limits on our desire for power. Total freedom from moral limits means total addiction to power acquisition in its myriad forms, and that means robbing others of their legitimate rights to power and freedom.”
My response: The individuator, that humdinger of an individual, must wield power to self-direct, to do work in the world, and to learn more and be more. This is my moral category of positive power: to develop the self, while seeking to enslave or hurt none other, and one is exercising one’s power in the world without chicanery, dishonest dealings, misrepresenting material facts, using force to gain advantage, etc.
Moral freedom, a free will—which is and must remain a good will—must be consistently expressed by the ethical agent in his actions, as he seeks to gain legitimate power in the world, seeking to be powerful more than powerless, but seeking neither total freedom nor total chaos in his life, for the postmodernists have revealed that those that shed all values and narratives, balance out their meaning deficit, by pushing holy causes and totalitarian schemes by bind all severely and cruelly. They vacillate between utter freedom or chaos, and then claps desperately for complete enslavement to provide them.
My Book (Notes after this)): “Therefore, total freedom for us dictates depriving our neighbors of a hard-won independence. To have total freedom for ourselves means we have forced our neighbors into a state of subjugation. They are enslaved and we are the enslavers. Both the predator and the prey have lost their free wills. The power wielding will need not be a free will. The submissive will is not a free will. The free will operates democratically among peers.”
My response: Let me unpack this: I am for egoism ethically, politically for individuating supercitizens running a free market constitutional republic, with a positive power model (the power of powerfulness), conditioned and tempered by moral moderation, that accepts some social structure among upper middle class equals (more or less equal in power and wealth), a social structure under which peace, cooperation and law and order will hold, while adults compete against their selves of yesterday and against neighbors, with some holds barred.
The supercitizen requires and demands neither total freedom, nor total subjugation for himself or any neighbor, because the enslaver-oppressor vs. enslaved-oppressed dispensation is one in which all have lost their free wills (all retain some residual free will), all will lose their good wills, as the evil model of power distribution and handling, the power of powerlessness gains sway. As evil grows, the consciousness of most citizens will shrink and be blighted under the cloud of injustice, corruption, and bondage.
Notes: “Free will can only operate and be maintained where free will belongs to one without total power or a total lack of power. The free will belongs to her whose will is about wielding more power than exists in a state of powerlessness.”
My response: 15 years ago, my current, mature theory of positive, desirable power mode (the power of powerfulness) versus eschewing an evil mode of power mode (the power of powerlessness), was implicit more than explicit, so I seek to clarify or expand what I wrote here on Page 55.
Notes: “The moral situation that liberates us: we must not seek total freedom (which is very similar to total slavery—either we subjugate others, or they dominate us) but great freedom while abiding by some other-directed, communal laws and regulations which we democratically agree to. Then we must faithfully conform to these restrictions upon us until through reason and compromise we can later modify them as the need arises.
As individuators we are entitled to individual power and freedom rather than settling for individual powerlessness and surrender to outer rules, or obedience to other-directed rules, and adherence to group power of powerlessness.”
My response: The group power of powerlessness is what I now define as the power of powerlessness. The individual power of powerfulness is what I could identify also as the power of powerfulness.
No comments:
Post a Comment