Aristotle's Lighthouse

Is This How Freedom Dies?

2011-12-04T13:02:00.001-08:00

Occupy Wall Street hides behind the legitimate indignation at the co-mingling of government and the private sector, but in reality it is nothing more than a Marxist propaganda group that wishes to give more power to government and destroy the private sector as it is. A *rational* mind would, instead, have argued that a wall of separation between government and the private sector needs to be respected just as the fabled wall of separation between church and state, and that the current issues are not, in fact, the cause of a capitalist system, but that of a statist Keynesian system in which it is acceptable for government to act upon the private sector (and thus open the channels for the inverse to also be possible).

A rational mind would, but Occupy Wall Street isn't a rational movement. Under the guise of emotional appeals, it seeks to destroy the private sector and true, non-government-contaminated capitalism- the things that make the modern world possible- and utterly devastate the world. And this paean to Socialism is going on while, at the same time, Europe is starting to collapse under the weight of decades of a socialist economic doctrine-- with the Euro at the very brink of utter and complete obliteration. Vast debt, stifling controls, decreasing production and 'wealth redistribution' (might those two be linked?), and the result? If Rome isn't burning already, it certainly is beginning to smolder, and someone is beginning to tune the fiddle.

And to quote William Blake-- "O who hath caused this? O who can answer at the throne of God? The Kings and Nobles of the land have done it! Hear it not, Heaven, thy ministers have done it!" -- every politician, and every person who supports them who subscribes to the belief that your life, your property, your person and your rights are not truly yours-- but either belong to the government or to 'society'. That you have no right to choose EXCEPT the choices that the government or society approves for you. The idea that you have no right to live-- unless it is to live for others and never for yourself, that you are not allowed to own anything--- except what the government 'lets you keep', is the idea that you as an individual are nothing more than a tool of the state, a resource for the ends of others. And resources, don't you know, are there to be... spent. And we all know that a government is more than eager to gleefully spend resources to the point of withering if there is no fetter.

And yet they still cry-- they took the 'hard edge' out of communism and instead sell it as Socialism, Progressivism. It's "moderate", they say, trying to appeal to others as the benefactors of humanity. Yet how can the 'moderate' forced sacrifice of others be more acceptable than the 'unmoderated' version? It is an irrational position-- on equal foot of claiming that 'moderate' murder is somehow more acceptable, 'moderate' dismemberment is somehow less horrific, and 'moderate' poisoning is not as shocking. But this is what neither liberals nor conservatives understand: that if the principle is unchanged, the results will always remain the same *regardless* of what new coat of paint is applied or what new terms are given. Socialism will always result in ruin and wreck, as the frozen corpses on Russian soil will attest or the miserable starvation of Cuba--- and 'crony' capitalism (which isn't capitalism, it's statism disguised under a name to blame capitalism) will always result, also, in ruin and wreck. Both schools seek to control, destroy freedom and obliterate choice. The *principle* is the same, the *methods* are the same, the only thing that changes is the name of the god for which either side wants to sacrifice you.

And neither will tell you that the answer is freedom and individual rights, because it carries with it their destruction: a government that only exists to ensure its constituents are free and protected from violations against their freedom is not a government of overreaching power... and both liberals and conservatives love nothing more than to tell you what to do, how much to keep, whom to marry and with whom to sleep, where to pray, where not to pray, what you can and can't buy, and what you can and can't sell.

Do you want to find the answer? Look to the air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame. There you will find a woman that has been called Mother of Exiles, but her name is simply Liberty. From her hand glows a beacon-light of reason, for only reason can grant freedom. At her feet lie the broken chains of tyranny. At this moment, you are standing at the crossroads with only two outcomes: The conservatives and liberals, in their current rhetoric, want those chains to be re-forged and bind you, the individual, to their agenda--- *what* exactly each agenda constitutes is irrelevant, it is sufficient to know that each wishes to shackle you to a different god, but a god they hold above you. The other road carries with it the rejection of all chains.

“At first, man was enslaved by the gods. But he broke their chains. Then he was enslaved by the kings. But he broke their chains. He was enslaved by his birth, by his kin, by his race. But he broke their chains. He declared to all his brothers that a man has rights which neither god nor king nor other men can take away from him, no matter what their number, for his is the right of man, and there is no right on earth above this right. And he stood on the threshold of freedom for which the blood of the centuries behind him had been spilled.”

Are you going to turn away from the threshold of freedom and return to those chains? If you do, liberty will fall and her lamp shall be extinguished. And from that darkness, it is very unlikely that anything shall ever rise again.

On Open Immigration

2011-10-10T08:10:00.000-07:00

The restrictive immigration policies that are currently in place in the United States nowadays are contrary to the spirit and principles upon which this country was founded, and they must be eliminated in favor of a system of open immigration for the sake of the country’s ideological integrity as well as its financial integrity. The very principle of the issue demands it.

Under the present immigration system, immigrants wishing to make their way in the United States face enormous obstacles: decades of accumulated baroque legislation have transformed what once was a relaxed immigration system into a veritable maze that only few are able to navigate successfully. Employers seeking to sponsor a foreign national for a work visa must, for example, invest over $7,000 in paperwork and legal fees to start the process. The following step consists of the potential employee being entered into a “lottery” in order to compete for one of the coveted visas- of which only 65,000 are granted a year by the government (should the employee be unlucky enough not to get a visa during the random lottery, his employer cannot recover the money invested). Should he be fortunate enough to secure one of the coveted visas, he must still wait six months before allowed to work for the employer. As it can be plainly seen, this system is a flagrant violation of the rights of both employer and employee: The employer finds his right to property violated the instant the government dictates whom he may or may not employ, and the immigrant in question finds his own rights violated by being treated as a potential criminal for the mere act of wishing to work. There is, in fact, no article in the Constitution which prohibits non-violent, non-criminal individuals from seeking to reside in the United States, nor is there an actual prohibition on their working on American soil (indeed, George Washington said, in his December 2^nd, 1873 address: "The bosom of America is open to receive not only the opulent and respectable stranger, but the oppressed and persecuted of all nations and religions, whom we shall welcome to a participation of all our rights and privileges, if by decency and propriety of conduct they appear to merit the enjoyment.")

Anti-immigration rhetoric in this country has seen a surge thanks to the efforts of groups such as FAIR (Federation for American Immigration Reform), founded by John Tanton, a white supremacist whose major funding comes from the Pioneer Group- another white supremacist organization whose main platform is the support of eugenics. While groups such as FAIR would gladly paint an image of a racially homogenous America, their very arguments crumble into dust upon examining any family tree.

Regardless of current status, every man, woman and child alive in the United States has an ancestor in their family tree who, at one point in history, set foot on these shores a complete stranger to its ways, its people, and its language. What awaited this traveler at the turn of the 20^th century was not a draconian process requiring thousands of dollars and Monte Carlo odds, but a rather simple medical checkup and other cursory examinations. It is a simple fact that if today’s immigration regulations were in place when the honorable ancestors of these men and women came to America, they would have been rejected and sent back… or, perhaps not wishing to go back to a country in the dawn of war, they might have jumped the border and become illegal immigrants.

Illegal immigrants become thus because, through sheer over-regulation, the government has turned the entire process of immigration into a nearly-impossible goal. Individuals not unlike the ancestors of our current prominent political figures (the O’Reillys – Irish peasants, or the Tancredos—Italian peasants) must either face the choice of staying in countries that are in strife (Mexico, Venezuela, Ecuador, Honduras), or seek to carve a new life in a freer country—even it if means risking the status of illegality. Decades ago, America welcomed such immigrants; today they must claim the promise of American freedom through the barbed wire and the border fences.

One of the common fallacies used against open immigration is that an increased number of immigrants will ‘dry up’ the job market and send the economy plummeting. This is known as the “Zero Sum Fallacy”, because it assumes that wealth and industry are a zero-sum game: that there are only so many ‘slices of the pie’ available at one point or another, and that it therefore runs out with more people 'grabbing' for then. If this argument were actually true, then the great cosmopolitan cities such as Los Angeles and New York, who have some of the highest population density in the country, would necessarily have to be wastelands of abject and complete poverty all across the board, and the arid and desolate expanses of Kansas’ small towns being shining examples of wealth and prosperity.

The fact that reality is quite the opposite points towards something that the country has known from its very inception: increased population causes an increase in the demand for skills, goods and services, and the new immigrants help ensure that those demands are covered—generating wealth and prosperity. Opponents of immigration also forget the most glaring error in their argument: That the O’Reillys, the Coulters, the Tancredos and other prominent figures are the direct beneficiaries of lax immigration laws in the past. Very few- if any- of their ancestors possessed degrees, many may not have known how to read at all. Under the immigration laws currently in place (and under their proposed, stricter laws) they would have all been turned away. Yet these ancestors were able to stay, work and prosper in America, and the most recent generations of their family trees reap the fortunate rewards whilst arguing that no-one else should have the same opportunities that their ancestors enjoyed, and from which they are currently benefitting.

Their argument even goes further towards barring any rights for anyone except American-born citizens. The very spirit of independence that created America revolts against such a notion- the ideas of monarchy and privilege by blood, where a group of people were given more rights than others because of who their fathers were, were the ideas that generated oppression against the colonies: a small sub-set of the population felt entitled to the property, income and land of others merely because of birthright. It was Thomas Payne, in his essay on Common Sense, who said “For all men being originally equals, no one by birth could have a right to set up his own family in perpetual preference to all others forever.” The idea that citizenship and the recognition of rights should only be applied to those born on US soil is the violation of that; it is the establishment of privilege by heredity, of aristocracy. And even if a person could take leave of their senses long enough to consider that argument seriously, the question arises: how far back is it to be applied?

Go back far enough, and nobody (except the Native Americans) was born on U.S. soil. Stop at any point before that, and it is simply an aleatory non-objective law. As Russian immigrant Ayn Rand pointed out, “only a non-objective law can give a statist the chance he seeks: a chance to impose his arbitrary will—his policies, his decisions, his interpretations, his enforcement, his punishment or favor—on disarmed, defenseless victims.” This is precisely what opponents of immigration- both private individuals and government functionaries- wish to achieve, they require non-objective law and prejudice to bolster their bravado, as they have no rational arguments to back their claims.

No matter how they may wish to phrase their fallacies, the irrefutable truth is that the Constitution does not discriminate in its allocation of rights between citizens and non citizens, and it also does not deny the right of any man, be he a law-abiding citizen, to live where he wishes to live. Washington D.C’s baroque and overtaxed immigration machinery has made criminals out of the kind of people who, many generations ago , might have been found descending from a boat at Ellis Island or, even further back, from the Mayflower itself.

The false dichotomy of Order and Freedom

2011-09-14T22:25:00.000-07:00

Today I was asked in class to consider the "conflicts of Order and Freedom," and I immediately noticed that the argument was a fallacious one.

The argument of freedom and the rule of law has constantly been framed as a false dichotomy: whomever usually brings the argument to fore begins from the early assumption that both concepts are anathema, and one cannot exist in the presence of another. I find this formulation flawed, as it seeks to present the argument as a false alternative.

Further contributing to the impression of a false alternative is the incorrect labeling of the concepts of “Freedom” and “Order.” Firstly, Freedom is equivocated with “Hedonism” or with “Whim”, and it often seeks to divorce the concept of freedom with the necessary contextual setting.

Firstly, no concept can truly be said to be applicable to human life if its conception is devoid and distanced from the facts of reality. When speaking of ‘freedom’ as the individual understands it, namely “The ability to choose and to act in accordance with one’s choices,” we cannot forget that we exist within the concept of a reality that is firmly established upon cause and effect, that actions have repercussions and that neither the concept nor we exist in a void, devoid of any interrelational values.

There is a distinct difference between make believe and reality, and you will often find that proponents of the false dichotomy often start from the assumption that make-believe is the desirable state when contemplating the issues of freedom (this is a tactic used in order to undermine it): They often paint people *wishing* to perform numerous acts of vandalism, or violation of rights or similar events, and then when repercussions (legal and personal) are presented upon these individuals –the argument somehow follows- it is a proof that freedom and order cannot coexist harmoniously.

What is missing from this reasoning?

A chemist decides to combine an acid with a substance that can accept hydrogen ions, an Acid-Base reaction occurs. The chemist then states that freedom does not exist, because she wanted to perform the combination without causing a reaction, despite her ample chemical knowledge which tells her that this is impossible. What has the chemist done? The answer is simple: An evasion of the facts of reality.

Every person is free to choose the course of action ahead of them. However, these actions do not occur in a vacuum, and they do not occur divorced from the rules of the world in which they are made. Just like the chemist who wished to combine reactive elements without causing a reaction, anyone who believes that freedom means actions without consequences (causes without effects) is practicing a willful denial of reality—and while one can try to escape reality, one cannot escape the consequences of attempting to escape reality.
We are free to invest our money, but we must use our rational minds to gauge the viability of different possible sources of investment as well as the risk each one of them incurs, knowing there is no such thing as a risk-free investment . Even in a stable market the onset of war, undetected natural disasters and similar events can bring about unexpected results. To enter into such an investment and willfully ignore the potential risks, to not prepare for them in case they happen, in the hope that not acknowledging them will prevent them from happening is to ignore how reality works.

This is not an issue of freedom, but an issue of irrational thought. You are also free to be irrational, but you cannot escape the consequences that accompany being irrational.

When we choose to perform an action that we know violates someone’s rights (theft, extortion, kidnapping, murder, etcetera), unless we suffer from an actual mental impediment, we are quite *aware* of the nature of the action, and of the accompanying consequences. We have the *freedom* to choose this particular set of actions, but if we do so then we also have the *responsibility* to accept the accompanying consequences.
It is then that it becomes clear that any debate upon freedom and order which does not hold responsibility as part of the equation is therefore an attempt to create a straw man out of freedom through misrepresentation. To discuss freedom without responsibility is to attempt to contemplate effects without causes.

Finally, to put both terms in their most appropriate definitions, I would like to propose the following definition of “Freedom”:

In a political context, Freedom is the protection of the individual *from* the coercive force of other individuals and from unwarranted coercive force by government itself. This does not include freedom from the laws of nature, or to circumvent cause and effect. “Order”, in this context being the rule of law, exists to safeguard that freedom and the individual rights from which it is derived. In a properly structured framework, therefore, Freedom and Order *cannot* conflict.

The Old Hope Peddler

2010-07-22T01:15:00.001-07:00

In Tom Lehrer’s whimsical song, The Old Dope Peddler, the witty mathematician uses the sentimental underpinnings of the Victorian trade song (songs dedicated to chimney-sweeps or lamplighters, etc, which romanticize the activities undertaken by these tradesmen) to describe the activities of the local dope peddler thus:

“He gives the kids free samples,
Because he knows full well
That today's young innocent faces
Will be tomorrow's clientele.
Here's a cure for all your troubles,
Here's an end to all distress.
It's the old dope peddler
With his powdered ha-happiness.”

Lehrer’s satirical song serves to poke fun at the (often false) sentimentalism present in the genre. The lyrics, however, could also accurately describe the kind of tradesman that makes his rounds in our present day and age: The political Hope peddler.

This is not an article attacking Barack Obama exclusively. Obama is nothing more than the symptom of a political and philosophical illness that has been plaguing the country for generations, to focus solely on him would be to miss the point altogether and to make a false identification of the issue.

Firstly we cannot truly ignore that, at the center of the current presidential debate, the issue of racism is present, but only as a sub-set of tribalism. Supporters of Barack Obama will accuse his detractors of racism because some oppose him because of his race. Yet they avoid the equally damning implication that many of them, his supporters, voted for him to ascend to the presidency precisely because of his race. True to today’s lack of critical thinking, his supporters think nothing of it, but the truth behind the matter is that making a judgment- whether positive or negative- on a person based on his race is , in fact, being racist: You are ignoring all of the person’s attributes that matter (mind, principles, morals, track record, etc) and holding up an accidental and arbitrary condition (the inherited color of one’s skin) as the measure by which someone is weighed. Anyone who finds themselves doing this either favorably or negatively towards someone is guilty of irrational tribalism, which is a denigrating position towards the human condition.

But tribalism is only one aspect of the situation- it is, rather, a tool being used by the most troublesome issue: The King Arthur Syndrome.

The Once And Future King, Arthur Pendragon, emerged out of nowhere during a time of great turmoil in his land. He fought against his enemies and united the realm and into a period of golden peace. Said peace was shattered from within and Arthur was lost to his land—but, the legend says, he will return once more at a time where the land cries for him and fear conquers everyone. Then he will return from the Island of Avalon to guide his land once more into a new golden era.

The legend is, of course, familiar to almost all of us. Every country has a variation of it, and religions have their own patented versions: Jesus, Mithra, Mohammed. Since time immemorial storytellers have spun tales of rescue and redemption which our grandparents heard as children and passed it on to their children, and they in turn…

While some are apt to dismiss the importance of stories, Bruno Bettelheim’s The Uses Of Enchantment demonstrated to us that stories, specially old ones, have great significance to us as human beings: older than religions, even older than the first philosophies themselves, the first primitive stories were rough attempts at creating a sense of understanding of our world, attempts at imparting significant knowledge, important enough to be memorized and transmitted.

British author Terry Pratchett made an allusion to us not as Homo Sapiens but as Pans Narrans, the storytelling ape. This is because, he says, one of the processes by which we come to understand the universe and create a framework of knowledge is by creating ‘stories’ – in its most primitive sense, we could see it as our ancestors trying to explain lightning by creating Thor or Zeus, but it becomes much more complicated than that: our understanding of causality can be seen as an extension of our ability to create ‘stories’, that is: we understand that B happens because A acted upon it.

The relationship of cause and effect is created in the context of a story- albeit one much more complex than the simple stories of childhood and primitive tribes. Another name for the Pans Narrans ‘stories’, you might say, could be the metaphysical abstraction of cause and effect. It might well be that we are uniquely suited to interact with the universe and identify its properties because we have trained ourselves over centuries to organize our observations in this manner, in an ever-increasing level of complexity. Our storytelling, then, was nothing more than our capacity for reason and causal observation making its nascent debut.

Stories, therefore, have power, specially the old ones. They are powerful in our psyche because we perceive them as important, anything that has survived that long has to be, we assume. This is the general kind of assumption that leads to a worship of tradition for tradition’s sake.

However, just like those stories about Thor and Zeus were dead wrong, as it were, many of the stories we have grown to regard as true by virtue of their antiquity are just as wrong. When left unexamined, they can act as subconscious influences, unspoken assumptions, that guide our beliefs and our thoughts without our full understanding—we may feel a certain way about an issue, but we can’t say why it feels right. We merely assume that because it feels one way, then it must be so.

There is nothing more dangerous than an unexamined premise – a story that you have come to believe as true but about which you have never really asked yourself the why or how it can be true. These are our secret betrayers in more ways than one: it is the tools that others use to goad us into surrendering to them.

In Terry Pratchett’s fantasy novel “Witches Abroad,” The heroine (one Granny Weatherwax, witch) must face the great harm caused by a very powerful person who has managed to get a whole country to submit to them. How does this woman control a whole nation? Through stories.

This being a fantasy novel (and semi-humorous in nature) the control actually occurs in a literal re-telling of stories: Stories, Pratchett writes, are units of curved space-time, grooves in the riverbed of history that grow deeper and more powerful with each re-enactment. The villainess in the book ‘feeds’ these stories—essentially, she sacrifices people to these stories, who trap them and force them into a predestined succession of events. In the process, the stories become stronger and the villainess, who depends on them, grows even more powerful.

Pratchett’s imagery here is not far off the mark. It has long been the tactic of snake oil salesmen and mountebanks to prey upon the hopes and dreams of people: they adopt the roles that they believe people want to believe in. They become them or, even more cunningly, they allow themselves to become ambiguous enough that people begin to project upon them the narratives they wished to see (an effect satirized with true accuracy in the Peter Seller’s movie “Being There.”)

Thus, one of the oldest stories in the book is that of the King Arthur figure and his promise of hope. Most people, to some degree or another, have come to accept the premise of this story as true: either from religious indoctrination or through social rhetoric--- the true core of the Arthurian story is that of a relinquishing of all responsibility. In effect, people long for Arthur’s return not for the undoing of injustices heaped upon them by others, but rather for the undoing of mistakes caused by themselves! To desire to be rescued implies a helplessness and a state of victimhood from which one cannot escape. It is essentially the statement: “I have gotten myself into this mess, but I cannot get myself out of it.” Because we cannot save ourselves, someone else must do it for us.

But this is one of those wrong stories we have told ourselves: No-one can save each and every one of us from his or her mistakes but the same person who made them. Cause and effect cannot be overthrown so easily—at all, actually. A company that put itself into debt will fail, regardless of whether a government throws the appropriated funds of its citizens at it—the incompetence (the cause) has not been solved bur rather rewarded, so failure (the effect) will eventually come.

Likewise, if we continue to believe the Arthurian story, we will constantly be in the lookout for someone else to save us from the consequences of our own actions—we will not even consider that the solution lies in our own hands. And this is precisely what the Hope Peddler is counting on.

The peddler will take the guise that you need to see- he will promise to be your King Arthur, your Jesus and Mohammed all rolled into one. He will promise you the moon and the stars—and you will surrender your power to him, juts as long as you don’t have to be the person doing anything at all. As long as you have given up the possibility of responsibility and personal accountability, you will continue falling over and over again for the hope peddler.

The desire to see a King Arthur upon his Camelotean throne was so strong that many Americans decided to vote for Barack Obama not for his track record (he barely had one) or his principles (he never defined them), but rather because he seemed like a King Arthur on the make: a minority candidate who faced certain hostility (Arthur was mocked as a bastard had to fight to be recognized as the legitimate Dux Bretonnum and even had to go to war against rebel kings before he could claim the throne) and who promised to be The Different One and bring change never seen before (as Arthur did to the divided Britannia.)

Now that it is late for bedtime stories, many Americans are realizing that this isn’t Malory’s “La Morte D’Artur” after all, but rather another old story: The one where a clever politician manages to rise to power by playing upon a deep-seated desire to see one particular fairy-tale come to pass. It happened before with George W. Bush (no defender of Freedom was he who designed the Patriot Act) and Bill Clinton (who signed the Defense of Marriage Act into law, despite the support of gays and lesbians whom he so readily courted during his campaign) and further back still… as Mrs. Potts says in Beauty and the Beast: “Tale as old as time…”

Hope is a loaded word nowadays, specially since the dust of the presidential elections marathon hasn’t washed completely off it, but if one is to be rid of the Arthurian legend, one must come to one realization alone: That hope itself must die if the world is to be.

We have associated the word ‘hope’ with many positive connotations, but nevertheless the core of it remains the same: The expectation that, somehow, events will turn out for the best. How? We don’t know. By whom? We don’t know either. By what method? Same answer. The almost mystical tone by which many utter the word demonstrates that it is an expression of wishful thinking, that in our society it has now become a replacement for the How, Where and By Whom.

This is all part of The Story, though it may not seem so at first glance: For there to be a King Arthur, there must first exist a hope of his arrival. The desire for a savior and the possibility of salvation through proxy are inextricably linked and are dependant upon the metaphysical conception of man that the individual has. If he believes that the individual is helpless, then hope and a savior are necessary, if the individual desires to remain alive—for if he is helpless and his lot can never improve, then the only correct course left to him is suicide.

Thus if we are to truly save ourselves two things must happen: Hope and the Savior must die a permanent death, and we must not look to anybody else but each and every one of us, his own individual, as the answer, and not a third party with the investiture of promised hope.

“The man who who lets a leader prescribe his course is a wreck being towed to the scrap heap. “ –Ayn Rand, For The New Intellectual.

A glimpse into an evil mind

2010-06-14T14:57:00.000-07:00

J.M. Bernstein is University Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research and the author of five books. In our modern society, I wold say he is the shining example of the evil kind of minds that our current post-modernist schools of philosophy engender.

Post-modernist philosophy, which in itself owes its deeper roots to the insane ramblings of Immanuel Kant and company, is deeply rooted in the abhorrence of the human mind. Its principal stance is that knowledge and certainty are forever impossible to the human mind, they attack the individual as impotent and meaningless and at the very core of its beliefs is the malevolent universe image of man as nothing more than an insignificant biological construct, impotent and awash in the streams of the cosmos where meaning is impossible for him.

In short, the desire of these evil (for they necessarily must be labeled as such, since what fuels them is the hatred of the very nature of man) philosophies is to strip the individual of his self-esteem and reduce him to an obedient, accepting fool who is incapable of questioning neither orders nor his own role in the universe.

From Communism to Statism, Socialism, Religion and Fascsm, the philosophical core of hatred for the individual and his ability to determine his life on his own terms has been active and constantly attacking. It is needless to mention the historical examples of these philosophical bases at play-- they are always the same, and they always have the same core of action: The sacrifice of the individual whether for god/religion or "The common good/society/the party/the state" (taking a larger group of people as more significant and important than the individual simply because there are more of them than him, making sure he knows that he is chained to them to do as they deem proper, this is what we call Social Metahysics: replacing the standards of reality and the nature of the universe with the rule of the mob), and those who collect the sacrificial offerings are always the one in control and who determine what "God" or "The People" want.

In his newest opinion piece in the New York times, Bernstein proceeds to spill his insidious philosophy of destruction by *apparetly* attacking the Tea Party. However, Bernstein is not a very deft philosopher (indeed, he is no philosopher at al) and, in rather clumsy rhetoric, allows his true target to become evident: Attack of the individual. Bernstein actually dares to say that there is no such thing as an individual (never questioning, of course, the fact that the clothes he chooses to wear are not exactly the same as everybody's, or that the music he likes, the books he reads, etcetera... and that is the argument itsef only on the shallow level, which is al Bernstein is capable of anyways). Watch him and you will see his insidious nature coming through. Can you tell how he wants to attack your self-esteem, to make you think you are something less than you are, that you owe your life and your existence to others without any self-worth of your own?

Quoted from the Article:

"Sometimes it is hard to know where politics ends and metaphysics begins: when, that is, the stakes of a political dispute concern not simply a clash of competing ideas and values but a clash about what is real and what is not, what can be said to exist on its own and what owes its existence to an other.

[...]

The opposing metaphysical claim, the one I take to be true, is that the very idea of the autonomous subject is an institution, an artifact created by the practices of modern life: the intimate family, the market economy, the liberal state.

[...]

The issue here is a central one in modern philosophy: is individual autonomy an irreducible metaphysical given or a social creation?

[...]

In love I regard you as of such value and importance that I spontaneously set aside my egoistic desires and interests and align them with yours: your ends are my desires, I desire that you flourish, and when you flourish I do, too.

[...]

All the rhetoric of self-sufficiency, all the grand talk of wanting to be left alone is just the hollow insistence of the bereft lover that she can and will survive without her beloved.

[...]

The great and inspiring metaphysical fantasy of independence and freedom is simply a fantasy of destruction. "

There are too many quotes here to address, but each and every one of them are monstrous. However there is *one* thing that can be said which summarizes his article, and his post-modern philosophy perfectly:

Beware of the man who tells you freedom is an illusion, for he is the one who wields the chains with which he seeks to hold you captive, physically, intellectually, or both.

As for the Tea Party? I understand where their reaction comes from: It is a sense-of-life reaction to encroaching government control and an increasingly corrupt political machinery. Nevertheless, although their reaction may be the right one, there is one great thing missing that makes the movement both aimless and contradictory: the establishment of firm philosophical principles to defend their stance. Without a coherent philosophy that reflects the metaphysical nature of reality, any ethics or codes created will inevitably work against the nature of the individual. Without a coherent core philosophy, the individual ends up adopting contradictory or absurd stances (For example, "Demoratic Socialism", "Anarco-Capitalism", "Socialist Libetarian", etcetera).

It is no surprise that the Tea Party movement, like the Libertarian Party, is a hodge-podge grab-bag of statements, codes and principles, but they are all "floating abstraction"-- that is, philosophical stances or beliefs that have no direct relationship to actual reality, and which have never been subjected to the had scrutiny of an epistemological examination by the individual, and thus remain dissociated and unexamined.

I once said that "A libertarian is someone who stands for liberty but doesn't know why, would fight for individual rights if he knew how, and seeks to steer the country in the right direction-- if only he knew which way that was. A mind so open the wind whistles through it, it is alien to principle and more full of fundamental contradictions than the beach is of seagulls." This is, unfortunately, also true of the Tea Party movement in its great majority. This is because a sense-of-life movement (a sense of life an emotional, subconsciously integrated appraisal of man and of existence- it denotes the very core of someone's emotional responses and the essence of his character.) is no substitute for an intellectual movement.

This is because your sense of life, your subconscious reaction, is simply not the equal of explicit knowledge when it comes to the implementation of a philosophical frame into practical reality. Those values which you can't identify but only 'sort of feel' are not values you control. The Tea Partiers and Libetarians, for example, might sense that freedom is a right and that any hampering of freedom of the individual (as long as he does not infringe upon the individual rights and freedoms of others) by the government is wrong. This is correct. Yet, when you delve and ask them to explain why, more often than not they will not be able to tell you the reason. Some, like Glenn Beck, will even resort to telling you that "rights come from God," at which point the hopes of a rational argument being constructed are very much *over.*

The reason for this is that they are operating solely on a sense-of-life basis without any actual understanding of the nature of principle, or even the nature of philosophy as a rational, every-day applicabe discipline (how could they? For centuries sine Kant we have been taught that philosophy does not relate at al to the real world!)

The problem here is twofold: The post-modernist and collectivists know exactly *what* to attack to destroy the individual's self-assurance: his mind and his self-esteem. Yet those who would defend the individual and his freedoms today seem completely ignorant as to what, in the metaphysical nature of the universe, makes the stance of individual rights and freedoms the correct one. Until they realize where they must look, their ideological stances will be cannon fodder for evil minds such as Bernstein's.

Being An Accomplice

2010-05-09T07:14:00.001-07:00

There is a great deal of attention being paid to Jason Chen, editor of Gizmodo, whose house and computers were raided by the police due to his possession of the newest-generation iPhone. Apple is getting the blame, people are crying foul and they claim freedom of speech rights are being violated.

This is where we have to hand Mr. Chen, and the media, a reality check. It's very simple, really: Jason Chen was an accomplice to theft.

California law states that anyone who finds lost property and knows who the likely owner is, but "appropriates such property to his own use" is guilty of theft. Taking property valued at more than $400 can result in more serious charges of grand theft. In my view the case is pretty open-and-close: Jason Chen, the editor, is an accessory to theft.

Regardless of what the law says, principle alone underlines the correct action that Chen should have taken upon finding the iPhone’s seller: report the seller to the police and the owners of the device, namely Apple. Instead, Chen willingly and knowingly ignored who the real owners of the prototype were and instead sought to use it to his own benefit: He chose to be ‘pragmatic’ about it, and now he is crying foul because he was brought to bear the full consequence of his actions.

Being a journalist does not exempt him from the logical repercussions of breaking the law, specially when the law in question has a solid moral foundation (property rights have solid moral foundations.) He paid for property he knew was either stolen or misplaced, he knew who the legal owner was, and still he chose not to return the property but to profit from it.

Journalism has nothing to do with it, it's the conscious violation of someone else's property rights whilst under the guise of journalism. While Mr. Chen may have thought the scoop was juicy enough, unfortunately the fact that he obtained it through illegal and unprincipled methods is still a fact.

On Ecuadorean Socialism

2010-05-03T12:35:00.001-07:00

By carlos Endara, translated.

It is not a habit of mine to watch national television, much less the channels which are owned by the government. Nevertheless, this morning whilst zapping through channels I was surprised to catch journalist Carlos Ochoa speaking against private news media.
I say that I was surprise due to the audacity by which this journalist commented. He criticized the fact that journalistic media only responds to the interests of their owners. Should they, then, respond to Mr. Ochoa's interests? Apparently Mr. Ochoa has no understanding of the concept of private property- in the end, if he dislikes some things that are said in certain private media, then he has the option of simply not watching them.

What is serious, however, is that Ochoa -a journalist- does not understand that the airspace and the salary he receives for being on television are both paid by Ecuadorean taxes and that he should dedicate himself to the objective presentation of the news instead of campaigning for the government, repeating the same slogans and bromides heard from the rank-and-file of the poorly-named twenty-first century Socialism.

(Translator note: Here Mr. Endara fails to see the correlation of government-owned institutions and the rise of propaganda and infringement of freedom of speech. Any government-run institution will naturally work in accordance with that government's agenda, and will act in as demagogic a way as it can. When taxes are used as a carte blanche to fund institutions that should be *properly* private, you create institutions that cannot be held accountable for their distortions, immorality and abuse because they are backed by the government.)

Ochoa himself complained that he had been dismissed from the channel Teleamazonas due to having expressed opinions that were not in step with the owners of the channel. Once I heard hearing the stream of nonsense that poured forth from his mouth this morning, I came to the conclusion that would have fired him too. Nevertheless, he has the audacity to make this complaint after I have seen a video -recorded secretly by TC television employees (a channel that is now in the hands of the state)- where the government-assigned administrator told the employees that if they didn't agree with what he said (concerning the censorship of a segment) "They could pass by Human Resources and file their resignations"-- the situation? During a cooking segment, one of the censored segments warned viewers about price inflation concerning some ingredients (This video can be seen on youtube under the words "Censura TC televisión")

How, then, can Ochoa criticize the private sector when, from the rank-and-file of the ill-named "Citizen Revolution", we have seen and continue to see even worse things?

(Note: Endara fails to make the final link-- what Socialism and Communism decry is *not* the act of determining what is being said on a private medium. Rather, Socialism believes there should be no such thing as a private medium that individuals have no right to determine what is being done with their property or how it is being portrayed- but instead it believes that there should be collectively-owned media, and that the *only* ones who can determine what *anyone* says, it is *them.* It seeks to replace the freedom of self-determination with the slavery of collective imposition.)

Slavery or Freedom: The essential principle

2010-03-24T09:47:00.001-07:00

I wish to bring to the fore the question that seems to be ignored by everybody else on the healthcare debate: At whose expense? And where , on a constitutional and philosophical level, do you have an obligation to pay for taxes (and I am looking to both the constitution and metaphysics)? Is it simply because the government says you have said obligation (if so, is there a qualificative standard, or is it always what the government says)? How does that obligation (which seems to be a Kantian categorical imperative) not contradict the right to life or property? Rights do not occur halfway or by compromise- you either have the freedom to dispose of your property according to your own judgments, or you do not and the State (or your neighbors, etcetera) have a claim to it.

There is no metaphysical existent between freedom and slavery- either you are free or you are not, either you are chained by obligations you have not freely undertaken (Kant's categorical imperative), or you are not and are free to undertake them or reject them. Morality does not deal with commandments and forced imperatives: it is a code of ethics created through logic and reason, and therefore it cannot feature nor accept imposition through force, nor it cannot concern itself with tactics that result in its forceful imposition. So either we must speak of a free country where you are free to dispose and manage your property, or a captive country where your life and your property are enslaved to the government.
The first is a model that is in synch with the principles under which this country was founded. The second is pretty much the kind of country that the founders escaped from.

The basic moral principle is reduced to this: Using legislative force someone's property (and thus their right to life) to be used not in accordance to the owner's judgment but in accordance to the tenements of a ruling class (whether monarchy, collective, etc) is slavery: it destroys the concept of ownership and property and fundamentally overthrows the concept of right to life.

Finally: The right to life does *not* include the right to healthcare. Healthcare, just like happiness, is something to be pursued- not guaranteed nor given by the government, because it is not a resource that happens without the intervention of individuals but in fact it happens *because* of free individuals. Healthcare is a product that relies on the resources and dedication, work and investment of said individuals, and it is right and moral for them to be able to make a livelihood out of it- otherwise they have no reason to put in the long hours to receive measly payment and to be unable to execute their own judgments but rather obey the tenements of a board of bureaucrats (not unlike how teachers must bend to the government curriculum, the result of that is plain to see).

You cannot demand the fruit of their efforts be given to you and contravene the process by which the producers may receive the just reward for their efforts through exchange any more than if you decide that 'happiness' is tantamount to the Hearst Castle and therefore the government must grant you it without your actually having to buy it.

Thoughts on the healthcare debate

2010-03-23T22:13:00.001-07:00

From replies to “Edgar”

“Edgar” is a friend of a friend on Facebook. The following paragraphs comprise my replies to him concerning the Healthcare issue, which reflect my own stance. Edgar replied, and I am including the reply to provide a full context. My purpose here is to provide a full context for the understanding of the issues surrounding the bill, specially from an Objectivist point of view. I would like to mention that my intention here is purely to illustrate, not to in any way be derogative towards Edgar- as I have not been during our conversation. Despite our disagreement on the issue I found him much more approachable and rational than a colleague with whom I discussed this many months ago and with whom I no longer interact by choice. Edgar is not his real name, nor his Facebook name.

(To my friend, who seems in favor of the bill, I said:) It is very dishonest to support bills where private property -in this case money- is forced from you to pay for something that is constitutionally *not* a right, and which will cause a serious upheaval in both quality and process (need I point out the effectiveness of public schools? Or the post office?) I do not like Limbaugh nor Beck, nor would I ever say I have the same background as they do-- but as far as the healthcare bill, I oppose it absolutely on principle.

It is unconstitutional, and the worst part of it is that everybody seems to think government intervention will solve the issue, when the initial imbalance in health care (such as the forcing of employment-based insurance over individual insurance, HMOs, forbidding insurance companies from competing across state borders, etcetera) was caused by government.

Edgar’s Reply:

So forcing money from citizens to pay for a war that they may or not support is not dishonest? Last I checked, the constitution put life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness over bombing third world countries...which makes healthcare of a right than war.

And as long as we're on the subject of dishonesty, let's talk about spreading absurd lies left and right about death panels, forced abortion, and evil socialist conspirators to scare the American people into not supporting healthcare reform. I believe that's a little thing called terrorist tactics. Hmmm...

I'm not saying this healthcare bill is going to solve all the problems, but it's a hell of a lot better than sitting around twiddling our thumbs acting like there's not a healthcare crisis while honest, hardworking Americans are suffering and dying everyday because they can't afford to pay Kaiser Permanente $200 a month just so that when something does go wrong they can be denied coverage for whatever loophole reason Kaiser can come up with.

My Reply:

Edgar: You are making several fallacies and errors of equivocation here. the biggest one is assuming Ii have used and supported the same arguments you have quoted and ridiculed above-- I have not. I would prefer to speak of the issue on principle and without hyperbole. Otherwise, I'm afraid you do yourself the same disservice that the aforementioned brainless pundits do to themselves, and no benefit can come from the discussion.

PS: I have not only traveled 'outside' of the little bubble of denial. I come from without, and I have seen firsthand the results, in practice, of bills like these.

Edgar’s Reply:

I was simply pointing out your own fallacy of accusing Josh and anyone who supports healthcare reform of being dishonest, and arguing your implied statement that the health and well-being for ALL of America's citizens is not a constitutional right covered under the opening statements of said constitution.

There is nothing dishonest about supporting something you believe in, or arguing against something you don't. If you don't agree with Josh and others who support the bill, fine, but don't say that their opinion makes them dishonest.

I also did not say or even assume for that matter that you had claimed or supported those arguments. I merely brought up those examples to make the point that accusations of dishonesty might be better pointed elsewhere.

Lastly, the bubble discussion was not aimed at you but at the ignoramuses such as Limbaugh who live in their little fantasy land where everybody else in the world worships America and believe that the sun shines out of our asses.

I have also traveled abroad widely and have seen the reverse of your experience and seen the positive effects that socialized healthcare have brought to many countries - and seen the negative effects of countries that do not provide healthcare for their citizens. Yes, there are some places where it does more harm than good, but the same can be said of just about anything.

The fact of the matter is that this country is in a health care crisis. We can either sit around twiddling our thumbs acting like nothing's wrong while people are suffering and dying, or we can try to do something about it. I have yet to hear any of the protesters offer any kind of alternative to Obama's plan, which of course is not perfect but at least it's SOMETHING.

My Reply: Actually Edgar, there is no fallacy here: If you are in favor of a bill that expropriates the property of others to cover something which is not a right*, to guaranty by force the distribution thereof, you *are* essentially supporting a dishonest and unconstitutional bill. We can move on to the other points afterwards, but you must first understand the first basic point that rests on principle alone: You *cannot* be honest *and* at the same time favor a dishonest policy. Regardless of what the 'intention' is, any rational thinking person cannot allow himself the benefit of dissociating the relationship between ends and means any more than he can try to dissociate the relationship between cause and effect. Both are factors of reality that are unavoidable, to the point that you cannot even avoid the consequences of trying to avoid them.

If you understand the principle at work you won't need to point out the irrationalities of the Iraq plan (note: I am of the position that Iraq should not have been an issue at all by then, if Hussein had been deposed properly as it should have happened- with Al Quaeda and Afghanistan being the proper focus of the operation) as an attempt to undermine my argument: You would understand that both issues are covered by the same principle and both have the same answer.

The constitution grants you rights, said rights are things you can exercise for yourself under your own autonomy- . If healthcare were a right it would carry the intrinsic understanding that, therefore, you now have the right to the effort and products of other individuals. Study the constitution and constitutional law-- in no case does the constitution allow for that, because it would be an immediate violation of one of the constitutional rights: The right to property, which is tantamount to your right to Life (without property, you cannot dispose of your life or nurture it). Notice one particular wording here: The PURSUIT of happiness. It does not *guarantee* you happiness, it is yours to pursue-- and rightfully so, for no-one is obliged to make you happy.

The whole issue has been twisted by several factors. It is a convenient distortion to forget that a few generations ago health care was affordable, and even those who could not fully afford it were usually given care under privately-funded charities, initiatives or groups of individuals. If you look at the history of healthcare you might find some interesting correlations. Why is employment-based insurance now almost the only way you can get insurance? Look into government intervention and you'll find the reason. Why do you have to pay such exorbitant amounts for your insurance?"

Insurance companies, by law, are forced to include a package of procedures and conditions. If you were free to tailor your insurance to cover precisely what you wanted, you wouldn't have to pay as much-- but go through the laws that are imposed upon insurance and you'll find out that even in the most basic insurance packages, there are procedures required by law which you would hardly ever need. Yet they are there, and it is illegal to get an insurance package without them.

Second point: Government forbids insurance companies from competing across state borders. Why should a company need to be fully affordable when Government regulations (HMOS, etc) require you to ideally have insurance to deal with hospitals (making it, thus, a forced necessity) and the same Government which prevents any company outside of state borders from competing against it? You have an artificially inflated AND reduced market at the same time: Were insurance companies allowed to compete across borders then they would have to compete on prices, the lowest attracting the largest clientele- specially if they were not required by law to cover a set package of procedures (and thus not being able to truly tailor down prices).

Add to this the inefficient fraudulent medical malpractice suits that hospitals have to cover for (since there has been no tort reform) and when you step back the only possible solution here is that the government, through its intervention, has created this panorama. And this is the same government that you are relying on to aminorate healthcare costs, somehow, through even more regulations, comittees and boards.

Are you aware of what kind of politicized environment doctors and hospitals have to navigate today? Look at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJjhEr9tT0I and listen for a moment. Do you truly believe that the regulation-fanatical government that created this environment is going to be any better? Hardly. All that is gong on are the ripples of the initial meddling. Are insurance companies, doctors and hospitals ripping you off? of course. But they are doing so because they went to bed with the government. Something, indeed, has to be done, but that something is not giving government more control over a field it has already disfigured.

I forgot to add: I'm not accusing Josh of being a thief, I am advising him that the course of action taken by the bill and the methods through which it is to be implemented is not an honest one. I am very aware that a great deal of people who favored this bill did so for emotional reasons, and they feel good about it.
Nevertheless, emotion is not a tool of cognition, it is merely a reactive system. It will not tell us what is a proper, principled and moral course of action *unless* we have already consciously and rationally pondered the values and premises. Otherwise all an emotion will tell us is how we *feel* about one particular issue or another-- not whether the conclusion is right or wrong.

The debate on health care in this country has remained solely at the emotional level. This is not a surprise: the gaps left by most levels of schooling include rational and critical thinking, as we value 'sensitivity' over reason. It is perfectly understandable that it disturb others that a large number of people lack health care or are in dire straits to cover it. It is natural to wish to do something about it- nevertheless the emotional reaction, the immediate gut level assumption is for everybody to have what they lack. Because reason is divorced from this debate, the question of "At what cost?" Is not asked right away- and when it is asked, the immediate emotional response is to ascribe the cost to whomever is most unsympathetic--- anyone who is making more money than we are.

After all, we have come to think of people with more income than us as evil, greedy and somehow indebted to us-- these are all emotional judgments, no rational judgment could possibly arrive at the conclusion that someone's wealth is intrinsically gained out of stealing from people. A rational mind can distinguish between a wealthy man or woman who made a fortune through hard work and a dishonest person who made a fortune through extortion, government canoodling or similar shady deals-- in short, a rational man would consider grouping all wealthy people under the emotionally charged category of evil, simply because of the fact that they *have* wealth, as inconceivable- just as it would be reticent to ascribe racial stereotypes, preferring instead to deal with each individual as presented.

The initial reaction to 'make it available to everyone' at the 'cost of the rich' rests on the same violation of the constitutional right to Life and Property: Health care is something that is produced by professionals-- doctors train for a decade or more to become trained professionals, chemists and researchers require resources to attack new diseases and create new medicines to tackle difficult ones.
Everything involved in health care requires a cost- nothing is free, and it is right and proper for those involved to be able to make money off it. Profit fuels further research and keeps the field of medicine sustainable considering the amount of resources and work that have to go into it. Forcing the government to 'make' healthcare affordable is essentially asking government to counterfeit reality: you are essentially asking government to interfere and falsify the requirements involved, to lower the prices and essentially run at a deficit (the same way it has run most schools and the now bankrupt Post Office)-- to boot further shackled by all of the mandates it will impose on professionals.

Nothing in the constitution entitles you to force the government, through law, to give you the fruit of the effort of others. By the right of property that fruit belongs to them just as the fruit of your efforts- your money, your career, etcetera- belong to you. It is a further flagrant dissociation of principle to justify this by saying that only a number of people- i.e. the wealthy- will have to pay for it, since you are essentially favoring government intervention into the property of other people... to benefit you.

Because this is an emotional reaction, it fails to contemplate this: Since your qualifier to advocate government theft against wealthy people (so that you may have their money) is that they have "too much", then shouldn't that qualifier also force you to be equally victimized by the government in favor of a lower tier, since by their standards you - who are not destitute- would have "too much?" The rational mind would not only see the violation of constitutional principle here but also the fact that the questions "by what standard of 'too much'?", "How far does that standard apply?" and "What makes that standard a right moral standard?" were never asked at all.
To put it very simply: To use the government to force others to provide a service to you, by legislative force, is a violation of the Right To Life. If your private property and your career are not yours to handle at your discretion, then the metaphysical statement is very simple: Your life does not belong to you, but to The State. This isn't an oversimplification, this isn't an alarmist rhetoric, this is a fact- an individual cannot claim a right to his life if the means by which he is to shelter, nourish and flourish that life- his property (physical and intellectual)- are denied him.

That healthcare is a much violated system, we're in agreement. However the steps towards rectifying it are not to hand more power to the jailors, but demand their retreat. With tort reform, freedom of insurance (which includes the ability to choose as few or as many procedures as you wish covered, which will bring about the resurgence of individual insurance policies since there will actually be a market for it), freedom of competition (allow them to compete across state borders) and freedom of dealing (get rid of HMOs and similar government mandates/bureaucrats and regulations that work as an obstacle between doctor and patient) and you will have a drastically changed system.

Will there be people who won't be able to afford it? There always will be. Instead of turning to the government, however, to take care of them--- why don't you take care of them? By the 'you' I am encompassing everyone. If we had more of our income readily available to us (as opposed to taxed) we would be able to invest in as many or as few private charities and initiatives as we wished.

Obviously you are concerned about your fellow man, and it's obvious there are many, many others who share that concern. Therefore, why not create associations, charities, initiatives, etcetera, that will help people? They won't be government-run, so that means that you can actually hold them ACCOUNTABLE.

You can't sue the government if the government doesn't want to be sued. A private institution, however, can be sued for fraud, for negligence, etcetera-- that is, it can be held accountable. Is it REALLY preferable to have the government hold the reins? Have you ever even noticed how hard it is to fire a government-employed teacher? There are countless accounts of terrible teachers who continue in government-run schools because the process to fire them is far more expensive and time-consuming than the process of hiring a new one. Is that what you want for your healthcare too?

It all boils down to principle: The government isn't here to give you what you *feel* you should have. It is here to run the courts, maintain the law and uphold your rights-- not the rights you *feel* you should have, but the rights you *have*.

If you feel there is a lack in one sector or another, do what Americans have done for countless generations, that which gave this country- once upon a time before the age of government nannies- its moniker as the land of opportunity: Do something about it. Get like-minded individuals, move on the private sector, rally up, organize, and execute.

You don't need the government for that.

The question that should follow is this: If you aren't willing to invest time or money in this privately, why should everybody else have to pay and be forced to contribute to something for which you yourself can't be bothered to participate? And if you can, indeed, do it, why need the government at all- specially in an area where it is unconstitutional for it to intervene? Feelings and emotions and feeling good about something is fine, but it is the mind who must work to ensure that what is done is done rightly.

I forgot to add: there have been plenty of people offering alternatives, and very sound alternatives, to Obama's plan. The media has focused solely, however, on the Republican and Democrat debate. Unless you've done research outside of those two fields, you probably haven't heard of them. Just as the political nature of the parties has now become completely alien to the constitution, the shallow nature of journalism in the country has become alien to the diverse reality of the land.

Tom Hanks, Polar Bears and Bronx Cheers

2010-03-18T12:03:00.001-07:00

From “Rule Of Reason”, cross-posted by Metablog

The Sands of Iwo Jima, according to Tom Hanks
Actor/Producer Tom Hanks made some unconventional, controversial remarks about the Pacific campaign during World War II. He more or less claimed that the conflict between American and Japanese forces was motivated by racism, not by ideas. Let me rephrase that: It was more a matter of American racism than it was stopping Imperial Japan’s version of Nazi’s Germany’s Lebensraum, a policy that could just as well have included the annexation of the West Coast if the U.S. had not recovered from Pearl Harbor.

“Back in World War II,” he says, “we viewed the Japanese as ‘yellow, slant-eyed dogs’ that believed in different gods. They were out to kill us because our way of living was different. We, in turn, wanted to annihilate them because they were different. Does that sound familiar, by any chance, to what’s going on today?”

One really is at a loss to task Hanks on this matter. He is a fine actor and heir to the mantle of also gregarious actor Jimmy Stewart (who actually piloted bombers over Germany). One is reluctant to slap his face silly, saying, “Wake up and smell the history!” but instead put a encouraging hand on his shoulder and say, “Read a few more books, son, before you make a fool of yourself.” But he did speak the words, and must take the slapping.

True, the Japanese were out to kill us. Just as they were out to kill the Chinese, the Koreans, the Filipinos, the Burmese, the Indians and any Europeans who were unlucky enough to be in the way of the Japanese march to “co-prosperity” at the point of a gun. Aside from race, just how “different” was our “way of living” from the Japanese “way of living”? Even with its nascent welfare state, America was still a relatively free country. Shinto and emperor worship, allied with bushido-driven fascist militarism, governed Japan. Also, the hubris of racial superiority.

True, many American soldiers went to war as racists. Much of the war propaganda was themed on race. But while Japanese war and political policy was racially motivated, American war and political policy was not. Its policy was: Defeat the aggressor. There was no trace of “moral equivalence” in those days. Victor David Hanson noted in his fine article, “Is Tom Hanks Unhinged?”:

Despite Hanks’ efforts at moral equivalence in making the U.S. and Japan kindred in their hatreds, America was attacked first, and its democratic system was both antithetical to the Japan of 1941, and capable of continual moral evolution in a way impossible under Gen. Tojo and his cadre.

Was our military out to “annihilate” the Japanese? No, not as a race, not even as a culture. Just its rank-and-file soldiers, who were indoctrinated to fight to the death in the realm of physical force. They owed their lives to the emperor, to their ancestors, and to die was to honor them. For our forces, it was a matter of killing them, or being killed by them. The stories of the suicidal combat and behavior of the Japanese brought back by soldiers, seamen, and Marines who fought them are legion.

So, it makes one wonder what interpretation Hanks would put on the European campaign. Was that fought from racist motives? He would be hard put to make such an argument, unless he claimed that “we” just didn’t like their cuisine, beer-drinking habits, folk-dances, and guys in funny uniforms who shouted speeches in a guttural language to mass rallies of true believers.

And, what did Hanks mean by “Does that sound familiar, by any chance, to what’s going on today?” Frankly, no, it isn’t familiar with anything that’s going on today. It is difficult to construe any meaning in this statement, unless he was referring to Islam’s ongoing war against the West, or perhaps to Iraq and Afghanistan, or to the Israeli-Palestinian issue. He did not qualify or clarify his remark. Neither did he shed any light on his meaning during an interview. He didn’t back-pedal. He stuck to his original remark and said that “America overcoming racism is taking an awfully long time.” Really? America boasts a black president, blacks on the Supreme Court, blacks in Congress, senior officers in the military, intellectuals and writers of many races, doctors, scientists, Japanese and Indian financiers, innovators, CEO’s…have I left anyone out?

Bill Gates’ “Final Solution”

One would think that Bill Gates, preeminent apologizer for his success and wealth, would know better than to jump on the anthropogenic global-warming wagon and say foolish things. But, he believes in it. And not only does he believe in it, he has a solution. During this year’s “Technology, Entertainment, Design” (TED) conference, he discussed the absolute necessity of reducing CO2 emissions to zero percent. His talk omitted any reference to the Climategate scandal surrounding the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia (and, as accomplices, NASA, NOAA, and sundry battalions of government-funded climatologists the world over), whose computers were diddled with and rigged and arm-twisted to produce the right politically-correct data and scary models.

In his talk, Gates seemed to be oblivious to the headlines about the data-dumping conspiracy, a strange thing for a man to be whose career was devoted to creating computer software.
Addressing methods to reduce carbon emissions to zero, he suggested that, “if we do a good job on new vaccines, healthcare, and reproductive health services we could lower that [carbon emissions] by 10-15%.”

Did he forget that everyone in the audience, and he himself, was exhaling CO2? As was everyone else on the planet? Including all the inhabitants of the sink-holes he’s pouring his wealth into? All right. We’ll cut him some slack here. We’ll assume that he actually meant cutting CO2 emissions to zero by setting aside the human race’s own emissions and not including them in his equations. Then what? If the zero point is to be maintained, it means that we will all just sit around twiddling our thumbs until we drop dead from starvation (growing food entails producing those greenhouse gases), freeze to death or collapse from heat stroke (from seasonal climate changes), or begin to murder and cannibalize each other until a population number acceptable to Gates and his worry-warts is reached. Call that number a “critical mass.”

But, no one need starve to death or endure a slow death at the hands of nature. Bill will help to reduce the population with new vaccines, healthcare, and reproductive health services -- all necessarily administered by the state, although he doesn’t allude to that. His chosen panel of experts will decide who is to reproduce, and who isn’t, who is to receive medical care (when available), and who isn‘t. And if you are not lucky enough to be deemed an asset to the state, would you be so kind as to drop dead? We really wouldn’t want to resort to force, when things could become ugly.

Bill Gates either means what he says -- or he should stop to think before speaking. But, he hasn’t clarified his remarks, either, so we must assume he means what he says.

Those “Deeming” Democrats, or, The “Slaughter” on East Capitol Street

Speaking of “deeming,” Nancy Pelosi has a solution to voting for the health care bill this week: Don’t vote for it! That is, forgo the whole roll call business in the House and just "deem" the bill passed. That is, not vote on the equally horrendous Senate version of the bill. Then send the House version without amendments to the White House for certain signature. An excellent way to bypass all those troublesome socialist health care "deniers."

The "Slaughter" here is House Rules Chairman Rep. Louise Slaughter (D-NY), who CongressDaily reported Wednesday is "prepping to help usher the healthcare overhaul through the House and potentially avoid a direct vote on the Senate overhaul bill." She is reportedly considering putting forth a rule that would dictate that the Senate version of the bill is automatically passed through the chamber once the House passes a corrections bill making changes to it.

This is the same Louise Slaughter of “her dead sister’s false teeth” fame I mentioned in a previous post, when she participated in the bogus “bipartisan” conference of fading memory. But, rather than belabor the obvious evil of any health care bill, there is an aspect of this enervating sordidness that has been overlooked, or not completely grasped. You look at the grunge who are running and ruining this country -- from the White House to Congress and all the way down to the mail room staff at the IRS or FDA or any federal agency or department you care to name -- and you must ask yourself: What moves them? What are they counting on? I can do no better than include here a remark I made in an email to a friend on the character and behavior of Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi.

Just read your comments here, and it caused me to grasp the horrible motive behind especially Pelosi's actions, statements and arrogance: She can't help but realize that if her "beloved" health care passes -- without or without a vote, with a roll call or with just a "deeming" -- she will be voted out of office. I am certain that she doesn't care if the Democrats suffer a massacre in November, and that she is willing to sacrifice her own political career to get this bill passed.
She and Reid and Obama and Hoyer and the rest were willing to throw other Democrats under the bus. What can you say about someone who, driven by an obvious, naked malice for freedom and a demonstrable contempt for Americans and this country (remember her "Are you kidding?" reply to the reporter who asked if health care was enumerated in the Constitution?), is willing to help destroy this country, even if it means sacrificing herself? She has not only thrown some of her recalcitrant supporters under the bus, she herself has rolled under it.

There is the proof of the pudding -- the precise, unsweetened, undisguised character of altruism and self-sacrifice in action. She is the distaff James Taggart, a principal villain in Ayn Rand‘s Atlas Shrugged. She wants to hear America scream. She wants to laugh and say, “There! It’s law! Deal with it! You’re going to obey me even if it kills you!”

Would she care if she learned that tens of thousands of doctors and other medical professionals would quit if the bills passes? No. If millions of Americans engaged in mass civil disobedience and refused to cooperate with or submit to the law’s dictates? No. She will advocate the use of naked force. Obama would approve and give the order. After all, from the first day of his presidential campaign and throughout his administration, he has waged his own jihad against America. He, too, seeks submission. His friends the Islamists don’t have a monopoly on that end.

It’s time Americans woke up to that fact. It’s not just about health care. It’s about power. It’s about tyranny. It’s about destroying America.

Humpty Dumpty’s Crumbling Global-Warming Wall

Not surprisingly, the polar bears, the Amazon rain forests, the glaciers, the snail darters, woodpeckers of all sizes and colors, and spotted owls of yesteryear are doing just fine. They’re not disappearing, or melting, or perishing, or being driven to extinction. Gerald Warner in the London Daily Telegraph, however, focuses on just the polar bears and the rain forests in his unheralded article of March 16th, “Climategate: two more bricks fall out of the IPCC wall of deceit -- rainforests and polar bears.“ He writes, with some humor, after reporting on NASA‘s own findings that a slight decrease of rainfall over the Amazon rain forests did not turn Brazil into a vast Sahara desert:

So, the rainforest scare, like the Himalayan glaciers panic, is garbage. A further encouraging feature of this development is that genuine scientists are increasingly becoming emboldened to challenge the IPCC’s junk science: the Academy is beginning to reassert its integrity. AGW [anthropogenic global warming] without withered rainforests is Hamlet without the prince. It was one of those emotive claims much invoked by priggish children in the voice-overs of nanny-state “green” commercials, lecturing their elders on the stewardship of the planet.

And all of Al Gore’s disciples, soothsayers and king’s men can’t put it back up again.

In the meantime, Hollywood, or one of its suburban branches, insists on producing AGW scare movies. Rob Lyons in a Spiked Online article, “What’s wrong with exploiting nature?” delves into the latest non-block buster, “Dirty Oil,” about how awful it is that oil developers in Alberta, Canada, are despoiling the landscape and altering the bucolic lives of local inhabitants.

With greens constantly assuring us that the day of reckoning for ‘peak oil’ is just around the corner, being able to exploit Canada’s oil sands to increase the total world reserves of oil and provide energy security seems a pretty good deal. But Dirty Oil seems uninterested in the wider economic benefits of oil-sands production.

Practically my only reservation about Mr. Lyons’ article is that he innocently assumes that the “greens” are truly concerned about oil reserves and everyone‘s well-being. The “greens” would rather everything come to an oil-starved halt and everyone be so good as to take a powder.

Israel’s Bronx Cheer to Obama, Clinton, and Biden
Finally, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu cocked a snook at President Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and Vice-President Joe Biden by announcing the continuation of Israeli settlement building in East Jerusalem, and on the very day Biden was in Israel to talk him out of it.

It left US Vice-President Joe Biden humiliated as he had traveled to the region in the hope of announcing the restart of peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians.

Biden, a buffoon, will get over the humiliation. He has the resilience of a rubber mouse pad.

Obama and Company would rather not see that construction take place because it would upset the Palestinians. The stateless Palestinians, you see, seem to be a better “client state” and ally to the U.S. than is Israel. The Palestinians do not recognize Israel’s right to exist -- indeed, Israel is missing from the maps Palestinian school books -- while Israel is expected to recognize their right to swamp Israel with its stateless manqués and so destroy it. The land at issue is land Israel won during the 1967 war.

Why would Obama and company side with losers? What could they possible gain in their ostensive fantasy of seeing Palestinians mix and mingle peacefully with Israelis in some Hegelian thesis-antithesis apotheosis? Daniel Pipes offers some advice to Obama, Clinton, and other policymaking denizens of the White House:

It concerns not a life-and-death issue, such as the menace of Iran's nuclear buildup or Israel's right to defend itself from Hamas predations, but the triviality of the timing of a decision to build new housing units in Israel's capital city. Wiser heads will insist that White House amateurs end this tempest in a teapot and revert to normal relations.

That advice is premised on the assumption that Obama and Company care about Iran’s nuclear buildup and Israel’s right to defend itself against Iran and the stateless beggars of non-existent Palestine, armed as they are by Hamas and Hezbollah. It presumes that the White House’s amateurs value “normal relations” with Israel. It asks that Obama and his fellow amateurs appreciate that it is a matter of life-and-death for Israel.

But, in truth, Obama does not value Israel. He would rather see it compromise and negotiate itself out of existence. Just as he would rather see America submit to socialism.

Cross-posted from Metablog

Benevolence: A matter of Faith or Rationality?

2010-02-16T13:49:00.001-08:00

by Kadar Talbot and Kain Scalia
of the Objectivist Institute In Second Life
===================================

It is my purpose to delve into the proper source of benevolence. Benevolence comes from "bene", meaning well, and "vol", to wish, and is described [1] as a feeling or desire to do good towards others. An incorrect but popular assumption ascribes this notion solely to religious doctrines concerning faith, though only one possible source unveils itself upon close examination of core premises: reason.

At its core faith demands a suspension of the minds core faculties, requiring no formal epistemology. Beyond this, as faith's ramifications unfurl, one discovers a conscribed set of mores that arrests value's target in this world only to imprison it in an unknowable, and indemonstrable dimension whose validation via undeterred and blind belief despite any instrumentation shown to the contrary is only rewarded by a promise of a post-corporeal existence. These ramifications require no participation in the gathering of knowledge, and deny objective qualification, as they presuppose all necessary moral knowledge to have been divinely imparted in a collection of dogmatic texts. In a stark contrast, reason takes a fully active approach to unraveling, and marveling at, the awesome mysteries of existence, and thus the universe, via the marriage of logic, the art of non-contradictory identification, and induction. While reason grasps nature through a process of identifying and obeying the rules by which nature is bound, faith closes its eyes in denial and attempts to control men through the manipulation of their values in ways indemonstrable, and understated. As reason promises the consummation of our dreams, faith at its worst defames our 'selfish dreams', and at its best encourages only those culturally acceptable dreams as judged by a parochial conservatism, and delays all others to that ecclesiastical, and unknowable, dimension.

It is easy to convince ourselves that reason alone dismantles social control in this regard and encourages understanding and awareness, while faith demands an homogeneity in both behavior and happiness that only serves to further whatever ends the convincers may have by a myriad of means. If benevolence is to have a source, if the sheer capability of doing good towards others originates at one point, one sees that if faith and its trimmings are chosen it can only conclude in a proselytization of its target into a spiritual cage of conforming self-denial, and if faith's counter-point reason is chosen one finds a moral landscape of beneficial trade and discussion aimed toward the core of any issue. These interfaces provide an incredible means of evaluating their efficacy in our goal of benevolence.

However, this does not locate nor guarantee the source of benevolence, only the most efficacious means of imparting benevolence. Why does reason, as it does, possess an environment of greatest efficacy towards this aim of goodwill towards men? The answer lies in the resultant morality's nature.

Morality is the means by which we determine what to do to further values held, and it is shaped precisely by the values chosen to pursue. An intellectually honest morality seeks objective qualification, rises to logical discourse with perfection, and strives to discover values worth pursuing. Such a morality can only be constructed by an active application of reason, for faith's epistemology is essentially dishonest in its own discourse by ignoring evidence and internal contradiction, imposing arbitrary choices through divine edict, observing intrinsic quality without qualification, by forging consequence, and in so many other ways.

Benevolence is always directed towards man's life, in whatever form imagined, and so it is a sensible parallel to a morality directed by reason which invariably will place man's life as its highest value. Comte's altruism's logical conclusions annul benevolence through the nullification of man's value. According to altruism man in and of himself holds no value beyond that which he assigns to the purpose of others, and yet those beneficiaries in and of themselves hold the same null value beyond that attributed to other's purpose. At this point exists a class of terms, each term valueless ad infinitum, establishing no over-arching principle regarding value without placing in that demesne an endless relativity of man as a means rather than end, as purely sacrificial fodder.

As previously observed, through so many mechanics, an epistemology of faith invariably extols the virtues of Comte's altruism, while once again providing motivation for such backwardness through the promise of salvation from an already dictated flawed existence.

How may a system of belief that holds man's life as only sacrificial and endlessly flawed and evil even begin to be benevolent to, or encourage benevolence towards, him? The only answer lies in a diseased doctrine where morality becomes the enemy of man's life, or joy; where one can only hope for benevolence to be shown to him in as much as a self-begrudging act of others as one does for others, exchanging not value but animosity supported by a loathing of duty. The only benevolence possible is a pretext covering man's true desires oppressed by irrational edicts, and if man truly is flawed it is this 'flaw', this inconsistency in the face of such impossible demands, that allows him to survive. In essence, in this doctrine created by faith's epistemology man's own life is regarded as the terrible, as the ultimate implementation of evil, as the antithesis to good and is robbed of all possibility of originating benevolence through the attribution of such acts to the grace and glory of the supernatural. What morality could be more evil than this systematic, and unfortunately successful, destruction of man's life, value, and happiness where benevolence lies only on an unattainable yet superfluous level?

Clarity of vision allows one to see that the simple discovery of reason's efficacy in achieving a true benevolence points directly towards the parallelism enjoyed by a morality ruled by rational thought. This mirror-like juxtaposition finally fixes a purely rational morality as the originator of any truly consistent sense of benevolence, but we must answer how this morality brings about this true benevolence to fully convince ourselves of this conclusion.

Rational self-interest, 'enlightened' self-interest, or, unabashedly, selfishness is the only principle by which rational men may exist and act consistently and is imperative to benevolence. There are two claims to be addressed here: both concerning necessity, but different in their instrumentation.

Concerning the one requisite principle of consistent rational men, all we must do for validation is examine the irrational demesne of solipsism. The rules of non-contradictory logic (a redundancy in terms) quickly confine solipsism to the realm of irrationality through simple applications of deduction: if I am a man, and others are men, we must possess the qualities of man in equilibrium; or if my consciousness allows me to act, others acts must imply the same consciousness, therefore my consciousness cannot originate without their consciousness likewise originating. Values are hierarchic in nature, for choice demands a selection of value based on the interned values' extremity. It is here one can observe all circularity in rational values' target, that being the maximum of all values held: one's own life.

If we choose other's lives as the highest value we must deny our own life that position, at the same time we must base our decision on qualitative facts to pull it out of the celestial body of whim. What quality do our own lives possess that other's lives do not to establish this differentia? If it is that we are the possessors of our own lives, and not that of others, we find that this quality creates an aliorelative term without asymmetry, and provides no distinct intension upon which to base our decision.

This is not subterfuge, however I will provide a more basic, but unrelated, example. If others well-being is our sole rational aim, one must accept that survival of oneself, in so far as that survival serves the means of others, is absolutely necessary to achieve said goal. As well, to increase efficiency, and decrease obstruction, all resources beyond that sustaining ones most basic survival will be spent on others, thus one's own life is robbed of 'want' and subsists on 'necessity' for all other possible values are deemed pointless. Yet it is precisely here that rationality unravels the construction. The principles of trade prove to us that the increase of productive potential lies in a trading of values, and not in mutual suffering, yet mutual suffering, in the form of self-denial, is all that is promised to anyone consistently following this construction. The same principal that has deemed all other values beyond the most basic necessities as pointless will turn upon this revelation and must deem the mutual suffering as equally pointless.

The only salvation, and the only act compatible with this proven principle of trade, is that of placing one's own life as one's highest moral value; in effect eliminating all pointless suffering on both sides of the interaction, damning all else to the realm of solipsism. In this sense one learns that sacrifice, that of discarding a higher value for a lower one or nothing, is incompatible with rationality if one's aim is to benefit life efficaciously, and is a vice in the rational moral landscape. The only conclusion then is that a rational concern for one's own interests, that being selfishness, is the only principle to produce moral consistency in a rational man.

Selfishness is imperative to benevolence because it is only through selfishness that a proper structure of value, as demonstrated, can exist. Veritably it is value that is ultimately required for benevolence and it is selfishness that guarantees value's existence in an objectively qualifiable form, for, as already demonstrated, altruism's classic string of relations among terms of nullified values provides no foundation to confine moral value's terms, nor those of benevolence. Value, in this, and all, contexts is to be regarded as agent-relative, possessing purpose, benefactor, and beneficiary, and in no way intrinsic, circularly pointing in upon itself, nor divinely imprinted. Benevolence requires value, and thus selfishness, due to its very nature: that of imparting good upon others. Good is a term of pure value, encapsulating within its letters everything one sees as the antithesis of the undesirable: suffering, damnation, encumbrance, etc. Benevolence is an expression of value in two ways: improving, or wishing to improve, another's life, and that of holding the principle as valuable.

Just as hedonism is a distortion of selfishness, through an elimination of discretion or purpose, altruism is a bastardization of benevolence: making no distinction of its target. Benevolence towards dictators, terrorists, the oppressed, murderers, thugs, rapists, victims, and racists is not only sanctioned, but standard, expected, and encouraged! It's called 'unconditional love', and it serves to destroy all principle through a compromise of values. By affording this value, and meaning, to all without qualification nor discriminatory eligibility, we equate our family and our loved ones as equal in value to mobsters, serial killers, and all who may seek to destroy us. We discover a gross familial responsibility to criminals who have forsaken the respect of an individuals right to his own life. Our search for individuals who increase our happiness is robbed of its very essence by eliminating all desirous qualities sought and imposing a wicked egalitarianism eliminating discretionary powers.

All these aspects obviously work in concert against the pursuit of our own life, and cause us to suffer pointlessly via our associates. Currency is relative to choice whose ramification is value, and choice necessitates discretion, whose demonstrated destroyer is unconditionality. If sacrifice is barred from rational men's actions by its own irrational nature, then there is no selfless action, as all psychological and physical interactions are actions of trade: just as one uses currency to pay for a product whose value is admired or required, one employs one's respect, appreciation, deference, and most noblest quality of love as currency to properly reward the virtues of the appreciated individual. (Love being the recognition and deep appreciation of values and virtues of the other whose qualities you hold in the highest of esteem.) Due to the presence, virtues, intelligence, and sense of life of the other that brings you pleasure, a healthy emotional transaction ensues when reciprocated.

How can a selfish man be benevolent? Rational men value their own life and align their interests with reason, and because of this are men with an incredibly deep sense of value, not only through a consistency of principles, but through a recognition of 'the unique nature and glorious potential of the individual, rational human life: to think, to create, to love, to experience pleasure, to achieve happiness here on earth.' [2] As demonstrated, benevolence requires value, and selfishness provides the only consistent foundation for value. The implied premise of this question is that selfishness is greed. Greed is an hedonistic distortion of selfishness: is it rational to use a hazardous method of waste disposal that poisons an area in the face of great profit? Greed dictates an affirmative, subverting as it does all honest value to that obtained through the involuntary sacrifice of others, the stepping on the broken, while selfishness recognizes no honest value in an enterprise predicated on the violation of others.

With reason and trade so efficient in the improvement of others lives, and the resultant dismantling of artificial and dishonest social control, is it any wonder that today's witch-doctors, both intellectual and ignorant, have painted the selfish capitalist as the greedy brute, content in destroying all around him in order to increase the extravagance of his own life? There is nothing guilty in the acquisition of profit, but to obtain that profit through involuntary endangerment of others violates the deepest reciprocal value of all consistently rational men: others' lives as their core value and the enabler of all their values. Just as no one can appropriate one's one life, robbing one of their single guaranteed possession, without likewise forsaking and offering up his own for sacrifice, no rational man can profit by forcing others to suffer. Once again it is reason that serves to protect and epistemologically secure our lives so that we are able to act benevolently.

Isn't sacrifice the core of benevolence? It is in the cult leader's best interest to confuse the terms sacrifice and investment in the minds of his followers. All of our modern emotional language equates sacrifice with the ability to gain admiration, have pride under a pretext of modesty, and acquire self-righteousness. Rational or irrational, no one desires to be wrong, lest our debates provide us guaranteed moral solutions. The rational man understands the previously demonstrated rule of beneficial trade, and knows that achievement is not zero-sum: the achievement of one in no way affects the potential of another. Only the conception of a world where true sacrifice is the only currency leads to the erroneous belief that there is only one pool of resources and only so many individuals available to give only so much to said pool. In perpetuum it is the cult leader and his disciples, whether it is the Communist Party in Soviet Russia or the Catholic Church doesn't matter, who profit from this pool, proving themselves to be the brutes they so vehemently froth at the mouth over.

Clarity permits then the conclusion that sacrifice only encourages poverty, self-loathing, and animosity towards the successful, while trade rewards achievement, excellence, and sharing. If our aim is benevolence, to improve man's life, it will only be found in the investment of trade. Investment is not sacrifice, and often on a personal level involves a cross-over in currency, and a delay in gratification. Helping a friend in need monetarily is an investment in the well-being of a value one holds dear. If one truly sacrificed to permit benevolence one would never achieve one's aim: friends would be put up for slaughter to save Argentinian Nazis, life savings would be dumped on terrorists, and jails would be filled with innocents in a deal to let criminals go free. In short, if sacrifice were necessary for benevolence, the people of the world would suffer incommensurably.

When one gazes upon the inspiring and glorious landscape of man's achievement, one witnesses the fruits of benevolence: achievement aimed towards the expansion of man's life. Humanity has moved past the pursuit of the most basic survival at all costs, an animality of amorality and incognizant of value, to being that which pursues happiness, beauty, glory, love, and above all, value and meaning.

When I write of man's life, it is not the vacuous pursuit of the most basic survival that I mean, though the continuance of life, survival, is of utmost importance. I refer to this greater embodiment, the pursuit of value and meaning, and all its illuminated ramifications. While men have found this quality, and its ally hope, historically in religion it is only by means of subverting, or sidestepping, the epistemology of faith that most men have been able to achieve its manifestation.

The effect of the epistemological primacy of faith over reason is self-evident in the unfortunately long period aptly named the Dark Ages. In this painful period during which faith was supreme monarch, technological advancement was laggard, few, and far between. Despite the presence of scholars and intellectuals such as Queen Eleanor of Aquitane, Heloise and Abelard, Louise Labbe, Marie de France, and others, there existed a compelling, undeniable, and inexorable intellectual vacuum. In comparison, observe the technological advances of much shorter periods such as the Renaissance, and the Industrial Revolution. The main difference between these periods is a return to logic and reason, and a rise in Aristotelian principles.

All of the achievements that have come to improve man's life on earth are borne out of the correct application of logic, and reason, from the carefully planned angles of a successful bridge, the intricate workings of a computerized system, to the meticulous research that goes into defeating life-threatening ailments. This is the promising province of reason and its benefits are plain to see. Periods dominated by reason have achieved more aggregate benevolence towards man's life in their short, but bright, durations than faith in its millennial rule.

It is entirely rational for men to experience benevolent desire because it is pertinent to his rational self-interest (selfishness) to improve his environment, and increase efficacy and security, due to its import on his own life as well.

The misuse and misinterpretation of rational men's efforts does not undo the good they have wrought nor is the fault of reason, by the same principle that rocks are not evil simply because irrational brutes may hurl them at others rather than use them to build houses.

Faith's epistemology denies the ultimate validity of man's life as an end upon itself, and serves as a self destructive mechanism: when faith eradicates reason, all value of life vanishes. Exemplifications are numerous: the Spanish Inquisition, the Nazi Genocide, and Islamic Extremists. This metaphysics and epistemology only produces a resentment of this world, and an inextricable culture of death. Man must suffer in sacrifice, and in such self-denial assign evil to that which he may enjoy, producing an environment of fear towards an unexplainable world manipulated by dark forces beyond his control. Who can be happy and experience joy in such a tragic world? The only salvation is escape, and the only ultimate escape is the grave, so the seeking and imparting of good is futile, if not impossible (which must be why it must come from god's grace), leaving man to resign himself to misery and sacrificial subjugation. The best example is Mother Theresa who syphoned large quantities of money into buildings that were not hospitals, but in fact houses for dying, and who told the impoverished that it was beautiful when they accepted their lot, denying them all but the most rudimentary medical attention, while she had herself flown into American hospitals when her health was falling. There could not be a more vivid example of the faith-based mentality of sacrifice: the specters of the impoverished of Calcutta were sacrificial offerings, and Mother Theresa was the preserved collector. There is no benevolence in this world-view, and clarity allows us to finally submerge its epistemology forever.

A rational world-view affords us a neutral reality, simply being with no intention, and allows man to act in accordance with its rules to achieve his values and flourish. With no benevolence to be found in a self-destructive system whose main aim is to relegate the importance of man and his life to a secondary role, one can easily convince oneself that benevolence may only exist in so far as reason can keep this self-destructive system at bay, that only through reason may man be able to achieve his full potential, and in this to achieve happiness, and that reason is, by its very nature, the ultimate benevolent benefactor (in faith's anthropomorphic epistemological terms) of man's life. While reason may serve to moderate faith, at worst, any compromise of reason with faith's epistemology proper is detrimental to reason, and thus detrimental to every individual alive.

The most benevolent act one can do is to establish within oneself the principle of selfishness, for this one principle guides one to act towards the best solutions, sacrificing no one to no one and benefiting all involved. I quote John Galt:

"The world you desired can be won. It exists, it is real, it is possible, it's yours. But to win it requires your total dedication and a total break with the world of your past, with the doctrine that man is a sacrificial animal who exists for the pleasure of others. Fight for the value of your person. Fight for the virtue of your pride. Fight for the essence of that which is man: for his sovereign rational mind. Fight with the radiant certainty and the absolute rectitude of knowing that yours is the morality of life and that yours is the battle for any achievement, any value, any grandeur, any goodness, any joy that has ever existed on earth." [3]

Now, that is the most benevolent attitude.

1. "benevolent." Dictionary.com Unabridged (v 1.1). Random House, Inc. 19 May. 2007. <dictionary.com http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/benevolent="http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/benevolent">.

2. Epstein, Alex, Ayn Rand Institute. Thursday, April 10th, 2007.

3. Rand, Ayn. Atlas Shrugged. New York: Signet, 1985.

This piece was written and provided free of charge. If you support its message of reason and rationality please donate via PayPal to pablonc22 [AT] hotmail [DOT] com or at the institute tip jar.

Never Forget The Man On The Rock

2010-01-17T08:55:00.001-08:00

ESTERHAZY: (Sitting down on the arms of a chair, speaking softly) You know, when I was a boy-- A very young boy-- I thought my life would be a thing immense and shining. I wanted to kneel to my own future... [shrugs] One gets over that.

KAY GONDA: Does one?

ESTERHAZY: Always, but never completely.

KAY GONDA: [breaking down, suddenly eager and trusting] I saw a man once, when I was very young. He stood on a rock, high in the mountains. His arms were spread out and his body bent backward, and I could see him as an arc against the sky. He stood still and tense, like a string trembling to a note of ecstasy no man had ever heard... I have never known he was. I knew only that this was what life should be... [her voice trails off]

ESTERHAZY: [eagerly] And?

KAY GONDA: [in a changed voice] And I came home and my mother was serving supper, and she was happy because the roast had a thick gravy. And she gave a prayer of thanks to God for it... [jumps up, whirls to him suddenly, angrily] Don't listen to me! Don't look at me like that! I've tried to renounce it. I thought I must close my eyes and bear anything and learn to live like the others. To make me as they were. To make me forget. I bore it. All of it. But I can't forget the man on the rock. I can't!

-From Ideal, Ayn Rand: Three Plays

The Immigrant: American At Heart, Endangered By Law

2010-01-13T15:08:00.001-08:00

Nowadays, one needs only to to listen to the political buzz in order to ascertain what buzzwords are to play a key function how each party plans to yank the attention of their constituents. While “marriage” still stands in the spotlight, for the moment the country seems to have waned slightly in its apprehension concerning certain parts of the population being able to enjoy conjugal unions in order to look closely at the newcomer to the political straw man circle: the buzzword “immigration”.

Readers will not be surprised to notice that every time a social or political topic is pounced upon by politicians, said issue is often distorted beyond rational measure, with the principles behind the issue never making an appearance before the public eye.

Nowadays one hears casual conversation concerning the status of illegal immigration, reactions vary from the calm and collected to the loud and zealous (the more common of the two), on one side some advocate amnesty for immigrants who have been in the country illegally for some time, while others hold that the panacea politicians are reluctant to adopt is a completely hermetic border and the stop of all immigration.

And yet, with all the heated discussion about immigration there are two vital points that hardly anyone dares to discuss: One is the status of the immigration system itself, and the other is the precarious positions in which immigrants invariably find themselves trying to follow the aforementioned system to the best of their ability.

The average person is as familiar with the intricacies of the US immigration and naturalization process as he is with the concepts behind the process of thermonuclear fusion. Both are highly specialized subjects that require a great deal of knowledge to navigate safely, both must follow a sequence of events and conditions in order to reach a desired conclusion , but unlike the immigration process, nuclear fusion is bound to reality. An individual who wishes to immigrate into the United States will find himself in a position not unlike a tourist in a casino, where the odds are stacked against him by the house and his success is not so much dependant on his skill as it is on pure chance.

According to Immigration Attorney Shaun Shahmardian, the body of laws that make up the current system of immigration is a complicated and cumbersome mangrove thicket that owes its gordian proportions to constant partisan squabbling. A hypothetical example has the members of Party A perceiving a lull in the workforce in certain areas of industry. Party A wishes to increase the number of worker visas in order to fill the perceived lack of talent. However, Party B, acting on partisan politics, wishes to block the iniative and imposes the following condition: In order for said bill to be passed in full, Party A must include a provision in which only foreign nationals are allowed to be hired if no possible American citizen is available for that job (in order to satisfy the Unions, who wish to have an almost forceful control over who is allowed to be hired).

It is immaterial to Party B’s concerns whether the lull in the workforce is caused not by absence of people but absence of talent (i.e: there may be people who can do the job, but not people who can do the job well or on an outstanding level), their priorities are given to partisan squabbling and blocking, and their other political allegiances (without questioning whether or not said allegiances have the right to exert authority over the issue).

Faced with this scenario, Party A can capitulate and include the required amendment, or scrap their plan altogether. Then, in the future, when Party B comes up with an immigration reform or bill, Party A will move into the antagonist square and the dance will begin anew. This constant push and pull of political interests has resulted in new laws being passed that many times contradict or are in direct conflict with previous regulations, requiring deft consolidation and juggling in order to solve the conflict. The unfortunate result of this process of stacking legislation is a system so complex and cumbersome that it is a miracle that it does not entirely suffocate under its own weight.

The standard wait period of a U.S. citizen petitioning citizenship for their foreign child can now last up to eight years. A green card for a foreign national may take up to six years in processing. After obtaining a green card, the immigrant may be lucky to acquire his citizenship by the ninth cumulative year.

Because of all the different hoops and scrutiny immigrants are faced with, it is no wonder that many who arrive here on a student visa (which in itself is an expensive thing to acquire), tourist visa, or some other method, end up becoming illegal immigrants after their visa period has expired and they have not been able to secure a way by which they could gain permanent residence. It is not because they are unwilling to work difficult labors, quite the contrary, many immigrants are willing to do arduous labor, but unfortunately it is the aforementioned partisan chess games that make it difficult for migrant workers to do certain jobs legally: Regulations place a limit on the areas in which the foreigner can work, limiting the immigrant to work only in the fields in which he has a certifiable degree, placing no relevance on talent, skill or experience that is extrinsic from his area of academic specialization. While an American citizen is not beholden to stay within these narrow confines and may work equally as an agricultural worker or a vice-president (provided someone wants to hire him for either job), immigrants cannot stray from a narrowly-defined limit, no matter how much an American employer may wish to hire them.

In his April 2, 2006 article, Harry Binswanger of Capitalism Magazine wrote: “To forcibly exclude those who seek peacefully to trade value for value with us is a violation of the rights of both parties to such a trade: the rights of the American seller or employer and the rights of the foreign buyer or employee. Thus, immigration quotas treat both Americans and foreigners as if they were criminals, as if the peaceful exchange of values to mutual benefit were an act of destruction.”

Binswanger is referring to the government regulations that dictate who an American employer is allowed to hire. Shahmardian spoke of several cases in which desperate employers had called him, seeking advice. Very often employers will have foreign workers that they value highly and who they consider to be real assets in their business.

The scene varies from construction work to retail or privately owned stores, but the story is always the same: Due to government immigration regulations, the business owner or employer is incapable of granting legal status to their workers in order to keep them in the country and under their employment. It is hard to believe that in a capitalist society an employer is not empowered to hire whomever he wishes to hire, but rather finds himself facing immigration quotas and union quotas -the unions claim that immigrant workers steal their jobs, while refusing to acknowledge the fact that in order to have something stolen from you, you must first possess it!

Shahmardian observed that the general belief that many employers resort to illegal immigrants for work in order to save money proves to be false in the majority of cases. He knows of an exhaustive list of employers who have illegal immigrants in their work forces and who spend copious amounts of money on their welfare- in one case, the worker’s wife fell ill with cancer and since neither she nor her husband could qualify for work medical insurance, the employer himself footed the bill for chemotherapy sessions and hospitalization.

There are many cases like these, in which the employers will spend more than they’d normally have to because they value their employees and do not wish to see them go.

Binswanger points out the core of the issue in his article: “If the fear is of non-working immigrants, why is the pending legislation aimed at employers of immigrants?”

One thing to keep in mind, adds Shahmardian, is that just like any population anywhere, there are corrupt and criminal immigrants, and there are good, honest and hardworking immigrants, no different from what one might find within the native composition of the country itself. Nevertheless, the current political climate is creating an ever-growing sense of xenophobia, to the point that some Americans would rather do away with immigration altogether.

It may seem shocking to hear anti-immigration rhetoric in a country that, more than any other country in the history of the modern world, has reaped great benefits from those who have sought a new life on its shores. Nevertheless the anti-immigration sentiment is strong and it is rooted in the conception that being an American and staying in America is not a right, but a privilege. But to be accurate, it is neither… as it currently stands, the status of citizenship is granted in accordance to two congenital factors: geographic location and the citizenship status of one’s parents. Later it can be acquired through heterosexual marriage (gays and lesbians are denied the rights to be sponsored by their partners, as their unions are not approved by the federal government) or through the daunting process of work visas and other similar processes.

Those who would claim that American citizenship should be birth-bound are, in fact, the ones who understand America the least. The ideology of this country was founded upon the rejection of monarchy, tyranny and oppression, discarding all notions that some mystical, authoritarian element was carried over through bloodlines and down family lineage. It sought, instead, to uphold the ideal of achievement, that those who were willing to work, diligent, honest and with integrity, would someday reap the fruits of their labor, and be free of all oppression, to seek ultimate contentment and fulfillment within the goals they have established. This is known as the pursuit of happiness.

It is under this principle that immigrants such as Alexander Hamilton, Alexander Graham Bell, Andrew Carnegie, Albert Einstein, Ayn Rand , Igor Sikorsky, Arthur Rubinstein, Bob Hope, An Wang, and many others, forged their paths and enriched America as a country for having had them. Isn’t citizenship, then, best given to those who strive to live by the principles and ideology of this land, entering into an ideological commitment that is reflected in a lifestyle of achievement and freedom, rather than just reserve this status for a new breed of genetic aristocracy, who will not necessarily work towards preserving these ideals?

“Because our government is reactionary,” says Shahmardian, “we usually wait until the issue becomes a problem to do something about it.” Instead of creating a comprehensive and fair immigration system in lieu of the current Rube Goldberg-esque machine, the government merely tacks on new reforms, adding a new floor to the Tower of Babel.

As of December 15th 2009, The White House announced for the second time that the highly anticipated meeting to launch the Congressional effort for comprehensive immigration reform had been postponed with an assurance by an unnamed White house official that the meeting will happen soon. On December 16th representative Gutierrez introduced a bill that proposes immigration reform.

What will happen next is yet to be seen: If Washington simply contents itself to continue adding floors to the INS madhouse instead of striving to scrap the system and put a principled system in its place, a lot of deserving Americans will never get to call this country theirs, and that is perhaps one of the saddest tragedies, and one that the majority of the soundbite-tossing world of politics will not even notice.

Avatar, Racist? Try Anti-Life.

2010-01-12T13:42:00.001-08:00

Every time Hollywood tries to depict an ‘original’ tribal species, we usually end up with several sensibilities being offended (as it is common in an age where people seem to think that opinions are tantamount to rights.) We all remember the ridiculous fiasco of Jar-Jar Binx, of course, a character who was not really as much of a racial stereotype as people claimed he was- but I suspect that that was merely an excuse used by people who were as annoyed as I was to let Lucas know that this whole New Trilogy idea wasn’t working out. It failed miserably, but at least the twerp kept his beak shut for the next two cinematic torture sessions.

Now that AVATAR has hit the movie theaters, we have the likes of Robinne Lee crying foul over racial stereotyping and ‘white savior fantasies’ in the movie, and James Cameron denying it has anything to do with race at all.

For once (and only once) in his cinematic life, Cameron is right:

What’s wrong with this movie isn’t that it is racist, but that it is philosophically bankrupt: The Na'Vi are poor (but expensively rendered) rip-offs of the Noble Savage stereotype, a throwback to the more embarrassing era of literature in which any underdeveloped civilization was seen as 'more pure' and 'innocent' and therefore superior to evil industrialized West with its ghastly materialistic values such as health, progress, comfort...

Such portrayals often gloss over inevitable realities as, for example, medical and scientific technology (how many Na'Vi children and mothers die at birth, obviously having no obstetricians? What is old for a Na'Vi, the ripe old age of forty?) in favor of painting this idyllic, bucolic and rather ridiculous "One with the earth" image of the Noble Savage.

The inevitable point of contention here is that in reality -the plane we all inhabit- the bucolic term "one with nature" usually means the abandonment of all 'evil' technology (because technology and industry are evil things to both the Noble Savage proponents and its historical descendants, the Environmentalists), which usually results in really being 'one with nature', such as being inside the stomach of a predator, or being part of a compost heap by the twilight age of thirty-five.

The other half of the equation lies in a portrayal of the Westerners that makes them out to be absolute brutish villains. Why are they evil and brutish, the Noble Savagist/Ecologist asks in false rhetoric? Why, it's because of his corrupt ways and technology!

Industrialization, according to the Virgin Earth proponents, is evil (evil enough that it has given us the longest lifespan in our history, and freed up our time so we don't have to spend nineteen hours a day toiling the soil, dying from gangrene, etc) and only after the Westerner abandons Western culture does he become Truly Noble -- such is the case with Avatar's protagonist who, when he abandons western culture and becomes like the Na'Vi, is even more superlative at being Na'Vi than the Na'Vi are!

This ideological befuddlement is not a plot flaw of “Avatar”, but rather it is the very essence of its Noble Savage root: The Noble Savage exists only to point Western Man in the direction of an ideal which they themselves cannot accomplish - only the Un-westernized westerner can. Are you still with me?

It’s not about race, race is the red herring that confuses the argument here: the whole core of The Noble Savage is to say that Man is only Man when he stops being Man (that is, he is only man when he becomes mystical, superstitious, abandons technology and the scientific method, and is reduced to the life style and expectancy of a Neanderthal.) Forget the aspect of race, the Na’Vi – and in the past the Hollywood Native Americans, the Literary Natives Of Fictitious Islands and so on and so forth- are only cardboard cutout poster children for an ideology (from Primitivism to the current Environmentalism) that wants nothing more than to see humanity reduced to its poorest state: huddled by a campfire and paralyzed by fear.

We’re In The Papers!

2010-01-09T01:30:00.001-08:00

Our number of visitors has increased manifold at the institute, and we came to find out that The Institute is now featured in the Second Life Showcase as well as the website’s Destination Guide!

We have been asked several times whether we are officially affiliated with either the Ayn Rand Institute (ARI) or The Objectivist Center (TOC) – our official answer is that we are not officially affiliated with either institution as far as being sponsored by them goes- the Institute is a labor of love (a love for values), but ideologically we align ourselves with The Ayn Rand Institute, Dr. Leonard Peikoff and Dr. Yaron Brook.

We consider ARI to be the institution that is the most faithful representation of Rand’s philosophy, and we could dedicate many pages to pointing out the reasons for which we find David Kelley’s position to be inconsistent, but both Kadar and I consider that one of the best sources for this material would be Dr. Diana Hsieh’s blog on “False Friends of Objectivism.” Once a member and supporter of TOC, Dr. Hsieh and her husband Paul have written some solid articles on the subject as well as provide a generous number of documents – including some personal anecdotes with Nathaniel and Barbara Branden. The site is a good place to start if you are curious.

Here we have an image from the event we held tonight: An open-topic get-together. We had a good number of individuals coming and leaving, so that our original 8 to 10pm time slot was extended to midnight. All in all, a good night!

Reader mail: Emphryio

2010-01-04T10:52:00.001-08:00

emphryio wrote:

“I used to love Rand. And there absolutely was misanthropy involved. The misanthropy in the fiction (a few great men pulled down by the lazy masses) is as clear as could be.

It's also a bizarre pipe dream.

In reality the few most powerful people get their power exactly because they'll do whatever it takes, without the constraint of any kind of ethics. Some thing to hold such people back like democracy, no matter that it's heavily flawed (especially in a world where people see no problem for those exact same men to control the news), is essential.”

First I must thank you for writing your comment on this blog, but I am afraid I have to tell you that your focus is rather narrow and very selective. You see misanthropy because a struggle between the individual and the collective is depicted, and you focus solely on the fact that Rand’s fiction seeks to show what happens to the individual when subdued to a collectivist society – this, to you, is misanthropy not because the individual is squashed, but because collectivism is painted in a negative light. It is akin to saying that individual rights activists are misanthropists because they depict the Iranian government in a negative light by focusing on the death of Neda Aghani Soltan.

Rand's novels deal with a world in which the individual rights of men are not respected and instead are run over 'for the greater good.' They are meant to display the consequences that arise from considering the individual as less important than the collective of which it is allegedly a part. More importantly, the fiction in itself is not a series of edicts of commandments, but rather all of the actions by heroes and villains stem from two sets of principles based either on individualism and collectivism respectively.

I am afraid you have made a misrepresentation, one not uncommon if all you have ever read is the fiction and never cared to examine the principles behind it (which are laid to bare in the non-fiction). Fiction is only the demonstration of a principle in action, and most people seem to take concretes for the principles themselves and not as a specific manifestation stemming from a foundation based on principle. For a crash course on the basics, I would recommend Bernstein's "Objectivism in one lesson" to see if you are indeed correct in your original assertion, which I suspect is flawed. I began my study of Rand’s philosophy through her non-fiction first and then finally tackling her fiction, and the philosophical landscape was much clearer to me than if I had started with the fiction- and gone no further. I make the assumption that you have only read the fiction since that is the only thing which you have mentioned. If you wish to address perceptions of misanthropy in the non-fiction, please feel free to do so.

I also would like to point out that you misunderstood the ethics proposed by objectivism. No objectivist actually celebrates corrupt CEOs and leeches of industry, It is precisely the system that allows these kinds of men to exist- a mixed economy where they can pull and push for government favors and impunity- that objectivists denounce. It is not the Alan Greenspans that are admired. Quite the opposite, as a matter of fact.

It is perfectly possible to become 'powerful' through ethical means, but you have misplaced your concept of 'power' here: The current 'powerful' CEOs are powerful because they have a heaping help of government scruff in their hands and they extend their influence throughout the market and government the same way cancer propagates through an organism. This kind of individual will have no qualms in performing whatever unscrupulous actions he can in his rise to power, but it is precisely the renunciation of principles and of individual responsibility that allows for this kind of creature to ascend to power.

Collectivism (after all, he did it ‘for the good of the company/business’) and moral relativism/pragmatism (‘whatever works’/’the means justify the ends’) make it perfectly possible, and these collectors of power are precisely the kind of people that know how to make government control and intervention work for them: they’ve been doing it for decades already, so all government control ever does is expand their field of play and influence.

You call for collectivism as being necessary to ‘hold these people back,’ when the only thing that is truly necessary to hold them back is, more than ever, a push for individual rights and the understanding of rational self-interest as the moral core of the existence of man. Ayn Rand did not write idly when she wrote, during John Galt’s speech:

“Yes, this is an age of moral crisis. Yes, you are bearing punishment for your evil. But it is not man who is now on trial and it is not human nature that will take the blame. It is your moral code that's through, this time. Your moral code has reached its climax, the blind alley at the end of its course. And if you wish to go on living, what you now need is not to return to morality -- you who have never known any -- but to discover it.”

The 'powerful' men of industry in the objectivist concept are not men who command industry through fear and favor, but are men who have achieved their goals of production and have some modicum of influence not through their use of unprincipled force but through the virtue of their creativity. Unlike the Rat CEOs they are not immune from competition (they have no government 'buddies' watching out for them through anti-competition laws and the like) and are always aware of the possibility of superior competition.

These men and women understand that engaging in harmful practices will only end up harming the market and themselves in the lung run, and therefore it is in their best self-interest to respond with an attempt at offering a superior effort. If you want to ask next “Where are these men and women of which you speak?” I will have to answer “Look at the system you are proposing, a system of government control, and what it has made possible. Then you will know where they have gone.” You cannot expect a flower to survive if it is watered with poison.

So, we have two views of man present here: your letter and my reply. In your letter you imply that man is an irrational beast who needs to be held back by laws, whereas I have said that all man needs to do is to rediscover his nature as a rational beast and the understanding that rational self-interest is a morality that allows him to exist on earth as a productive individual without despoiling or exploiting his fellow individuals.

To label Rand as a misanthropist because she wanted to see man free to enjoy his life, free to pursue his happiness rationally, free without being shackled by collectivist laws and sacrifice - it is puzzling, to say the least.

In each hero of hers, from Dagny Taggart to Eddie Willers, you can see that it is within the grasp of every individual to become honest and rational, even if the capacity of becoming super industrialists, chiefs of industry, or world-shattering inventors is not in them (after all, there were many other people in Galt’s Gulch representing different professions, from composers of great note to merely famous actors, and simply unknown but honest and hardworking principled people)- all that matters is that an individual be honest, rational, principled and uncompromising in matters of fundamentals.

Rand used the villains and collectives of her novels to demonstrate the effects of holding contrary philosophies, but in no moment did she ever state that her heroes were a special breed of people and that the principled life was beyond the rabble – that would have been misanthropic. Instead, throughout the novels there are isolated examples of people responding to greatness or achievement in a positive way (the reaction to the John Galt Line, for example), even if it is people who lack a completely structured philosophical approach, it is clear in the novels that they want to see great things done and admire them.

These anonymous good people become disillusioned and listless (as it is implied in the state of the world in Atlas Shrugged when North America is near its collapse) because they have no structured philosophical approach that would help them understand why are these things happening and who is responsible for them- they’re good people (like Cheryl Taggart), but by having only an osmosis approach to philosophy that they are at the mercy of the current and many drown in it (a point of interest to you on this would be to read some of the essays in Philosophy: Who Needs It? that touch upon this very point)- they are at the mercy of the tides precisely because they live in a society that has discarded the value of individualism- they lack a sense of self and self-worth that would otherwise save them.

You might want to rethink your original approach, because although you implied that Rand’s view (and therefore your own when you “used to love” her) is an inherently misanthropic one from which you have moved beyond, your words suggest that you have moved into a position rooted in misanthropy: now you are arguing that the only means by which man may be ‘held back’ (controlled) is not by his own mind or rational argument, but by the brute force (translated into legislation) of a collective movement (this is most likely why you see Rand as misanthropic, as she attacks the very means by which you think the individual must be reined back.)

This indicates to me a far dimmer view of the human condition than Rand ever expressed -after all, there are heroes in her works and her philosophy is explicitly geared towards the attainment of a rational state in which men trade value for value, whereas the existence of rational and honest men is qualified by you as ‘a bizarre pipe dream.’

2010-01-02T12:03:00.001-08:00

To Professor Jennifer Burns

2010-01-02T02:48:00.001-08:00

Sent to Professor Jennifer Burns, author of a rather philosophically inaccurate and heavily biased book on Rand:

To Jennifer Burns, Professor

Although you have done a very competent job in your book, from a historical perspective, I continuously found your attitude towards the philosophy in itself to be that of someone who either strived to misrepresent it or who simply did not understand it and did not put much effort to understand it at all. I am aware that your focus is a historical one, but it seems to be a very obvious oversight to attempt a book about a philosopher without actually studying the philosophy itself.

At best you have offered an incomplete portrait, at worst you have presented a disingenuous reduction of the personage by not attempting to understand the concepts of the philosophy and instead relegating your explanation of Rand to a point of view which is aimed as a platform for your criticisms of the person in question and not as an honest evaluation of the person *and* the philosophy.

A philosophy by itself can be the subject of a book, but the biography of a philosopher without integrating an honest study of the philosophy itself is inconceivable. I kept finding several philosophical mistakes concerning your conception of Objectivism at large (such as Rand's conception of selfishness, which you seem to have taken to be some sort of conception of cynical exploitation and misanthropy), and I must hope that these were honest mistakes - for the alternative must be that you sought to misrepresent the philosophy intentionally, which is a level of intellectual dishonesty that I do not wish to consider in an academic of your stature.

It is in absolute sincerity that I suggest you read the book "Objectivism in one lesson" by Andrew Bernstein- not as an attempt to 'convert' you but as a source against which you may wish to compare your assertions about the philosophy and correct, in a future edition, your intellectual inaccuracies regarding some very salient and important aspect of the philosophy. It is only the intellectually honest thing to do.

Update From Ecuador

2009-12-23T14:47:00.001-08:00

Amelia Sandoval gives us a live report from what is the predictable actions of a tyrannical state:

“Yesterday, around 1800 hours, a number of vehicles drove up to the television station in order to demonstrate our support. We honked the horns of our cars and the police officers who were present (as they were the ones who enacted the closure of the television station) began to write down all the license plate numbers of everybody present.”

One question that pro-socialists have never been able to answer satisfactorily is this: If a fully socialist nation (and by this I mean a full socialist government without any capitalism to stave off its inevitable self-destruction) is such a paradise, why is there always (literal or metaphorical) barbed wire fences at the borders- pointed inwards?

Heart Of Socialism, Heart Of Darkness: Ecuador.

2009-12-22T20:19:00.001-08:00

On the 22nd of December of 2009 the television chain Teleamazonas was closed down for three days due to a direct order from the Palace of Carondelet, the seat of president Rafael Correa- a self-avowed “Socialist Of The XXI Century.” The order given by the Superintendent Of Telecommunications violates all procedures and has been given without the option of appeal.

The shutdown occurs at a key moment for President Correa: 5pm, only a few hours before the National Assembly prepares to debate about a new law known as Gag Order.

At 7pm tonight hundreds of people could be found outside of the station in solidarity with Teleamazonas and against the measure, which attempts against the liberty of Ecuadoreans everywhere. For Marcos Cadena, one of the protesters, this is nothing more than a reflection of the totalitarian nature of today’s Ecuadorean government.

Teleamazonas has set up a twitter feed at http://twitter.com/teleamazonasec

However, despite the hundreds of protesters, there a many who, like Victor M. Abad (who is conveniently residing in New York and is therefore exempt from all suppression) , are in favor of totalitarianism and the violation of freedom of speech. Mr. Abad writes:

“Para los ignorantes como Orlado Zuñiga, me pregunto hasta cuando los periódicos y radios van a hacer y decir lo que les plazca sin miedo a ser reprendidos o en el mejor de los casos sacados de circulación.”

Translated, it reads:

“For the ignorants such as Orlando Zuñiga, I wonder for how long will newspapers and radios be able to say and do whatever it pleases them without fear of being reprehended or, in the best of cases, taken out of circulation altogether.”

To Mr. Abad we must ask: What kind of country do you wish you live in? You have two choices:

a) A country in which the government has the right and force to censure and infringe upon the individual’s freedom of speech, in accordance with whatever it is the government deems ‘appropriate’ to be said.

b) A free country.

If it is a free country he wants, then Mr. Abad has to live with a very unpleasant fact of reality (for him): The fact that he will live in a country in which any person may say whatever stupidity comes forth from their mouths (Mr. Abad being a case in point) without the risk of government sanction (unless they are performing legal slander or libel, which is raising false accusations) for expressing themselves. If it is freedom that Mr. Abad wants, then there is only one path to it: Remove Rafael Correa from power and purge every cabinet, committee and office appointed by him, embrace capitalism and individual rights and restore a proper set of laws so that Ecuador is not a ‘Social Democracy’ but a full Republic.

It is, however, the first kind of government that Mr. Abad wants. In this case we suggest to Mr. Abad to buy a one-way ticket to Iran, a country that is now famous around the world for having exactly the kind of government that he wants. Iran is so efficient in controlling everything by what the government deems ‘acceptable’ that some remarkable progress has been made in every aspect of Iranian life. For example, the government has banned makeup on female TV hosts, has banned those harbingers of sexual perversion known as curvaceous mannequins from store windows, has banned male clerks from selling women’s underwear, banned English words, and banned local and foreign media within Iran from covering things such as the brutal assassination of Neda Agha Soltani by government thugs – which is something the government would obviously find ‘inappropriate.’ Obviously Iran is the perfect choice for Mr. Abad: the full logical conclusion of his sickening ideology.

There is more than a passing resemblance between Iranian totalitarianism and Ecuadorean Socialism. It is important that everybody realize that the kind of ideology that is now taking full bloom in Ecuador is the same totalitarian tyranny that drove Augusto Pinochet, Francisco Franco and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the ideological ‘giants’ (if one can be a giant in depravity) that Rafael Correa wishes to emulate. In the end it is valuable and intelligent individuals such as Neda Agha Soltani who are destroyed whilst government cronies and sympathizers, like Mr. Abad, feed on the carcasses.

Taking Out The (Euro)Trash

2009-12-01T02:46:00.001-08:00

You’ve prepared yourself for a night at the Erfurt Opera, you’ve bought your tickets and go forth to watch the production, secure in your knowledge of the libretto and looking forward to good acting, directing and singing.

Only something must be wrong, you realize, as the curtain goes up: You do not remember Verdi’s Un Ballo In Maschera taking place in the middle of a post nuclear holocaust wasteland, and you are almost certain that the libretto did not call for a Female Hitler (who manages to maintain Der Fuehrer's signature moustache in an estrogen-defying feat), Uncle Sam, or a chorus of naked elderly men and women wearing nothing but Mickey Mouse heads! Where is the King of Sweden? What happened to the costume ball? Did somebody switch your ticket when you weren’t looking?

Or, let’s say, you show up for your first “Norma” rehearsal and the ‘concept’ of the show is explained to you: the sets are geometric, the costumes look like Cirque Du Soleil rejects, and you are informed of the proliferation of a good number of naked people onstage—and you are one of them.

If any of these, or weirder, have ever happened to you, then you have my commiserations: You have encountered Eurotrash or Regietheater.

How can you tell what a Regietheater/Eurotrash production is? Well, let’s look at some of the properties that these productions usually exhibit:

It is an European house, or it is a production staged by Famous European Stage Director #125.
A specifically defined historical or fictitious event suddenly acquires a completely different, unrelated and ‘polemic’ subtext that wasn’t obvious to any of the Great Unwashed who studied the libretto but which did not escape The Great Director’s clever interpretation (the assassination of the King of Sweden in Un Ballo suddenly becomes a Marxist anti-capitalist critique of North America in the midst of the September Eleven terrorist attacks. What? Didn’t you notice? It’s obvious, for crying out loud!)
Natalie Dessay is somehow involved (not 100% true all the time, but if she’s there your odds become considerably higher)
Someone, somewhere, is walking around butt-naked for no discernible reason (other than maybe a desire to catch pneumonia, considering the temperature of most theaters).
For some reason, a sexual act is simulated, usually Out Of Character (such as Scarpia’s use of prostitutes to perform fellatio on him during the recent Met Tosca— Scarpia is a rapist, not a sex addict, and rapists don’t pay their victims) and performed in the most shocking or ridiculous manner (that is, if your own spouse were to act that way you would be served with divorce papers after you laughed yourself silly).
Something ‘symbolic’ is taking place onstage (or above it, below it, to the sides, etc) which serves as a means to tie the Great Director’s vision with what the libretto actually says, and it is usually as subtle as a firecracker in an oil field (as she sings Sempre Libera, Violetta climbs onto the giant clock that looms over the stage and attempts to push its hands backwards--- telling us that Sempre Libera is just the 19th century version of Cher’s If I Could Turn Back Time! )
Something happens onstage that could have only been inspired by generous doses of Peyote (human-sized bumblebees are dancing the Charleston around a soprano during one of her challenging coloratura arias).

Semi-humorous lists aside (we wish we were making things up), we can say that Eurotrash / Regietheater is the practice of allowing a director an unprecedented level of freedom in devising the way a given opera is staged so that the composer's original, specific stage directions (as well as location, timeline, cast, plot) can be changed to suit whatever The Great Director’s vision is.

Tracking Regietheater’s roots, we find that a Wagner is at the heart of it. In this case, Wieland Wagner, grandson of the infamous misanthropic composer Richard Wagner (a man who was the exemplification of the Kant-Heidegger dynasty of thought).

After World War II, Wieland ran into several problems concerning his grandfather’s works onstage: during the apogee of the Third Reich they had been appropriated and adopted as the Reich’s ideological banners, with Wagner being named the composer whose musical ideas were the artistic expression of National Socialism ideology (this is no coincidence, as Quee Nelson demonstrates in her book “The Slightest Philosophy”: The chapter “The Same Walking as Dreaming” is dedicated to demonstrating the continuous and harmful effects of post-modern philosophy, starting with Kant and Heidegger and their insane philosophy’s hand in the birth of the Third Reich).

Wieland was the ideological pupil of Adolphe Appia, a famous theorist of stage lighting and set construction. Many of Appia’s approaches were revolutionary- including the preference of three-dimensional sets over flat painted ones. In Appia’s theory of artistic unity, Wieland found the answer by which he could sidestep the unfortunate political undertones that were attached to his grandfather’s works: instead of focusing on specifics, he would divest the production of all detail and instead emphasize a minimalistic approach in order to render it more symbolic and, in doing so, put the focus on the universal quality of the Wagnerian dramas – with a heavy dose of Carl Jung on the side.

Most stage directions were reinterpreted or discarded as, Wieland said, they were already illustrated in the score (of course, we would have asked him ‘then why bother with a costly fully-staged production? Just put the whole thing on as a concert version and we’ll close our eyes, since it is all illustrated in the score?’ We imagine Wieland would not have liked this question.)

Unfortunately, this is where one of our stereotypical villains first makes his entrance: Say hello to monsieur Jacques Derrida, the father of Deconstruction. Derrida first published Of Grammatology in 1967, and the seeds were planted.

Incidentally, Monsieur Derrida admitted to be indebted to none other than Heidegger, without whom (he said) he would never have said a single world.

So what is Deconstruction, and why is it important in the field of Eurotrash? J. Hillis Miller, a deconstructionist himself, put it best: “Deconstruction is not a dismantling of the structure of a text, but a demonstration that it has already dismantled itself. Its apparently-solid ground is no rock, but thin air.” ("Stevens’ Rock and Criticism as Cure," Georgia Review 30,1976)

Essentially, the whole point of Deconstructionism is that any text has more than one interpretation; that the text itself links these interpretations inextricably and that the incompatibility of these interpretations is irreducible. Sounds absurd? No more absurd than the fact that Derrida, who created the movement, was completely unable to express a definition of it: "I have no simple and formalisable(sic) response to this question. All my essays are attempts to have it out with this formidable question."

The only attempts Derrida ever made towards defining his philosophy occurred only in negative statements: He says, for example, that deconstruction is not an analysis, a critique, or a method, without saying that it has nothing in common with an analysis, a critique, or a method. This is as effective as saying, when attempting to describe an automobile: “It is neither the moon, a centipede nor a pregnant milkmaid.”

By refusing to define deconstruction, Derrida allowed himself the con man’s way out: he could include anything under the realm of deconstruction, and thus allow for the possibility for the deconstruction of everything.

To say that post-modernist philosophy aims towards the destruction not of all standards but of the mind itself is not an exaggeration: Derrida and his anti-intellectual philosophy are perfect examples of the nature of the beast. When deconstruction swelled as a movement, Wieland’s adaptations of Grandpa Wagner were seen in a new light: they were the ideal tools for post-modernists such as the disciples of Derrida, a perfect means to represent their non-standards.

Skip to 1976: nine years after Derrida’s first publication, Patrice Chéreau is tapped to produce the centenary Bayreuth production of Wagner’s Ring. Chéreau, applying the postmodernist (and Derrida’s) approach towards meaning, took the story of the twilight of the gods and created an anti-capitalist and Marxist sub-text (that is another thing that postmodernism has: capitalism is always en vogue as a target of a reinterpretation of anything ever said or written), so the Rhinemaiden became three ragged prostitutes doing business before a hydro-electric dam, the gods are (of course) industrialists, and Siegfried used an industrial steam-hammer to forge his sword.

Since then, the operatic world—specially in Europe and particularly in Germany—has undergone a strange and harmful madness. Because of postmodernist approaches to the libretto and the score, they are no longer considered to be useful guides from which to derive meaning but rather they’ve been supplanted by some obscure crystal ball into which the Great Director glances, sees what he wants, and from which he extracts a deconstruction of the original material which, when examined, has very little to do with the context of what either composer or librettist wrote down: one gets the impression that the Great Director would get rid of the pesky inconvenience of these two personages if only the singers and orchestra didn’t have to sing and play what they wrote.

Over the years we have seen productions that suffer from terrible dissociations of context: We have seen a Contes De Hoffman which takes place in a sanatorium with fly-away walls and elderly extras who apparently take delight in rolling on and off the stage (Natalie Dessay was cast as Olympia in that particular production, is anyone surprised?), We have seen eggs singing, enormous fetuses a la Space Odyssey 2001 suspended from the ceiling during Sigmund and Sieglinde’s passionate exchange (how subtle and foreshadowing!), A Sonnambula that was essentially a meta-mockery of opera, and more nudity, lewdness and vulgarity than you could ever find in the whole of Las Vegas.

When allegory, heavy-handed metaphor and rampant symbolism hijack the staging so much that the actions that take place (and the environment in which they take place) are so absurdly bizarre that they could pass as a Dadaist’s secret fantasy, then you’ve gone too far. The audience is not incapable of understanding and, in fact, applying these ridiculous postmodernist approaches is a double insult: You’re essentially telling the audience that it is too stupid to understand the actions and meaning of the opera without your Magnanimous Intervention, and you are saying the composer/librettist team was too much of a boob-troop to make the opus understandable.

Every character will have a doppelganger accompany them around the stage -- a priest for Micaela (a metaphor for her desire to get married, explains Dante), and Escamillo (Erwin Schrott) under his cape will hide a third arm -- yes, seriously -- as a metaphor for his bullfighting and his swordsmanship. And five gypsy girls will always follow Carmen, silently, just like five veiled old women will never leave the stage, as silent witnesses of the action, a symbol of inescapable Fate.

I would like to point out that there is a difference between the updating of an opera, a re-interpretation of it, and Regietheater/Eurotrash.

Many operas can be tastefully updated: Fidelio, for example, can be transported forward in time to the dictatorship of Franco in Spain without losing a great deal in the process, although it does provide some incongruence due to the appearance of Don Fernando at the end, the savior minister of the King (this being Franco’s regime, he was the de facto regent starting in 1947 and therefore Don Fernando would have been sent by Franco himself- this incongruence could be seen as defeating the whole argument of the opera because Florestán and Leonora are being freed from the tyrant Pizarro only by the superior force of the greater tyrant Francisco Franco).

Nevertheless, these difficulties must be confronted by many opera updates: any updating of Rigoletto proves troublesome because of the explicit mention of titles of nobility and the plot resting on the power relations between an aristocratic class system that does not exist in our current society as an adequate parallel. Likewise, updates of Nozze di Figaro run into similar predicaments because the power that the Count of Almaviva exerts over his wife, Susanna and Figaro also has no parallel in modern Western countries.

At their best, when done with taste and sagacity, these updates can be a breath of fresh air. Most of the time they end up a mixed bag of brilliant moments and awkward ones (when anachronisms and incongruence appear), and sometimes they do not work at all.

While updates can still follow the score and libretto as guides for establishing parallels in the updated settings, Regietheater seeks to create a whole new subtext that was not present before and use it as the main focus of staging and interpretation.

Because postmodernists lack standards (since their eternal loop on the ‘meaning of meaning’ leaves them impotent to actually perform a judgment of values,) these Great Directors of the Regietheater world resort to all sorts of macabre and depraved effects in order to drive their ‘Concept’ across. Journalist Heather Mac Donald wrote in her article “The Abduction of Opera,” explaining to what lengths one of these Great Directors (the culprit’s name is Calixto Bieito, don’t forget it!) proceeded to mutilate Mozart’s famous rescue opera, Abduction from the Seraglio:

“Mozart's lighthearted opera The Abduction from the Seraglio does not call for a prostitute's nipples to be sliced off and presented to the lead soprano. Nor does it include masturbation, urination as foreplay, or forced oral sex. Europe's new breed of opera directors, however, know better than Mozart what an opera should contain. So not only does the Abduction at Berlin's Komische Oper feature the aforementioned activities; it also replaces Mozart's graceful ending with a Quentin Tarantino--esque bloodbath and the promise of future perversion.”

Nudity, vulgarity, needless violence and perversion are Regietheater’s best friends. Only a postmodernist mind that could be capable of conceiving of any of them as central exponents of a serious and worthy intellectual proposition. Let us not be fooled here: Underneath the posturing of intellectualism, these promoters of Regietheater and ‘avant-garde’ productions are little more than savages who delight in seeing any proposition of structure or coherence consumed by flames. The champions of this ‘art form’ are posturing, false intellectuals who hide behind a murky and undefined concept of metropolitanism by which anything is proper onstage, as long as you can create a flimsy argument to rationalize it.

These faux intellectuals accuse those who dislike these shenanigans of being ‘provincial.’ There is nothing provincial in attacking Regietheater, but those who fight against it must know the reasons for which they must decry it, mere emotional appeal will not work, but rather one must take these people on what they pretend are their terms- no concept within the universe of Regietheater will remain standing when ruthless critical judgment is applied. They make great show of their circular intellectualism and esoteric arguments questioning the validity of esoteric arguments, but a postmodernist is no more an intellectual than a cow is a barn.

Another attack the Regiespecters use to defend their master’s works is the appeal against Puritanism. Their use of nudity and sexuality, they claim, is a celebration of the beauty of the human body. There is nothing wrong in using the naked body in productions, and it is you who should be ashamed to find anything wrong with it.

Yet, if there is nothing wrong with onstage nudity, why are only a select number from within each cast deigned to be naked at one time or another? And why does this nudity come, as it always does, at a moment that seems all too specifically engineered to cause shock, dread or horror?

The truth of their sham is that there is nothing ennobling in their use of the nude body. Their appeals to innocence are tarnished by the fact that they used nudity as nothing more than a gut-level shock-value. Scarpia’s prostitutes flashed their breasts at the audience, not in celebration of their beautiful bodies but as a brazen and infantile slap at the public on behalf of Great Director Luc Bondy.

Cherubino’s simulated masturbation to the tune of Non so piu, the aforementioned depravities in Seraglio and the pervasive nihilism of similar antics do not state “Behold, here is man in his greatness, with his body as his manifestation on earth, celebrate and admire it!” but they rather seem to say “Behold, you are a depraved and monstrous creature, here you lie naked like the beast you deserve to be!” It cannot be any other way: Postmodernism is a philosophical movement that hates the mind of man and its achievements above everything else, and therefore will hate man for being man. Whether consciously or not, these premises cannot help but concretize themselves in the horrendous actions that these Great Directors thrust upon the audience.

It is fitting that Great Directors are fascinated with prostitutes, because they are not unalike: when it comes down to it, anyone can have sex- but very few can actually make love. It is easy to appeal to the carnal and instinctive, but creating something of great significance requires a level of mental and emotional integration that a postmodernist mind simply cannot conceive. Hence, the prostitute is the perfect symbol for them, whereas their opposite would be the Romantic Ideal. It is inescapable to compare the nude creations of the Renaissance masters with the abominations of the Regietheater: The great masters sought to express internal and external perfection in their nudes—true celebrations of what it means to be truly human, whilst the postmodernist artist wants the human subject to be depraved both within and without and, in the fashion of true monsters, revel in its sight.

The greatest singers of our age have managed to move audiences to all manners of emotions without the removal of a single item of clothing or the use of any gimmick. Shirley Verret’s early Dalilah, for example, is the quintessential seducer- she exudes beauty, passion, danger and eroticism whilst remaining completely clothed. Natalie Dessay, Queen of Regietheater and onstage histrionics, could sing Lucia’s Il Dolce Suono stripped to her unmentionables (and in her case, indiscernibles) whilst swinging to and fro on a hobby-horse and not a single member of the audience would experience a single transcendental moment compared to what Callas achieved (even with a flawed instrument) in the role.

So let us be provincial, if that is the way they wish to call us (I prefer the term principled), but we have to call a spade a spade: Regietheater is nothing more than a grotesque gimmickry, pornography masquerading as the celebration of the body, anti-intellectualism passed off as deep thought. It must end, and it must end now so that true and talented directors can take over and truly perform innovative and fresh approaches with these works of art, without resorting to the horrible postmodernist tool set.

John Riley at Counterpoint put it best:

“Why not just trust the audience to know that this is a fictionalized portrayal of historical events that, as far as modern parallels are concerned, fits where it touches? This may of course lead to productions where the hero of A Masked Ball is an 18th-century Swedish monarch who is assassinated, or Henry V has a sword rather than a submachine-gun that he, for some reason, fails to employ against his enemies, but if that’s the case, we’ll just have to put up with it.”

Here, I would like to address other opera singers: As singers who hold our art as a great standard, it behooves us(if we hold Honesty to be a virtue at all) to put a stop to the atrocities perpetrated by these Great Men, and if possible to end the Age Of The Director once and for all in favor of the Age Of Opera, simply put.

We are the instruments of the opera- through us, the orchestra and the set and house crew the will of the composer is manifest into a complete multi-sensorial work of art, and we add our own individual and unique interpretations when we truly sing and act at our highest potential.

What, then, should be our call to pride when we allow men and women of such low caliber to use us to cheapen and debase that which we love most?

What statement are you letting someone else make with your body?

It is finally time to start taking out the trash.

The Problem with Our Health-Care Debate

2009-11-18T07:58:00.001-08:00

by Alex Epstein (ARI)

Everyone seems to have a different take on how to solve America’s health-care problem. But notice that every solution offered involves some elaborate new system of government controls. Different proposals include a “public option,” mandatory insurance for individuals, government-supported health-care exchanges, government-sponsored “efficacy research,” government-supported co-ops, and as many other ways of dictating consumer and producer behavior as can fit in a 1,000-page bill.

More government controls, we are told, are necessary to solve problems such as skyrocketing health-insurance prices, lack of competition among insurance companies, the inability of workers to keep their insurance policy when switching jobs, etc.

Really?

Then why do giants of the computer industry like Google, Microsoft and Apple compete vigorously without a “public option”? Why do we have such plentiful, affordable food without a government “food insurance mandate”? Why does laser eye-surgery, which is not covered by Medicare or government insurance laws, get better and cheaper all the time, while the price of health services the government is most involved in, skyrockets?

The answer is that these other markets are (comparatively) left free--while health care has been manipulated by government “solutions” for decades. Thus, our health--care discussion should focus, not on how government controls can solve our problems, but on how government controls have caused our problems.

Take for instance the common complaint that individuals can’t keep their health insurance when switching from one job to another. The only reason so many individuals can’t keep their insurance in the first place is that they get it through their employer--a phenomenon that was institutionalized by the government post-WWII through tax laws that make individually purchased insurance far more expensive. We don’t face the same problem with car or home insurance when we change jobs because we don’t buy it through our employer.

Or consider the general phenomenon of skyrocketing prices for health insurance. The ways in which the government drives up prices are many and gory, but here are a few.

State insurance-mandates force companies and individuals to buy policies covering all sorts of expensive treatments they wouldn’t otherwise buy coverage for: chiropractic care, psychiatric care, prenatal care. Every such “benefit” means higher costs. Those who would prefer just to purchase insurance against medical catastrophe and pay for everything else out of pocket are prohibited from doing so.

More broadly, since the 1940s, on the idea that health care is a “right” that others must provide, the government has made Americans collectively responsible for each other’s health care, whether through collectivized employer plans or through Medicare; thus, on average, “every time an American spends a dollar on physicians' services,” explains health economist John Goodman, “only 10 cents is paid out of pocket; the remainder is paid by a third party.”

People consuming medical services on other people’s dime consume a lot more. Prices are further driven up by numerous restrictions on the supply of medical professionals, such as protectionist licensing laws that prevent doctor’s assistants, nurse practitioners, nurses, and paramedics from competing with doctors on services they are well qualified to perform (fixing minor bone breaks, diagnosing the flu, etc.).

When supply is artificially limited, and demand artificially increases, prices explode. (Any system promising “universal care” experiences this--the much-vaunted “affordable” European system just deals with it by severe rationing.)

This is just a fraction of the story of how government has mangled the market for health care--a story any honest discussion of health care needs to study and learn from.

Then we will start to hear proposals for a truly progressive idea: a market in health care where the individual is responsible for his own health, the medical profession is truly free to compete for his dollars, and the government has been removed from the equation--the private option.

Heidegger to be cast out of philosophy (good riddance to bad rubbish, I say)

2009-11-13T00:40:00.001-08:00

Cross-posted from the Objectivist Online forum:

original notice by user Grames

From the NY Times book section: An Ethical Question: Does a Nazi Deserve a Place Among Philosophers?

By PATRICIA COHEN
Published: November 8, 2009
For decades the German philosopher Martin Heidegger has been the subject of passionate debate. His critique of Western thought and technology has penetrated deeply into architecture, psychology and literary theory and inspired some of the most influential intellectual movements of the 20th century. Yet he was also a fervent Nazi.
Now a soon-to-be published book in English has revived the long-running debate about whether the man can be separated from his philosophy. Drawing on new evidence, the author, Emmanuel Faye, argues fascist and racist ideas are so woven into the fabric of Heidegger’s theories that they no longer deserve to be called philosophy. As a result Mr. Faye declares, Heidegger’s works and the many fields built on them need to be re-examined lest they spread sinister ideas as dangerous to modern thought as “the Nazi movement was to the physical existence of the exterminated peoples.”

Dr. Leonard Peikoff has a description of Heidegger's thought in his book “The Ominous Parallels,” ch. 10

In academic philosophy, amid a variety of routine movements unknown to the public, one development stands out as both self-consciously new and fairly popular (especially among college students): the Existentialism of Martin Heidegger, whose major work, Sein und Zeit, appeared in 1927. Existence, Heidegger declared to his enthusiastic young following, is unintelligible, reason is invalid, and man is a helpless "Dasein"; he is a creature engulfed by "das Nichts" (nothingness), in terror of the supreme fact of his life: death, and doomed by nature to "angst," "care," estrangement, futility.
The novelty of this viewpoint lies, primarily, not in its content—Heidegger traces his root premises back to Kant—but in its blatancy and form (or rather formlessness). Contrary to the major line of nineteenth-century German philosophers, Heidegger does not attempt to offer an objective defense of his ideas; he rejects the traditional demand for logical argument, definition, integration, system-building. As a result, his works, brimming with disdain for the external world (and with unintelligible passages), have been praised by admirers as the intellectual counterpart of modern painting. Heidegger, it is sometimes said, exemplifies "non-representational thinking."
As to human action, according to Heidegger, it must be unreasoned, feeling-dictated, willful. On May 27, 1933, he practiced this idea on a grand scale: in a formal, voluntary proclamation, he declared to the country that the age of science and of academic freedom was over, and that hereafter it was the duty of intellectuals to think in the service of the Nazi state.

May 27, 1933 is when Heidegger acting in his capacity as Rector of the University of Freiburg fired all of the jewish professors.
Faye advocates Heidegger's books be banished to the Hitler shelf of the history section, not burned.

Ayn Rand Week at Chapman University

2009-11-11T07:45:00.001-08:00

Last week (the week of November 4th) was Ayn Rand Week at Chapman University. Events included the dedication of a bust of Rand to celebrate the establishment of the Rebecca and William Dunn Distinguished Chair in Honor of Vernon Smith , as well as an exhibit of Rand memorabilia in the Leatherby Library and other events.

Image of the full bust

Closeup on the dedication plaque

The dedication ceremony.

From Timothy Sanderfur’s blog.

Romantic Love: Victim to the tyranny of Tradition

2009-11-06T16:42:00.001-08:00

The most recent defeat of the same-sex marriage initiative in Maine is an interesting scenario for observations, particularly when it comes to pinpointing how a lack of integrated principles and logic will lead individuals to willingly legislate away the ability of the pursuit of happiness of a whole minority without batting an eye.

When perusing the pages of websites such as Stand For Marriage Maine, we may encounter the following lines:

“If Question 1 fails and LD 1020 is allowed to take effect, marriage will be redefined to be about any two consenting adults without regard to gender, the focus being only about what the adults want for themselves, and not what is best for society as a whole. If allowed to take effect, LD 1020 would throw to the trash heap Maine’s decades-old interest in traditional marriage and legalize homosexual, genderless marriage.” 1

There is a lot of subtext floating around in this statement, and I think we should cleave this political and ambiguous language in order to extract the actual principles that are peering at us from behind the language of propaganda. I’ll divide this into four violations:

Appeal to Government Intervention.
Appeal to the mob.
Violation through deceit.
Appeal to the cherished zombie.

1. Appeal to Government intervention:

The stance as a whole assumes that it is proper for government to restrict the right of an individual to enter into a contract of his own choosing with another individual. Furthermore, the sentence insinuates that it is perfectly within the rights of a sufficiently agitated majority to restrict other individuals from entering into a specific kind of contract (in this case, a civil marriage contract) simply because they are in disagreement with it. This, in fact, is not true at all: as long as the terms of the contract and its actions do not violate the individual rights of others, individuals are protected by the principles individual rights– they are free to enter into a marriage contract or other kind of contract if they so desire.

For the citizenship to prohibit a couple of the same sex from entering into said contract, there would have to be an explicit right to specifically delimit relationships of third parties. No such right exists and no such right could exist because its philosophical and legal repercussions would be devastating upon individual liberties: with these principles put into practice, one group may prohibit a set of individuals from entering into a contract of marriage because of religious grounds, racial grounds, public opinion, et cetera.

The principle of interference in the affairs of others has already run its course in North America and South Africa, the only difference being that the bone of contention upon which opponents leaned was the issue of race – this stance (on both its general principle and its specific applications) has been proven to be wrong in the past, now it returns to us in a different guise but with the same trite old chestnuts for arguments.

The argument for government intervention must be immediately discarded because it is improper for government to interfere in the private lives of its constituents when no rights are being violated and no crimes are being committed.

These groups attempt to strong-arm the government into bowing down to their particular agendas by using the mob as their bludgeoning weapon.

2. Appeal to The Mob:

Stand For Marriage Maine, by citing ‘what is best for society as a whole’ has invoked the principle of ‘social theory’ which holds the highest good, and the highest good is whatever ‘society’ deems it to be. Rand identified the problem behind this collective surrender in “The Objectivist Ethics” by indicating that

Although it claims that its chief concern is life on earth, it is not the life of man, not the life of an individual, but the life of a disembodied entity, the collective, which, in relation to every individual, consists of everybody except himself. 2

This egregious philosophy is naked for all to see in the fourth line of the website’s excerpt: ‘The focus being only about what the adults want for themselves, and not what is best for society as a whole.’ Well, then, who is ‘society’? What rights does ‘society’ have that it supersedes the rights of the individual? In this example, just as in all other examples of ‘social theory’ throughout the ages, same sex couples are not part of ‘society’ and their benefit is not part of ‘what is best for society.’

This is an argument best called Argument From The Herd. It consists solely on denying or imposing a course of action to someone simply because the great majority has decided it be so, without any necessary proof other than testifying that they ‘speak for society,’ and society always happens to be everybody but the parties being coerced.

There are no magical rights that suddenly appear when two or more people are gathered together- each individual has his own rights, which are no different from any of the rights those around him hold. The Argument From The Herd would have you believe that consensus equals truth, but that is not the case: You can convince the entire population of the United States to vote that gravity is caused by little green fairies who live under trees, it won’t matter because reality will not suddenly change its configuration to accommodate the new ultimatum from the Gravity Definition Committee.

Society is not a beast apart from the individual unit (it is, in fact, nothing more than an abstract concept that means ‘the total sum of individuals living within a specific social framework’)—what is good for the individual is what is ‘good for society’, and what is good for the individual is to have his individual rights respected and enforced: to impede two individuals from defining their relationship in legal terms is infringing those rights.

The argument for ‘society’ must be immediately discarded without a second thought: there is no such thing as a collective hive mind and sheer numbers cannot substitute good judgment, logic and reason.

How do these groups manage to get the sparks of a mob fired up enough to command its mobility? The answer is simple: Deceit.

3. Violation through Deceit (inciting fear):

There is an enormous confusion when it comes to the term ‘marriage’ as it is applied to the non-ecclesiastic function of two individuals signing a legal contract with the intent to share their assets and their lives. Opponents of same-sex marriage have used this tactic over and over again: deliberately misinforming the public as to what exactly is being discussed.

Preachers and other religious leaders would have you believe that what is at stake is ecclesiastic marriage, the ceremony by which the priest, cleric, pastor, witch-doctor or other religious officiator unites the couple in question before their shared deity. This is wrong- the entities of civil marriage and religious marriage are separate and it is impossible to treat them as a single entity: one is a legal contract, the other one a religious ritual, and neither has any effect on the other (if it were otherwise, then all it would take would be one ceremony and both bases would be covered- and we know that is not the case). The contract that a couple signs when marrying through City Hall is, in fact, a civil union.

Groups like these are often contentious of the concept of separation between church and state – but only when it goes against what they desire. Whenever something transgresses upon their agenda, they are more than willing to erect a wall. Thus, it is perfectly alright for them to impose their religious values upon local government (by banning same-sex marriage), but they are quick to repudiate this church-state love affair should someone attempt to impose legislation on them (after all, if there is no separation as they claim, then it should be impossible for them to stop government or legislation). This ideological inconsistency is a trademark of all religious movements because religious thought does not work on principle, but works from the angle of commandment and imposition, a position that makes it impossible to integrate philosophical principles.

If these religious groups understood principle they would realize that the concept of separation of church and state is nothing more than a concrete example of the principle that government may not interfere upon the private lives of its citizenship- romantic love and religion being two elements of this, and government being part of the public life of the country. These two elements are like acids and alkalines- best kept apart, and disastrous when combined.

Furthermore –and here I am moving outside of the context of Objectivist Philosophy to address a point in theology- it is an act of extreme inconsistency to make religious belief a public issue. By interfering through government in other people’s lives based on religious belief, these groups take their faith – a private matter- and turn it into a public affair, a part of the government, as one would think of the State of the Union address or tax payments. The religion in question (Christianity) has something very definitive to say concerning making one’s faith a public affair:

“”And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by men. I tell you the truth, they have received their reward in full. But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. – Matthew 6.5-7”

I bring this up as a serious point, since it is clear to my readers that I am neither a Christian nor religious (though having undergone a very extensive study of theology during my teenage years), but I do believe in holding people to be consistent with what their alleged philosophical platforms are.

The violation from deceit continues:

“A wealth of examples have been identified by legal scholars who have pointed out the conflicts that will arise between the rights of people who sincerely disagree with homosexual marriage, and the rights of homosexual couples to demand that the state enforce gay marriage whether people support it or not.” 1

We have a dash of Argumentum Ad Verencundiam mixed in here for added flavor, basically “Great experts have said this is so, and you should believe it”- these are anonymous Great Experts, as the website fails to link to any study or provide any names whatsoever (most likely because they are sources that are well-known to be absent of objectivity.)

Furthermore, what conflicts of rights are these to which these Great Experts refer? To insinuate (as they do) that a gay marriage infringes the rights of a heterosexual marriage who disagrees with it is as ridiculous as stating that an interracial marriage infringes the rights of a white supremacist marriage. Contracts are not signed on a ‘societal’ basis, they are signed only between individuals, and the contracts that two individuals undertake have no obligation nor repercussion on other individuals, thus two men or women marrying has no immediate metaphysical impact upon others, and whatever others’ religious dogmas require on the side of a reply is not a public matter but a private one. The only way in which rights would be infringed here would be if the new marriage clause would force individuals to marry only certain individuals based on an arbitrary criterion.

For this to be even remotely true it would require the government to impose that you could only marry people of your same sex, regardless of your sexual orientation.This is exactly the same kind of imposition that these groups seek to bring about by banning gay marriage. Same-sex couples are only asking that their right to enter into a contract with each other be respected- they are not prohibiting al heterosexual marriages or requiring that everybody else marry their own gender.

Immoral groups such as Stand For Marriage Maine (in Maine) and The Church Of Latter Day Saints (during the California Proposition 8 Referendum) demand that the state enforce the prohibition of this contract to whatever group they deem is not within their definition of ‘society’. It is irrelevant ‘whether people support it or not’ if it is a constitutional and philosophical issue- the annals of this country are full of many majorities supporting unjust and immoral laws that had to be defeated through the efforts of relentless individuals fighting against the throng- the appeal of sheer numbers is the equivalent of a brutish thug breaking the arm of a weaker person in order to coerce the person to act for his benefit: Might makes right.

This is why such groups must resort to the Violation From Deceit- in order to get the anger of the mob behind them (and thus have the Appeal To The Mob as one of their weapons) they must first instill fear in people for whom thinking on principle is not a habitual engagement. If these unthinking people fear that their cherished society is about to collapse and give into paranoia, they will follow whatever their leaders command in order to ‘kill the monster’, so to speak.

But what do these groups point towards, as their imagery of a frail and collapsing society in need of their crusade of salvation? Why, the Cherished Zombie, of course.

appeal to the cherished zombie:

The Cherished Zombie is a relic. It has been around for ages and its origins stretch back as far as anyone can remember. People might or might not know how it came to be there, but one thing everybody is certain is that it has always been there. And anyone who tries to move it will pay dearly.

The Cherished Zombie in this particular fight is the “Traditional definition of marriage,” an admittedly ugly and threadbare zombie in its own right. When they speak of ‘traditional definition of marriage’, these groups continue practicing the Violation From Deceit, because they do not explicitly say that the only ‘traditionally defined’ definition of marriage they accept is that of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, conveniently forgetting the arranged political marriages and child brides that were the staple of marriage for a much, much wider expanse of time than those two centuries. We will look at this definition, however, a little bit later, for now we shall focus on that one interesting word (which earned itself a whole musical number in “Fiddler On The Roof”): Tradition!

What is tradition? What makes it so important? To put it bluntly, a tradition is a social ritual (though it can be religious as well) that dictates the certain manner in which things ought to be done. The reason? Because it has always been done that way. The entire weight of the argument is supported not by how right it is or proof, but merely by how long it has been done. That’s pretty much it: anyone arguing from a traditionalist perspective has to be informed that attempting to establish a moral stance through the perspective of tradition does not have a foothold- morality must be constructed from logic and reason, structured through the incorporation of principles- Traditional imposition is no different than Moral Commandment as far unsuitability to formulate an actual moral code.

An appropriate fable that shows an application of the shortcomings of traditional imposition (though its origins are forgotten, unfortunately, by me) is that of a school teacher in antiquity and his pupils. The teacher had several gifted pupils whom he instructed at an amphitheater, and it happened that a certain local cat came to the assembly every day out of curiosity. This cat eventually became a distraction to the students and so the teacher finally tied the cat to a nearby tree and continued with the lesson. This continued for many years every day, and eventually the students grew and new students came in and eventually a new teacher replaced the elderly one when he died— but what started happening was that, when the cat finally died, a student started bringing a cat for the teacher to tie up! Neither the new teacher nor the newer students knew precisely why a cat was tied at the beginning of class, but all they knew that that was the way things had been done from the beginning, and no-one dared to question this, it became a commandment.

The reason many anti-gay marriage opponents make reference to ‘the institution of marriage’ is precisely because their approach to principle is like the students at the amphitheater. They have grown up with ‘the way things are done’ for many years, and they look back towards this traditional image of a 1950s family as the model of all familiar relationships because they seek to reinforce a standard not through rational processes, but through imitation of antiquity. They do not ask “what is the proper criteria by which man/woman must choose a lifetime companion?” but rather they state “Man must marry a woman, because it has always been.”

There truly is no ‘institution of marriage,’ marriage –the contract two people choose to enter out of their own free will- is not the prerogative of the government to command, nor is it the property of interest groups to deny. From a moral and philosophical level, there cannot be any government-enforced model of romantic relationships, for once that threshold is crossed statist groups are free to dictate whatever impositions upon anyone, without any other authority than the force of the violations enumerated above.

The track record of tradition

The issue of tradition versus principle is a serious one. To examine one concrete example, If it were not for the intellectual integrity of some individuals to not only defy but destroy ‘tradition’ for tradition’s sake, we would still see a world in which this ‘hallowed institution’ of marriage served no other purpose than to establish political or mercantile ties between powerful clans, with the unfortunate bride serving as nothing more than chattel, a bargaining chip made from flesh and blood. It was neither religion nor tradition that gave us the notion of Romantic Love – rather it came from the circles of intellectual individuals such as Eleanor of Aquitaine, who sponsored and protected the troubadours that predicated the notion of courtly love (once called Amour Honestus, or “Honest Love”)- a way for people to express the love not found in their marriages, which were in most cases unhappy- being almost exclusively made out of political necessity. In the Middle Ages you married a fief and got a wife thrown in with the bargain.

It was this notion of courtly love that would eventually give birth to romantic love, which was then adopted in the movement of the Enlightenment and carried into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to give us a world in which a young man and woman can arrange their own marriage for their own reasons – and upon whom the outcome is solely dependant. This is not to say that romantic marriages never existed prior to these movements, but they were the exceptions, not the norm. The lower classes married as they would, of course, but the leading trend of any family above serf status sought arranged marriages to improve their financial lot in the absence of a capitalist system.

The focus is evident here: Tradition demands the lives of individuals to be bound and dictated by nothing more than “How Things Have Always Been” in favor of a community or collective, while the individualistic notion of Romantic Love calls for no other dictum than the judgment and free will of the parties involved.

An effective and rather poignant dramatization of the principles at play here can be seen in the musical ‘Fiddler on the Roof.’ In this musical the milkman Tevye, who reveres Tradition greatly, has to bend twice to two of his daughters, Tzeitel and Hodel, when they choose grooms out of love (Motel and Perchik respectively)- although it is tradition that the weddings be arranged by the Matchmaker (Yentl, a role created by the late great Beatrice Arthur) in an arrangement that is usually primarily done for economic reasons, Tevye realizes that the happiness of his two daughters as individuals is much more important than whatever demands tradition may make and gives his blessing. However, when the third daughter, Chava, chooses a man outside of the Jewish faith (Fyedka), Tevye refuses to cross that line and in a rage forbids Chava from ever seeing Fyedka again.

Chava elopes and marries Fyedka, and returns in an attempt to approach her father once more- he rejects her and declares her dead to the rest of the family. The man who out of love bent the rules (and backed out of a arranged marriage for his first daughter- a major social rupture) could not overcome the final barrier that holds any traditionalist bound fast: Tribalism. Considering the floating abstraction of ‘the tribe’ more important than his own daughter’s pursuit of happiness drove Tevye to even impose his will upon Chava. Too much of a free spirit, and being a creature who was too in love with life, Chava abandoned ‘The Tribe’ for the pursuit of her own happiness – because what was demanded of her was that she should sacrifice her chance at happiness that others might not have to question the possibility that their Tradition was wrong. Anyone that values joy is incapable of choosing a different path than Chava’s.

This is the world that organizations such as Stand For Marriage Maine really mean when they speak of ‘the institution of marriage’ and of the ‘traditional definition of marriage.’ It is not the world of Romantic Love where you and I are free to choose whom we court and pursue, and with whom to spend our lives. The world based on a principle of “Tradition” is the very world from which the Enlightenment delivered us – a world in which we must court and marry in accordance with the wishes of others, for their benefit (not ours), and with our happiness, our joys, our aspirations and our longings within a romantic context are completely and permanently ignored. The restriction of marriage for ‘the good of society'.’

History and philosophy show us that the choice of romantic partnership is a choice that is only morally right when the individuals in question are the ones making it—to seek to impose a decision by law or by force is the peak of immorality, and these groups who speak of marriage as the unit of society for centuries (and by this referring solely to heterosexual marriage) would do very well to remember that their kind of marriage is an aberration from a historical perspective (being a relatively new invention when compared to the older approach), and that the true historical ‘institution’ of marriage (if one goes by what has been the longest-running historical trend in ‘tradition') can be encapsulated in this phrase:

“How much for your daughter?”

These groups should spend less time protecting the fictitious institution of Marriage and instead should spend its funds into discovering principle behind the freedom of each individual to determine his or her romantic unions by his own judgment, instead of engaging in behavior that is ultimately destructive towards the individual and his rights.

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1. Stand For Marriage Maine, “Why Marriage Matters”

2. Ayn Rand, “The Objectivist Ethics,” The Virtue of Selfishness, 34.

Slight Hold

2009-10-17T01:18:00.000-07:00

I want to apologize for there being no posts this and last week. I have been preparing a concert which will happen tomorrow. After the concert I will be able to finish some posts I have been working on, and a new podcast!

Did I hear a song?

2009-09-30T10:19:00.000-07:00

I've had several requests to list the recordings I use at the beginning of every podcast, so I'm going to keep an ongoing list of them.

First Podcast: An Issue Of Principle.- For the opening podcast I chose a scene from one of my favorite operas, with one of my favorite singers. The theme is "Chi Mi Frena In Tal Momento?", the famous sextet from Donizetti's Opera "Lucia Di Lammermoor". The singers listed are Alfredo Kraus ((24 September 1927 – 10 September 1999, Tenor), Edita Gruberova (Soprano) and Renato Bruson (Baritone), I cannot find the other three. It is an exquisite recording, among one of the best of this opera, but it is almost impossible to find nowadays.
Second Podcast: Principle Vs Common Sense.- Ukranian baritone Igor Gorin (October 26, 1904 – March 24, 1982) sings a lovely parlour song by American composer Augusta Mana-Zucca (December 25, 1890 - March 8, 1981), "I love life."
Third Podcast: Q&A.- Spanish composer Víctor Carbajo is perhaps one of the best contemporary composers today, using a heavy romanticist influence in his compositions, and writing lush and passionate melodies. I chose to use the beginning and ending of his "Luminous Barcarole" to give this unsung composer some needed exposure. I have sung many of his compositions in concerts to great results, and I think his music should be played as often as possible. You can find his music scores online at his website, as well as many recordings of his pieces. Just go here and take a look.

And that's it for the firs three podcasts. More to come.

Podcast #3: Q&A

2009-09-29T13:45:00.000-07:00

In this podcast, Kain Scalia answers questions from five people:

Isn't collectivism necessary to survive?
Should people be protected from self-harm by the legal system?
Hypotheticals and potentiality as crime.
Objectivism's stance against conspiracies.
The necessity for government dependence on basic needs such as the mail.

Listen to the podcast here or subscribe to it through itunes for free by searching for "Second Life Objectivists" on the iTunes store.

Galt's Gulch Cigarette Dispenser

2009-09-27T14:25:00.001-07:00

Nahasa Singh has provided us with a new novelty item- the Galt's Gulch Cigarette Dispenser! Come over to the institute and buy one of them from the lobby stand. It dispenses dollar-sign wearable cigarettes. A great way to make a statement, and no harmful side-effects!

Podcast #2 is up

2009-09-26T00:09:00.001-07:00

1) You can subscribe to the podcast on itunes this way: http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=315374698&uo=4
2) At our liberated syndication page at http://slobjectivists.libsyn.com
3) At our libsyn feed at http://slobjectivists.libsyn.com/rss

Thinking on Principle or Common Sense?

2009-09-24T13:26:00.000-07:00

I was recently asked what was the difference between thinking on principle and thinking with common sense.

Now, a lot can be said about what we term Common Sense. In order to put forth a simple definition we might say that common sense is a basic application of reasoning, a ground-level use of correct premises whose scope only encompasses a concrete problem of slight complexity. Usually it consists of a process of observation, simple induction, the formation of a very basic principle or rule, and then the elaboration of deductions starting from that basic principle.

One of the long-touted virtues of American culture used to be its common sense, or what some call the 'down to earth' approach many Americans had towards life. Common sense is not an incorrect tool by any means, and it is perfectly useful when it comes to problems of simple complexity, but unfortunately Common Sense simply isn't enough for an individual or a culture to survive. The great problems that an individual faces in the world today, the problems that directly touch upon his life and his liberties are very complex, and such problems - to be addressed correctly- require the direct application of a method capable of addressing many different degrees of abstraction, a task for which our valued 'Common sense' is simply not ideal.

The reason for this is that the way our minds work is hierarchical: as children we begin absorbing basic concretes such as our mother's nursery chair, our grandmother's rocking chair, and little by little we begin to create concepts based on the concretes to which we have been exposed, each becoming more abstract and subsuming more and more concretes and concepts underneath- so we moved from treating the nursery chair and the rocking chair as unique phenomenons unlike each other to treating both as concretes subsumed under the abstraction of 'chair'. Then, we began to include the abstraction of 'chair' under the abstraction of 'furniture' which encompassed many more concepts of different household items united by common characteristics ('tables', 'counters', 'couches'), and so on and so forth.

We do this because it is simply impossible for us to think in terms of every single phenomenon we have ever encountered at once: when we think of 'chair' we think of the abstraction that holds the characteristics that would classify something as a chair, we do not think of every single chair we have ever encountered. We end up understanding 'fire' as every kind of fire, we do not consider the fire of a furnace as different from the fire of a candle as far as basic attributes go- we don't need to stick our hand in the furnace to see if it will burn us like the candle did. The process of abstraction works like a system of references under which our intellect can access broad or specialized information quickly and efficiently.

This concept of abstraction and complex abstraction is very important to understand principle, because a principle is a proposition that integrates the total sum of your knowledge as it pertains to an important issue. Because of the nature of our minds, we really can't help creating abstractions - our minds need abstraction in order to deal with all the information with which it will come into contact - but we have a choice in whether we consciously integrate cohesive principles through self-examination and logic, or whether we take a completely passive role and have our principles formed, as Ayn Rand put it, from "a grab-bag of notions snatched at random, whose sources, validity, context, and consequences [we] do not know."

When it comes to several disciplines, many of us are more familiar with principles than we suspect: the entire field of computer software and hardware is based on principles of mathematics and electrical engineering, architecture works with the principles that evaluate the properties of metals and other materials in relation to the laws of physics, and so on and so forth. However when it comes to the most important fields- the fields of human life - ethics, politics, aesthetics- it seems as if the majority of us ignore principle altogether and almost consider it a four-letter word.

From what we can observe in the world, most people take the grab-bag approach to principle whenever it is applied to their personal lives - even a brilliant engineer who deals with concrete scientific principles during the day will fail to apply principle whenever he is not dealing with an engineering problem. Suddenly the decisions he makes for his private life or what political causes he supports become disconnected, contradictory or completely illogical. The greatest culprit of this is, of course, modern philosophy and post-modernism, but we can trace it back to Kant and Hume, and even further back to Plato. None of these philosophers were ever capable of establishing a very simple fact that has eluded their kin (with the exception of Aristotle, who was Plato's prize disciple and who, ironically, ended up disagreeing on everything with his old master), and which is at the very core of the problem of principle today: Morality is neither mystical nor arbitrary (and certainly not a 'categorical imperative'), but necessary.

In her book "Viable Values" Dr. Tara Smith, analyzing the philosophy of Rand, draws the conclusion that morality is necessary for the individual not because of a whim, a divine mandate or some other reason, but because a rational human being *cannot* survive without a code of morals. Smith goes further by saying that not just any code will succeed, but an *objective* code of morality, a code that will guide a human's choice and actions based on the standard of value of his life, a code obtained not through a divine mandate whose rules are hard -if not impossible- to glean, but through reason and logic, in accordance with the observable nature of a human being. Any system of morals that goes against the logically observable nature of a human is, therefore, evil since it is the antithesis of his existence, and that which goes in accordance with the nature of man is good- as it helps determine the purpose and course of his life.

Thus, just as it is with everything else, principle is absolutely necessary when dealing with the issue of morality and how a human is to live (and how a human is to live with other humans). A common mistake is that most people think that instead of principle, morality requires commandments. A morality accepted through logic and reason (as opposed to one imposed through mysticism or tyranny) does not accept compulsion or coercion- the basic stance of reason is proof and argument, not imposition. A moral principle is the sum of all knowledge of an individual's understanding of the nature of man, his place in the universe and the ways in which he can live to further his life and his goals while at the same time respecting the individual rights (a principle that addresses what is necessary for the individual to live) of others, and therefore it is only through the understanding of these concepts, and their validity, that the individual can apply them to his life and to his choices.

Commandments are non-contextual, whereas principles are. Let us examine, for example, the commandment "Thou shalt not lie." It is implied that lying is forbidden and wrong in any and all instances. There is no explicit contextual consideration, we must be truthful to everyone regardless of who they are. In contrast, Objectivism's stance towards honesty is very clear: since a rational man must first recognize the existence of a reality that is the standard of truth, to attempt to falsify that reality through deceit is a denial of this, as it would imply that the falsehood has more value than the truth.

However, this stance changes when the context is not an exchange between honest and rational individuals but instead it becomes a situation where one is dealing with non-rational thugs who attempt to use force- and this applies to physical force users such as criminals, or political coercion and force users such as tyrants and dictators: These individuals have already denied the aspect of reason by initiating non-rational force against the individual's rights, and if a rational man can survive by lying to tyrants and thugs, it is within his moral bounds to do so.

To require the rational man to be truthful to those who are irrational and who would destroy him would essentially imply that telling the truth to a criminal is more valuable than the life of an honest individual. This is not to say that standards are relative, rather they are relational and contextual: you cannot expect the same treatment from a criminal who seeks to destroy you as you would from someone who treats you as an intellectual equal, and you cannot react to both in the same way. To pretend to do otherwise is to falsify a fact of reality.

Commandments are rigid imperatives that seek to mandate a very specific moral conduct in all situations and, by being non-contextual, do not allow for the integration of concepts into principles. By adopting the standard view that morality is reduced to a series of commandments, we have alienated the concept of principle from moral life. This is reflected everywhere in the private and political spheres, where there is either an arbitrary set of commandments or an approach that proclaims that there are no standards whatsoever - this in the manner in which someone accepts being commanded or rebels against the idea of it.

Those that rebel against commanded morality either come up with 'soft codes' of their own, or simply attempt to cram in as many (often contradictory) standards into their repertoire as they can, thinking that they are displaying tolerance and open-mindedness when in truth they may be sanctioning a large number of moral atrocities they do not have the courage to condemn. How could they condemn them, if they lack any principle whatsoever as a moral standard?

Acting on principle comes down to acting on an abstraction because you have been able to understand the facts of reality surrounding the issue at hand, not simply because you are conforming to a command given to you by someone whom you regard as a moral authority. It is the act of thinking for yourself on a level of high abstraction, as opposed to letting someone else do the thinking for you.

Think about another popular Commandment: "Thou shalt not steal." In Objectivist philosophy, we understand that the private property of others, when acquired honestly, is inviolable. What considerations do you think should be kept in mind when, for example, we become aware of someone having stolen something from another person. If there are no authorities nearby and there is a risk of flight from the thief, is it moral to (safely) 'steal' the property from the thief in order to render it unto its proper owner? If it is, why is it so?

Most of you probably answered yes, it is moral in this case to 'steal' from the thief, and if you did you did so because of either a conscious of unconscious principle that incorporated the concept of respect for the property of others and the wrongness of depriving others of that property through illicit means. You may not have known why it was moral, but you somehow knew it was. That is a principle in action.

To be ale to arrive at a conclusion based on principle on, for example, whether it is proper or not for the government of a country to be able to nationalize businesses that belong to private individuals, you have to operate on a high level of abstraction: the issue at hand is whether or not the government should have the authority to annul the property rights of an individual. In order for this to be properly answered you need to have integrated all the necessary concepts that are subsumed under the label of individual, which includes the metaphysical nature of 'man' (as well as the definition of what a man is, as opposed to -say-a nonrational animal), his relationship to the world in accordance to his nature (which will in turn bring up the issue of individual property), what is the proper attitude he should have in order to be true to his nature and reach fulfillment, also he would have to integrate all the abstractions subsumed under government: the nature of government, its purpose, its limitations, et cetera...

Only when a person has been able to integrate the necessary concepts into complex abstractions he will know, for example, that a man is a rational being unlike the rest of the animals in the world, that he has a specific nature, which is that of being able to be a rational creature capable of complex abstractions beyond simple troubleshooting, who can only survive in the world by using his rational mind to circumvent obstacles; that the means by which he can survive is to establish ownership of his property, which is the fruit of the labor he receives from using his rational mind in one way or another; that said property cannot be acquired by force (because force is a denial of the rational nature of a man, it implies that a man is incapable of using his rational brain to interact with another man and that his only recourse is force- this, of course, becomes an exception when a rational man is aggressed upon and has to defend himself, which proper and moral) or that this property cannot be acquired through deceit either (with the earlier contextual exceptions applied to tyrants, as we mentioned before).

He will understand, because of the concepts he has integrated, that to be deprived or relieved of his rightful property through force is a direct attack against his ability to live as an honest, productive individual. At this point by this alone the answer to the person's question can be seen, but let us go further and say that this rational person would also have come to understand that the government, being an elected group of individuals possessing no greater number of rights than the individuals who form part of it, has only one proper function if it is to remain ideologically constant: To protect man’s rights, which means: to protect him from physical violence against himself and against his property. It is only an executor of defense against those who start the use of force.

When these abstractions have come into place, then the individual will be able to correctly formulate an answer to the question at hand. Because he knows the nature of man, the nature of his survival, and the nature of government, he understands that no matter what, no matter where, the use of force from the government enacted against an individual to deprive him of his private property when said property has been acquired without the infringement of the individual rights of others and that person is also morally blameless, is immoral. This answer is arrived at through principle, the principle of Property Rights. Thinking on this principle can also tell us what is the most likely outcome should the government step forward and break this principle: increase in governmental power, the creation of a legal precedent which the government can use to infringe upon the rights of others again, the blurring of the property rights within that society, and the precarious position all other rights enter the moment this happens. Once principle becomes compromised, the ideological structure becomes weaker and weaker.

Common sense, on the other hand, does not operate at this level. Without access to higher abstraction, common sense seeks a direct path to address the problem on a primary level. While this may be useful on the more basic of problems, issues such as the one mentioned earlier suffer greatly from a lack of principled thought.

On a surface, basic level it might seem perfectly acceptable to a man operating from the premise of common sense for the government to nationalize a failed company. After all, he reasons, by nationalizing a bankrupted company the government will be saving many jobs that would have been lost, as well as the economy by preventing a crash. Because this response does not incorporate the complex abstractions of industry, individual rights, property rights, a free market system and competition, the person in question does not see that by allowing nationalization he is not only infringing upon the rights mentioned earlier, but that he is also condoning the reward of failure: after all, if businesses that fail end up being rewarded by either being bailed out or 'purchased' by the government, why should any business owner worry about competition, profit or efficiency? Why should any successful business owner wish to remain successful, if his or her hard-earned money will be used by the government to finance his failed competitors?

Common sense's only preoccupation is solving an immediate problem, seldom a long-term one, and the only level it focuses on is the here-and-now, and what is the most efficient solution for the time being. In order to address problems of any important magnitude the use of principled thought is an absolute essential. A human needs principled thought in order to make accurate decisions on concrete problems.

Countless important concepts and concretes are subsumed under principles that common sense, working on an elementary level, cannot consider in its scope. The current state of our society, with its government interventions, government rulings on whether or not certain people can marry, or its attitude towards immigration can all be traced back to a lack of principled thought and a great deal of "common sense" politicians.