The preview to The Sunset Limited reminds me of Atlas Shrugged, they both involve the life or death of railroad. You might want to check it out. The following is based solely on the movie trailer and common themes among many works of art of which I have knowledge. I have not read the play or any of the works of Cormac McCarthy, but these clips give a short synopsis of the problem of evil. Good looking out.
[1] Then was Jesus led up of the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted of the devil.
[2] And when he had fasted forty days and forty nights, he was afterward an hungred.
[3] And when the tempter came to him, he said, If thou be the Son of God, command that these stones be made bread.
[4] But he answered and said, It is written, Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God.
In "The Sunset Limited," the Black character makes reference to the Bible, Jesus, and angels. He asks the White character if he is "happy." Samuel Jackson explains that the White character is very educated and his Black character in the film holds up to him the "bread of life" i.e. the Bible, which Christians call TRUE "knowledge" that satisfies "hunger" and leads to eternal happiness with full knowledge that the Black character has "suffered for righteousness," which in biblical terms should make him "happy."
[14] But and if ye suffer for righteousness' sake, happy are ye: and be not afraid of their terror, neither be troubled;
[5] Then the devil taketh him up into the holy city, and setteth him on a pinnacle of the temple,
[6] And saith unto him, If thou be the Son of God, cast thyself down: for it is written, He shall give his angels charge concerning thee: and in their hands they shall bear thee up, lest at any time thou dash thy foot against a stone.
[7] Jesus said unto him, It is written again, Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God.
The Black character in the film saved the White characters' life when he "cast himself down" in front of a train and the black angel rescued him, leaving us to conclude that this Altruist deed is exemplary of "the hands that bear him up." For all we know, the White characters' suicide is a result of the "ego" that reveres earthly human wisdom obtained through education that results in the "pride" of a knowledge that actually creates earthly values, which the Christian ethic holds to be the gravest of sins because any man of self-esteem by their estimate feels right while they don't, thereby creating a playground bully brawl over who is good, or the Son of God or the correct sort of mystic with ideas, choices and actions that reflect the Christian ethic presented in the "living word" i.e. the Bible.
[8] Again, the devil taketh him up into an exceeding high mountain, and sheweth him all the kingdoms of the world, and the glory of them;
[9] And saith unto him, All these things will I give thee, if thou wilt fall down and worship me.
[10] Then saith Jesus unto him, Get thee hence, Satan: for it is written, Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and him only shalt thou serve.
Needless to say, what the Black character did is what you might imagine we are all trying to do- live as we are supposed to and sacrifice everything we own, value or desire including our lives for the sake of any random stranger. This would truly be the the sort of worship the Lord thy God would accept as his due service.
I would tend to believe that, as far as philosophical reasoning is concerned, we look toward Immanuel Kant for this ego that reportedly exists or did exist in defiance of reason, truth, logic, reality and any good that may come of man's life on earth.
Enjoy Cormac McCarthy and best of luck with philosophy.
Monday, September 26, 2011
Friday, July 15, 2011
.Money, money, money
My love of my life, the desire to live it, and the recognition of reality require that I do not default on existence. Standing upon the judgment of my mind alone, I have arrived at the following conclusions: my interests cannot be served through the pursuit of contradictory goals, life requires I not hold contradictory values, and reality requires that desires are not acted upon until or unless I know that it is right that I do so. I reject any governmental policy that is generated for the welfare of society and fight for the right not to relinquish any values to those who seek a gain through the use of force against legally disarmed victims. The source and validity of my conclusions are: 1) it is not proper or moral, nor is it possible for man to achieve his goals if they contradict the facts of reality 2) society as such is only a number of individuals and its welfare does not exist apart from or against the rational self-interest of its members. As a primary value, I desire freedom in order that I may live with dignity and actual productivity. For these reasons, I accept a monthly stipend on the basis that I not be forced to default on existence by living for the sake of others as a cog in an engine of wealth redistribution.
If I owe anything to other men, it is to be rational. This requires thought in the purposeful and active achievement of a goal. To work to achieve these values, create these virtues, and generate these goals requires philosophical detection in, and often the fighting of, the motivations of average, respectable men who clamor for the unearned in a mixed economy. The circumstances I face permit the carrying out of freely chosen obligations, the options of rationally integrated and personal promises, and voluntary agreements that give me dignity in the face of the emotional barrage of well-meaning men who feel lost in a world they never made and conclude that either their interest or mine must be sacrificed in the process of the transition from tyranny to liberty.
If I heal my pain by my own effort, I refuse to deal with anyone who asserts; deny and denounce any who make a pretense at; and condemn anyone who makes an arbitrary claim based upon the unreality of self-made character. If I acquire rights by means of my own virtue, I refuse to accept the validity of any who demand sacrifice and reserve the right not to deal with them. If I set out in the pursuit of my own happiness, I reject the impracticality of adherence to objective reality and retain the right to destroy anyone who stands in my way. If I do not choose to let disasters go uncontested, I reject the non-existence of moral necessity on principle and speed past anyone who denies it. If I defend laissez-faire capitalism, I refuse to accept that rational self-interest is a petty preoccupation that is to forever remain illusory and I commit to defend the fact that life requires selfishness and defy any who seek to act on the basis that it is impermissible or inadmissible. In short, I concur with Hank Rearden “I will not say that the good of others was the purpose of my work—my own good was my purpose…..that when you violate the rights of one man, you have violated the rights of all, and a public of rightless creatures is doomed to destruction.” 2 If I cannot defend man as such, I would have to accept those ideas of the behaviorist ilk who demand the impossibility of functioning in complete autonomy. If I cannot live in the absence of autonomy, I must fight the prevailing authorities who demand that no man has the ability to exist in total freedom.
Selfishness is a magnificent philosophical achievement that requires spectacular mental energy, tremendous strength, and uncompromising virtue. John Galt speaks of the pyramid of ability “The man at the top of the intellectual pyramid contributes the most to all those below him, but gets nothing except his material payment… The man at the bottom who, left to himself, would starve in his hopeless ineptitude, contributes nothing to those above him….Such is the nature of the ‘competition’ between the strong and the weak of the intellect.”3
Literally, to acquire selfishness is a radical innovation in its own right and does not pose a conflict with the interests of rational men. In defending the interests of rational men, John Galt says ”In proportion to the mental energy he spent, the man who creates a new invention receives but a small percentage of his value in terms of material payment, no matter what fortune he makes, no matter what millions he earns.”4 By the same token, Hank Rearden, on trial for practicing capitalist ethics defends the moral right to be the beneficiary of his actions- “I refuse to apologize for my money. If this is evil, make the most of it. If this is what the public finds harmful to its interests, let the public destroy me. This is my code—and I will accept no other.”5
The economists of collectivism treat man as a sacrificial animal. The cause for my position is that groups of men have put in place laws that create a revolving door of coercion for the alleged common good. It can be shown that the abrogation of a right accomplished through this coercive process results in the failure of free enterprise and the major cause for this is the intellectual. Our current political philosophy starts with the precept that force against private citizens who force no one is a moral means to the ends of government. The prerogative of the responsibility for implementation is taken up and excused on the basis of an existence of a beneficiary. The worship of need is incorporated into conventional rules carried out by bureaucracy that alleviate or ameliorate conditions that in theory justify the use of force. The mass of elected officials, through various channels of taxation, institute a game of profiteering on sacrifice. The only justification behind this racket is the creation of nobler experiments that require stricter regulation and ever-increasing controls. The end of the game is worse than the stated motive at the outset, sacrifice for the sake of sacrifice is considered to be the good, precisely because it is the “common” good. It is to this that I shudder in contempt and revulsion; the prospect of being viewed with a cannibal’s lust as a means to an end and taken as the embodiment of virtues readily available and at the disposal of anyone who cares to make a claim on them. The above is the cause for my stand in opposition to collectivism and justifies my acceptance of public assistance.
Societal norms generate over time as a result of the dominant ideas in the minds of a majority of men in a culture and exist primarily in the kind of morality man accepts. The laws we accept as rational perpetuate the morality by which we live and the morality we accept in turn perpetuates the laws that we regard as rational and are willing to accept and live by. The guidelines set by judicial procedure rest on precedent set by conflicts of interest among men. The essence of the conflict is: altruism stands in opposition to the facts of reality that give rise to life as the root and reward of morality. Several issues exist that are subsumed under the conflict between reason and altruism. I shall enumerate them here:
Assistance is doled out on the basis of the view that need is a first claim on the productive energy of any man. In reason, if a man is able to fill his need and to succeed at his work he obtains the highest dignity that can be attained by man. For lack of introspection, the envious convey a knee-jerk wish to wipe the universe out of existence, best expressed in the bromide: “Dignity is for the needy, not the greedy.” The creator is forbidden to know the dignity of the use and disposal of the product of his own effort. What is more reprehensible is a corresponding emotion of hatred that is meant to preclude the laborer from moral worth and the experience of an earned pride of achieving his purpose. The advocates of selflessness decree that pride is reserved for the beneficiary by virtue of the fact that he produced nothing and is best expressed by a line from a popular song by Janis Joplin: “I don’t want nothin’, if ain’t free.” Obviously, this dooms the distributor and recipient to feel nothing because reason not emotion asks the questions and only reason can answer them. At this point, the impasse is one of differences on principle which altruism dismisses and thereby serves no one. None the less, the injunctions toward causeless love, groundless compassion, and indiscriminate regard for all as the first concern continue with the absence of self-interest as a motivating factor, the lack of authentic desire to relieve suffering as a mode of awareness, and the non-existence of a genuine reason-based purpose in assisting.
A claim to the products of virtue of other men is rendered valid through the instruments of subjection. The inculcation of any resolve or certainty is devalued and demonized as a fault of one’s own making, not an asset; and is disregarded or dismissed as pathological or unruly and must be either squashed through patient demoralization or punished to reduce man to an existence that holds merit only if he possesses a lack of any firm convictions.
The man of integrity knows that his life is directly dependent on the work of his mind and that the building of his character is his first concern in matters of trade and association on the implicit knowledge that a zero cannot hold a mortgage over life. Altruism’s claim is that he must be subjected to the reduction of his ego to the moral status of a zero by virtue of an absence of mind and a defect of character.
A rational man understands that to surrender his autonomy to anyone for any reason means danger and self-destruction is the only result to be expected when this becomes a policy of interaction with men. Altruism declares that welfare and well-being is contingent upon identification with inability and incompetence.
The existence of life is a value, with all this entails: dignity, integrity, and autonomy. On this view, the practice of virtues makes life worth living. Altruism demands the surrender of life by holding the premise that the practice of virtues is undesirable and an affront to the status quo.
With all that the existence of life entails, the primary consideration is one of self-esteem: the positive appraisal and benevolent position in relation to the ego and the positive self-regard of a man; ultimately determining his efficacy and control over reality. As a means and a method to success, altruism suggests the acceptance of the reduction of cognition to an automatized mode of awareness that regards suffering and disease as a metaphysical state.
Self-esteem and confidence are made the subject of the views of professionals that denounce their very existence as suspect and at best a flaw; therefore, in facing the challenges of life, man is fit to the extent that he make himself unworthy of existence.
Reality does not permit that it is possible or imaginable to provide a guaranteed secure income, its greatest advocates make the attempt to rewrite reality by labeling their actions “grace” as a euphemism for the vicious motives of a tribe or community of man. The enemies of man believe that through the granting of mercy, the favor of undeserved kindness or the bestowal of compassion on the inept or incompetent by or through God’s wisdom, justice is served somehow. This assault on man’s mind is mutually reinforcing self-abdication. One cannot accept the moral status of a serf in intent and purpose without suffering likewise the immolation of spirit that paralyzes the capacity to value through the acceptance of unearned guilt. In the absence of all intents and purposes, one cannot repair to the moral status of an industrialist or politician in his belief system, without permitting the resultant state of metaphysical humility. Outside the bounds of persuasion to do so, I am not willing to surrender an entitlement. If I were to forego the battle for my rights, I would be complicit in keeping these creatures alive and contributing to the destruction of wealth and morality; the enemies of man would benefit doubly thereby.
The deterioration of the capacity to meet life’s challenges is an inevitability of the slow, day by day, erosion of ambition in the fight for dignity. The sense that life is impossibly unjust is a consequence of the constant barrage of anti-reason. The existence of despair comes to the fore because of the all-pervasive bombardment on values. Average men internalize a belief that life is degradation as a result of misbegotten conclusions that life requires intellectual subservience. Misbegotten, because of the inability or unwillingness to integrate the facts of reality that give rise to: the necessity for mental effort and the solving of concrete, particular, real-life problems, the responsibility for rational cognition and its consequences, the demands of society that require the formation of convictions and the realization that these are to his benefit alone, selfishness that takes joy in the production of values and their use and disposal, the integration of metaphysically given facts into a consistent case as the source and cause of a desire to fight for freedom. A rational man realizes that all dignity is either betrayed or upheld thereby. The deleterious effects need not exist, precisely because, as Dagny Taggart submits “We never had to take any of it seriously, did we?” 6 The above is the cause for my stand in opposition to altruism and justifies my acceptance of welfare benefits.
The Founding Fathers, in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States, created the first political philosophy based on the theory of rights on earth as they pertain to man and subjugated society to moral laws. Laws that were an effect of a culture that had its underpinnings in the Enlightenment code of values. Values that translated into the base for a proper social system and were grounded, if not explicitly on selfishness, at least theoretically on: a set of enlightened principles that direct the course of man’s life arrived at by means of an “unaided intellect”, the premise that man is sovereign by the grace of human birthright and the nature of existence, the ends to which his life and energy, talent and ability are to be proscribed are the property of each man; as the facts of life require, “rights” are the right of individual men to determine. As a moral system, it was based on the fundamental of the “inalienable” rights of man to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. To secure these rights was the reason government was established among men.
The corollary economic system implementing the rights of man in the sphere of commerce is known as capitalism. It can be shown that the preservation and protection of the right to private property and the product of one’s efforts manifests in causes enacted by private free citizens that translate into success, health, and wealth. A society built on the principle of inalienable rights is created to the benefit of the individuals of which it is comprised. The essence of irrationality is the violation of rights and begins with a gun. Conflicts of interest are a result of policies that have as there consequence: the incursion of loss of values, imprisonment, or death. Only when these policies are not applied as instruments of coercion by the State are men able to live in peace and prosperity. This, I will tell you now, is the motive behind the building of my John Galt Line.
The most devastating reality to cope with is the fact that altruism leaves man with no guidance in the issues of how he lives his life and to what end is his effort or struggle. The cultural effect is widespread spiritual impoverishment in the ability to answer such questions as “What does life demand of me?”; “What can I demand of others?”; “What is and is not my fault?” With the corresponding increase in governmental power, the morality that is driven out by the monstrosity of social welfare policies is the plain, average, ordinary, man in the street idea of voluntary investment. In causes that he is eager and anxious to contribute to and facilitate, the impetus to do so is rationalized as the legitimate domain of those that out-source any necessity for volunteerism, hence the shrinking of his values to mere subsistence. This is an incipient and inane pattern of gradual social moral decay, in the light of what America is capable of as an unprecedented phenomenon of good will and benevolence toward men of all ethnic and cultural backgrounds.
Is the proposition that reason is sufficient, a result of accurate logic and is it valid given the state of knowledge possessed by man at present? Is reason the distinct and distinguishing faculty of man, if so how are his problems to be solved? Can reason explain a trend of events and through the scientific method arrive at a reality based means of either reversing or perpetuating it? Can reason evaluate a political system and by a process of logical induction achieve certainty, arrive at principle, and act to further the right ideas? Is a rational code of ethics and therefore a proper social system possible? Permit me my answer: there are no conflicts of interest among rational men as long as life on earth is the goal and reason is the value.
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