The problem with those who wish to organize society by means of a central governing authority (the State), is not that they don’t have any good ideas, it’s that ther ideas are always a package deal with government force. Which obliterates the ideas, rendering them fundamentally (at the roots of the philosophy) irrelevant, and leaves us only with force.
Monthly Archives: June 2016
Aphorism of the Day: Thinkers and Readers
The student is he who mostly reads; the master, he who mostly thinks.
Trump Like Hitler? Well, Let’s Compare Contexts.
USA, 2016: Muslims commit mass murder on a wide scale; US at war or has very poor relations with roughly six Muslim countries and is responsible for thousands if not millions of Muslim deaths; Donald Trump calls for a ban on Muslim entry into the US to protect Americans from the people with whom the country is overtly at war, and is derided as a racist and Islamophobe while his detractors, including anti-war leftists, never mention the wars or the deaths of Muslims perpetuated by the current democratic administration.
Germany, 1939: Jews commit no violent crimes of any appreciable amount and perpetrate zero acts of what could be called terrorism; Germany at war with zero Jewish nations, because none exist, because for thousands of years Jews have been forcefully exiled and expelled from almost every place they’ve settled, primarily because they come from a tradition of reason, the ownership and promotion of private property and the free market, and of self-realization and individual self-worth, which is anathema to the rest of the world, which concedes almost categorically some form of philosophical gnosticim/mysticism; Hitler openly scapegoats the Jews in his autobiography and likens them to an evil, subversive, monolithic force, and, far beyond the call for banning their entry into the German state, indicates the necessity of rank banishment, the violent seizure of all Jewish private assets, the suspension of habeas corpus, and mass extermination.
And in the US today, both the leftist ideologues and right-wing political establishment declare a moral and political equivalency between Hitler and Trump.
There is no basis for this.
If You Really Care About Who Gets Elected, Reject FORCE as a Means to Socially Organize Humanity, and Become a Voluntarist
Despite the claims that one candidate is more or less libertarian than the other (a “classic liberal”–that is, a small government advocate) it is important to remember that due to the nature of the State, or a centralized governing Authority (which is merely a monopoly of force–violence to compel individual behavior on a mass scale), or, more precisely, the human metaphysical premise upon which the State is based–that man, by his nature (i.e. his tendency to evil, where “evil” is defined by referencing morality to the collective which the State “represents”) MUST be governed–yes, it is important to remember that the election of any representative is merely another hash mark on the evolutionary line of inevitable totalitarianism. To be concerned over one political candidate versus another, while ostensibly relevant, is merely to concede cognitive dissonance as the plumb line for political and/or moral truth.
The fact is that as soon as the State is inserted (and it must be inserted, never volunteered or freely admitted) it does not ultimately matter who is elected…for the very presence of the State must necessarily subordinate the individual to a reality where truth and morality are a function of force (violence) at the hands of the Authority and not understanding or will.
Here’s why (one of several reasons):
There’s no such thing as the integration of behavior by choice, and behavior by force. Mutually exclusive concepts cannot be practically applied. This is precisely why human epistemology is meaningful and matters! It’s not subjective. You cannot manifest a contradiction because that categorically undermines the relevancy and efficacy of human knowledge. And further, it is summarily impossible to even CONCEIVE of a contradiction to practically apply in the first place! And that is the cognitive root of the disaster.
So…if you are really worried about who is going to be elected to represent “the people”, reject the abstraction (the “people”, the “nation”, the “common or collective good”, the “race”, the “church”, etc.); reject its agent of force (at the philosophical level), which is the State or the Rulers, or the Authority; reject voting for the deceptive pretense of violent coercion which it is, and become a rank voluntarist.
Socialism (or any Form of Collectivism) is Literally the Ideology of Nothingness
The point of socialism is to subordinate man to nothing–or nothingness. By appealing to the authority of the State to rule on behalf of the “common good”, which is the collective that trumps the individual, socialism makes the rank absence of Self the objective. Thus, it is necessarily, inexorably, about the categorical elimination–not limitation– of opportunity.
That’s socialism, specifically. However, I would add the following in regards to all and any collectivist ideologies, and they are legion; and they all share in common the idea of “rule by authority”. And it is this, I submit, that at root defines collectivist metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and politics, and which serves as the fulcrum of collectivism’s necessary tyranny, and general loathing of humanity:
An appeal to rule according to ANY amount of authority must inevitably subordinate the entirety of man to this authority. This is because man’s Self, metaphysically speaking (metaphysics being the ontological primary–or the singularity from which all of a thing is derived) is absolute, and therefore any sanction of the Self by appealing to the right of authority to define Self for Self, must therefore also be absolute.
This raises an interesting (if not horrifying) contradiction. Man, himself, then, becomes absolutely irrelevant–and thus the authority claimed over him is rendered perfectly meaningless. And this is why all attempts to implement authority structures as a means of socially organizing human beings eventually manifest as rank and abject despotisms. Since man relies upon reason and rational consistency for his very survival, attempts to practically apply contradictions always fail…and in the process torment and murder millions.
Aphorism of the Day: Time and Space are Abstractions, Possessing No Material Existence; They Are Not Things
Time itself has no moment, so it can never arrive; and space itself has nowhere to be.
M.C. Escher Shows Us That Contradiction is Fantasy
M.C. Escher’s “Relativity” reveals to us that just because we can observe a contradiction does not mean that it is compatible with reality and truth. The image of a contradiction is and must always be at its foundation utterly consistent. And the plain fact is that we cannot actually conceptualize a contradiction, and I mean cognitively. Though Escher’s lithograph appears contradictory, its form is perfectly rational. At its root, being wholly an artistic rendition in and of itself (the lithograph qua the lithograph), it necessarily conforms to the rational consistency reality always categorically demands.
The Rules to Which we are Obligated are Always a Function of the Individual, So Let’s Stop Obligating People
I submit that we are so concerned and obsessed with the idea that people must do this and must not do that according to the dictates of those in “authority”, or those “outside of us”, that we fail to understand and/or realize that before these behavioral (or intellectual or moral) demands can become a burden for collective humanity, someone must have decided for themselves, alone, what must and what must not be done. That is, only when an individual decides how life must be lived can these decisions become a collective obligation.
Therefore the real question is not: what things must or must not be done? But rather, since all behavioral or intellectual or moral standards are at root a function of the individual and his own moral and intellectual agency, by what assumption(s) and what rationale(s) do we assume that the right of one individual to decide for himself what he must or must not do does not also and necessarily apply to all?
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