In the capacity of science, scientists are brilliant, and hard and tireless workers. But as philosophers they are the most intellectually lazy and obtuse bunch of rubes I have ever come across; for even the most basic rational contradiction seems entirely beyond them.
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To claim that will and choice are illusions is to claim that thought itself is an illusion. To claim that thought is an illusion is to claim that the Agent who necessarily must exist in order to think and to will and choose is likewise an illusion. This equation is inexorable, and quite frankly, obvious to anyone not a rank pseudo-intellectual determinist ideologue.
And once the intellectual Agent (the Self) is claimed illusory then morality must likewise be illusory…for the intellectual Agent is also the moral Agent.
And therefore, make no mistake and do not be fooled. Any scientific determinist like Sam Harris who argues that will and choice are an illusion is wrecking not only an aspect of man’s mind, but all thought itself, which thus denies the truth and validity of the Self…the individual human being. And once the Self is declared merely a figment of infinite universal cause and effect then morality is obliterated. And what follows is a torrent of bloodshed.
In my next article, I will make my case for what I consider the root flaw of scientific determinism: the subordination of the Observer to that which is observed. In other words, the absence of any rational metaphysic.
Your intellectual and/or moral agreement with an idea is entirely irrelevant if those who are not in agreement are forced to submit to it. Once force is used to implement an idea, the idea no longer matters. Force becomes the sole point and purpose, and death becomes the sole outcome. This is axiomatic. Force nullifies choice; and choice–between good and bad, and truth and falsehood, for instance–is the product of conceptualization, which is the root and efficacy of thought. And ideas are a function of thinking.
And thinking is how man defines Self, via his powers of conceptualization. And the definition of Self necessarily implies the relevancy and purpose of Self, which is thus the relevancy and purpose of the existence of the Self.
Therefore, use force, destroy ideas, which destroys the Self; that is, Humankind.
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By the time a child is old enough to understand the concepts of “authority” and “submission” you shouldn’t be appealing to them.
If you intend to force your opponent to comply with your idea, you don’t actually need the idea, all you need is force.
You see, having an idea is fundamentally an appeal to reason–i.e. this is true because of this rationale, which also must be true because of this premise…etcetera, etcetera. And reason is a function of concepts men use in order to communicate with one another. Communication (or more precisely, the ability to communicate) then is proof that all men possess an equal and singular frame of reference by which communication is made relevant and efficacious: One’s Self. I. The I Am inside of each human being.
Therefore, to force men to comply with ideas is a contradiction in terms which inevitably turns rulers (those tasked with forcing compliance) into brainless killers, and the ruled into trenches full of ashes.
Apologetics for government begins with the right of the good man to be protected from the avarice of the evil. From this we can directly extrapolate the following equation:
The right of the virtuous to be protected from the non-virtuous = the vast majority of men shall be subject to the authority–that is, the coercive violent force–of a tiny minority of men.
This is a logical fallacy.
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To protect virtue by compelling all men through violence entirely wrecks virtue by nullifying moral and intellectual agency and is a contradiction in terms.
Which is why all governments are simply degrees of tyranny.
Faith absent reason cannot provide an answer for itself–that is, its purpose and relevancy–which means it cannot be considered in any way efficacious.
And the answer to a question cannot be redundant or a contradiction, because that’s not an answer, it’s merely a priggish regurgitation of the question. So when you are asked the reason for your faith, use reason to answer. Otherwise you are nothing more than that kid in middle school who bragged about having a girlfriend in Canada. All claim, no dame.
A thing’s identity–whether that thing be an abstraction or a concrete–is violated when it is said to be or do two mutually exclusive things at the same time.
(Examples: God is infinite and God is distinctly Himself; man may choose and man is governed by God’s will/natural law; the Big Bang began with an infinitely dense and infinitely hot singularity (what is infinite cannot be valued and thus it cannot be measured, you see, and it also cannot be compared, so it is impossible to claim it “hot” or “dense”–appeals to a thing’s infinite existence preclude appeals to any specific properties); God created everything from nothing (ex nihilo)–nothing by definition cannot beget something–“is not” and “is” are categorical antipodes; time has a beginning (time cannot be subject to itself–logical fallacy); space can be folded (implying that there is space between space which must be mitigated via folding it–again, logical fallacy.
These are just some of my favorite specimens.)
While reason may indeed be defined according to its own criteria–that is, it is reasonably defined–I submit that this is not a function of tautology, but of the axiomatic and irreducible nature of man’s inherent and innate ability to conceptualize his existence. If man is going to conceptualize himself, and his environment, and his relationship to his environment, and this according to his root and innate ability to conceptualize, then I submit that the concepts he so devises must and will necessarily show compatibility with one another in order to be meaningful, relevant, and efficacious. That is, they will be compatible in order to be possible at all. (For fundamentally incompatible concepts simply cannot be created.)  Therefore, when specific concepts do not show compatibility with one another when combined (e.g. “She took a a right turn to the left.”), man will apprehend quite automatically that meaning, relevancy, and efficacy have been violated. And this, he will correctly assert, is a violation of reason. And by this violation he will recognize that his ability to claim truth–that is, to discern the difference between what is and what is not–has been compromised.
Well…until he doesn’t.
And by this I mean until he decides–to his own destruction–that conceptual consistency is not necessarily the means by which what is (that is, the truth) is established as distinct from what is not. In which case, man’s ability to conceptualize–the root of his own will and his own meaningful consciousness–becomes null. And since conceptualization is the foundation of human consciousness and gives relevancy and efficacy to human perception (empiricism), its nullification leaves man with a consciousness that cannot actually define that of which it is conscious.Â
What I am asserting is that a rejection of reason (as a tautology, for instance) is a rejection of conceptualization itself, or the ability to conceptualize, and this is a rejection of consciousness. Which is a rejection of the awareness of Self, which is a rejection of the Self, period. For the Self consistently defined is of no more veracity than the Self inconsistently defined. Which means that there is no actual definition of the Self possible. For a contradictory definition is just as “valid” as a non-contradictory one. Thus, there is no difference between what is and what is not. The Self then implodes under the weight of the inconsistency. The human individual ceases to have any value, or any truth. And worlds are destroyed by this kind of thinking.
Which brings me to my next point. We need to stop asserting that the West, or Western thinking, is somehow a bastion or legacy of reason. Believe me, if that were the case, western governments would not exist, and all western societies would be categorically voluntary, and all wars of religion, and nation building, and colonization, and rank ideology would never have occurred, and would not be occurring today. Collectivist determinism, and all of its evil spawn–communism, fascism, democratic socialism, monarchism, Protestantism, Catholicism, scientific determinism, nationalism, racial and cultural Marxism–would not exist nor have ever existed. Time and Space would not be submitted and venerated as actual and causal, nor human consciousness and will a function of natural law, nor it declared that God created the universe out of nothing, which makes so much non-sense that people don’t bother even trying to explain what this means beyond some perfunctory Bible paraphrasing or proof texting.
Trust me, if the East avers irrational mysticism and paradox as the root of Truth, then the West is utterly blind to it, offering nothing. If the East is rationally misguided, then the West is positively retarded.
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