Monthly Archives: December 2017

Why Government as a Rational Entity is a Delusion

forced compliance, government, individualism vs collectivism, Man's Ability, Violence, Voluntarism, , , , ,

Is government a necessity? Does man’s survival depend upon its establishment and Authority? That is, is it necessary to man’s existence? Is man doomed to extinction in an orgy of rudderless morality and practical insufficiency without it?

Thats crazy, we would say (well…most of us). We understand at least implicitly that people precede government. And after all, governments are made and established by people. We understand that to say man cannot exist without government and yet it is man which establishes governement is a contradiction which cancels them both.

Furthermore, if man is inadequate to existence–to life and survival–in and of himself, and therefore needs the coercive power of government to BE his sufficiency for him then this obviously implies that man is a naturally self-defeating, self-canceling agent, possessing inherent fatal shortcomings. But if this is true then no man among us could ever possibly be in a position to establish, organize, and operate an institution which exists specifically to redress man’s inherent fatal shortcomings.

The answer then to the question, “Does man need government?” is effectively null. It amounts to a zero sum. It’s a pointless question. That is, the question implies a contradiction that makes the whole thing entirely moot.

So then let’s formulate an ostensible rational premise from the knowledge that the question of man needing government isn’t a thing at all. It’s not a question of need because it simply cannot be a question of need. Man precedes government and government is a product of man. So “need” doesn’t comport, period. If man needed governement, then man could never have existed in the first place. Our new premise then, since man cannot need government, is: man chooses government because it’s better than not having government. And by “better” we mean more beneficial to the perpetuation and prosperity of man’s life. Man can survive without government, but with government the quality of life is, relatively speaking, much better. Government is efficacious, is what we mean, relative to no government.

This premise you’ll hear often when you bring up this subject. And I submit that the people who attempt to argue this codswallop are people who do not want to admit object dependency upon government, but simultaneously wish keep their anarchy flags furled. They want their cake and to eat it, too, but that’s not how it works. That’s not how it can work. You don’t get to be both free and not free. So far, contradiction has found no practical place in object reality as far as I’m aware.

The fact is that whether government is better than no government, or vice versa, is a red herring…a distraction, intentional or not, from the real issue:

Once it becomes clear that man cannot need government then we must admit that government is a choice. The issue isn’t whether government is better than none, it’s that at root the establishment of it must be, in fact, optional.

So what?

Government by its endemic and necessary nature and purpose is Authority, and Authority is force. And force by definition is incompatible with choice. This means that government by its very intended nature is not optional, it is compulsory. It is coercive. As far as the government is or can be concerned, you don’t get the option of no government.

Why?

Because it’s government!

And because it’s government it can never accept or even entertain the idea of no government. And thus, no matter how benevolent a government may seem, the only relationship an individual (the citizens) can have with an institution that specifically exists to collectivize him and compel his behavior against his singular nature is that of constant friction. There can only be total freedom or total control. Any middle ground is merely war (I don’t mean literal violence…I mean two competing philospohies with entirely different premises, conclusions, and objectives). Government being Authority and the arbiter then of Truth and Morality (via the Law) through force, has no frame of reference for a reality with no government. It can never, not will never, accept the idea that its existence is optional. Period. Full stop.

And thus we have contradiction number two. Man must choose to establish government, but government cannot recognize that it is a choice.

And the contradictions explicated in this article reveal why government cannot work, will never work, and must forevermore be doomed to inevitable despotism and dystopianism. A peaceful government is an oxymoron, and a delusion.

There Can Be No Such Thing as Gravity Qua Gravity, So What is it?

General Philosophy, Objective Relativity, Physics and Metaphysics, , ,

The following argument is based upon these assumptions, which I aver are all rationally defensible:

1. All that exists must be able to exist, which then supplants Existence with Ability as the metaphysical primary.

2. Gravity cannot possess any distinct existence. That is, there can be no such thing as gravity distinct or separate from the objects upon which it acts. Apart from these objects it has no relevance, which means it has no meaning, which means it cannot be defined as gravity.

3. There is no such thing as space qua space, because the distinction between objects cannot itself be a thing from which objects are also distinct. Therefore, there must be a different manifestation of distinction. I submit that gravity is this distinction.

In light of these, I submit the following about gravity:

Existence is ability to exist. Existence then is action, because ability must find rational expression as action. Action is always observed as relative movement. I therefore propose that gravity is, specifically, the expression of the ability to exist. Or perhaps better said, it is the action of existing…of existence observed  necessarily as an action.

The Only Moral Plumbline

Ethics, individualism vs collectivism, , ,

The only efficacious and rational moral question you should be asking yourself, which applies to every instant and instance of your life, is not “What should I be doing?”, or “What have I done?”, but “Is what  I am doing right now a direct violation of another human being (and a simple “cause and effect” concept can be applied here…to wit, is it a lie, a theft, a damage to property or body/mind, a murder)?” If the answer is “no” then you are acting morally; you are being moral.

No other moral question is rational, and therefore no other moral question is relevant. The reason for this is simple: What isn’t–that is, what you are NOT doing–cannot subject you to any moral valuation–because it does not exist.

Now, certainly, what you have done in the past, though it does not exist (as such…without getting into the sticky tentacles of the purely abstract nature of time) can be used as a legal and pragmatic standard. But it cannot be used as a moral standard for the simple reason that it does not necessarily represent your moral nature, which is now (and now is where everyone perpetually exists). Now is where man’s nature resides, and man’s nature is the only rational target of moral judgment. You might judge a past action as “moral” or “immoral”, but the “morality” or “immorality” of a past action does not necessarily have any rational bearing on the moral state of your person, because your person is always now. And the moral state of your person is the only thing that can be valued as moral with respect to morality qua morality. Past actions, which we might judge as moral or immoral can, again, be used for pragmatic or legal reasons, but not to judge one’s root moral state. And there is no rational moral condemnation for anything besides the root state–or the nature–of an individual.

So…unless you are directly violating another human being at the moment, you are not acting immorally. (Certainly and obviously, if you have a history of direct violations of others, reason would instruct you to change, or face the very real legal and practical ramifications of your behavior, which you have earned; also, existential condemnation is the consequence of an evil nature…so, if you are a repeat violator, you are in danger of throwing yourself into everlasting hell. And I’m not kidding. But that’s a topic for another article.)

Further, the reason I stipulate “direct” violations is because indirect violations are by definition subjective violations; they require conditional truth, as opposed to absolute Truth, and hence their innate insufficiency as moral qualifiers. In other words, indirect violations are those which must be qualified by an “if”: IF we assume that behavior X occurres in context Y, THEN we can call behavior X a moral violation. For example, IF we assume that the military is a fundamentally murderous enterprise, THEN we can say that all soldiers who have killed in battle are murderers. Of course, we can see the dubious integrity of such a standard, and the implicit collectivist ideology which undergirds it. The idea of claiming that ALL people who act under the auspices of a given ideology are all individually evil, while it may be true, is not necessarily true. I would argue that since immorality is a violation of individuals, then immorality must be gauged by its specific effects on specific individuals. This makes ideological context fundamentally irrelevant with respect to moral violations; but not “morality” per se…that is, morality as ethics–the ethical gauging of ideas which may lead to specific violations of specific individuals.

I submit that members of every group, no matter what its ideological basis, can be morally judged only according to their specific individual actions. This is why I completely reject armed revolution against governments, for example…it ends up hurting, punishing, or even murdering those who cannot rationally be said to have directly violated another individual. Cops, soldiers, various sundry workers and politicians…people with families who may have never done anything other than live and work within a given sociopolitical context, which, though it may be ideologically false, does not make living and working under it a moral violation. This is because ideologies are by nature collectivist, and collectivism cannot serve as the plumbline for individual acts of immorality (or morality at all for that matter). And morality qua morality only exists at the level of the individual.

Apropos to this, I believe that to collectivize immorality means to risk condemning men by nothing more than their group identity. And that is the root of every evil  that has ever existed.

Diversity as a Sociopolitical Ideal is Impossible

General Philosophy, Identity, individualism vs collectivism, , ,

If Diversity, as it suggests, includes everything then it does not and cannot discriminate. It cannot define what is not diverse.

Umm…

But if everything is diverse then how can Diversity be implemented as an Ideal? There could be no reason to implement Diversity because the current system based on the current Ideal would already be considered Diverse.

Hmm…

Let me think.

For Diversity to have any meaning at all it must inherently define and acknowledge that which is not, in fact, diverse.

But…I sense a self-defeating problem here.

If Diversity acknowledges things not diverse, then it cannot be all inclusive. And Diversity not all inclusive is Diversity which discriminates. Which means it’s not really diverse. Someone or something doesn’t belong to the Diversity crowd. There is a difference it won’t accept.

Which means that Diversity can only really be “Diverse”…that is, conditionally, or subjectively, diverse. But Diversity as a sociopolitical IDEAL does imply Absolute Diversity, because ALL Ideals are necessarily monolithic–they intend to define, describe, and organize reality. But monolithic diversity, or Absolute Diversity, is a contradiction in terms.

In other words, Diversity as an ideal, sociopolitically speaking (or otherwise), demands the contradiction and nullification of itself: it must be absolute AND it must discriminate.

All of this is the reason why Diversity is little more than a deceptive euphemism for your run-of-the-mill bigotry; a rank assertion of non-white, non-western, non-cisgendered existential superiority. Which is why it’s so inherently and obviously oppressive in its application, despite the good intentions of some of its proponents.