Category Archives: morality

Why the Is-Ought Problem, or “Hume’s Law”, is a Fallacy: Hume’s Law presumes passive observation, and ignores the “shall”

July 12, 2022Ethics, morality, Uncategorizedepistemology, Ethics, fallacy, Hume’s guillotine, Hume’s law, is, ought, shallArgo

Hume’s law says, in short, that one cannot derive an “ought” (a prescriptive claim) from an “is” (a descriptive claim). In other words, there is no such thing as objective morality because volitional behavior (the engagement of will being how we classify behavior as moral, immoral, or amoral) is always predicated upon purely subjective “if” premises. See the following:

The moral formula presumed by Hume’s Law is: “Because A is this or that (descriptive), you ought do behavior B (prescriptive)”. Now, implicit in this formula is an “if” upon which the subjectivity of volitional action is predicated—“You ought do B if you desire outcome C”. For example, “Because God is the wisest and most powerful being in the universe, you ought obey his commands”, with the implied “if” being—“If you wish to honor Him” or “If you wish not to be punished by Him”, etcetera. The “ought”, you see, is purely subjective because it is dependent upon a subjective valuing of the objective description. The fact that God is the wisest and most powerful being in the Universe cannot objectively demand that one choose to value that fact to this or that degree and then act upon it in this or that way. Only if they happen to value it ought they act this or that way. Yet whether or not they value the fact, to whatever degree, and whether or not they act according to that value, doesn’t change objective reality…it doesn’t change the objective description. “God is the wisest and most powerful being in the universe” is the description…the fact…the objective reality…the “is”. Whether that ought compel one to choose this or that action is utterly dependent upon the degree to which one decides that fact matters to them. What one ought do with a given truth claim always depends on the degree to which a they value it. If they value it, then they ought do this or that. That’s why morality, what one ought (or ought not) do, is only ever subjective. Morality (prescriptive) is purely an “if”, where reality (descriptive) is an “is”.

Here is my response to the assertion that objective morality is impossible, due to the ethical is-ought dichotomy:

That there is no such thing as objective morality—that there cannot exist objectively good and bad volitional actions—is an assertion which contains many rational errors, and all of them rooted in the following presumptive premise, implicit to Hume’s Law: that observation is at root passive, meaning that truth, and therefore by extension, knowledge, is in essence purely a description of reality which is entirely dictated to the observer from outside himself.

This is the premise, I submit, which has ushered in the demise of every argument heretofore attempting to debunk Hume’s Law, because virtually everyone either explicitly or implicitly accepts it on its face. Consciousness is passive; reality dictates its description wholesale to the observer who simply regurgitates it in some manner. In other words, there are no objective acts of will because will is a function of consciousness, and consciousness is merely an illusion of reality, or at best an epiphenomenal mirror which reflects it, but is not real, itself. Human behavior is merely the regurgitation of objective reality back onto itself. Human action is thus determined; consciousness, if it exists in any sense at all, is merely a bystander, an epiphenomenon, and thus fundamentally irrelevant to objective reality. Even Christian doctrine, the place where some of the most ardent defense of objective morality stems, ultimately concedes that truth, and thus knowledge, and thus the volitional application of knowledge, is strictly the purview of God; and that even if it were possible for man to commit moral acts, they must ineluctably be infinitely inferior in morality to God’s acts, rendering them only relatively moral, meaning only subjectively moral, and thus not truly moral at all. Yet I submit that, according to prevailing Christian dogma, even God’s morality is utterly relative to Himself, because He alone is the moral standard, making anything he chooses to do moral, thereby making objective morality a direct function of God’s subjective whim, which again means that morality is only purely subjective.

All of this makes every Christian argument affirming the existence of objective morality an exercise in rank hypocrisy. Indeed, Christian doctrine professes that Christ is the only one who can keep the Law of Moses perfectly—He is God; men are mere mortals, fallen, and immutably wicked in their root nature. Even after salvation (and why anyone gets saved at all is an object mystery, because men cannot earn it, as their very nature is evil, and thus there can be no reason anyone should be saved in the first place) morality isn’t theirs, but the “work of the Holy Spirit through them”. Jesus is the only man who can truly act morally, and thus the only one who can keep the Law. This is because He is God, and only God is capable of keeping his own moral standards. However, what is meant by “standards” is “whatever He feels like doing”, because he is God. This of course isn’t “standards” at all, but pure whim; and “objective whim” is a contradiction in terms.

At any rate…

Since the premise of Hume’s Law is virtually always conceded a priori, all criticism ultimately fails. In other words, if one builds his argument against Hume’s Law upon the very same epistemological premise that Hume presumes, then one must necessarily fail. One doesn’t win a debate by agreeing with his opponent before the debate even begins.

Let us consider a different premise, then.

I submit that observation is not passive, but active; that truth is not dictated to the observer but is, in fact, a function of observation, and thus a function of the observer. It is not reality which describes itself to the observer, it is the observer who describes reality for himself; and it is the observer who describes what is true, from himself, in order that he may promote himself truthfully in his environment.

Yet this is not relativistic or subjective truth. Truth finds articulation and meaning in language, and language is purely a function of the ability of the observer to conceptualize what he observes. What is extremely important to understand, and critical to objective morality, is that language implies communication, and communication implies that there are other observers with whom a given observer shall communicate, which means that truth is shared…it is not relativistic or solipsistic. In order that truth be objectively shared (that truth be shared truthfully, so to speak), it must be shared consistently. Truth is not “relative truth” or “subjective truth”—these are contradictions—but objective truth. This means truth is a matter of conceptual consistency, and conceptualization itself is the foundation of language. Thus, conceptual consistency is the only way truth, and thus actual, objective knowledge, can be shared. I cannot declare to you that I have created a square circle (and no, I don’t mean a bunch of squares set up in a circular fashion…as cheeky as that may be) because that is an entirely meaningless claim, containing a synthesis of concepts, “square” and “circle” which in such a relationship are contradictory…that is, conceptually inconsistent. You have no frame of reference for “square circle” because you simply cannot have one, because the very ability to conceptualize, which is the root of your consciousness, and that from which we form language, precludes it; and since language is necessarily shared because it ineluctably implies communication, and is, again, rooted in conceptualization, conceptualization must be consistent among all observers. If you have no conceptual frame of reference for contradiction then neither do I, and thus you know objectively that I am not speaking the truth. It may not be that I am necessarily lying—it could be that I am deluded or mistaken—but I am certainly not speaking the truth. It is an object falsity to claim that there is any such thing as a square circle, because this claim is conceptually inconsistent, and thus violates truth, meaning it violates a consistent conceptual description of reality; and it is impossible for the observer observe reality this way; and further, impossible for him to share it as truth.

The idea that observation is fundamentally passive means that the observer’s knowledge about that which he observes can only ever be of that which is utterly outside himself, meaning outside of his consciousness, meaning outside of his conscious frame of reference as the observer. Therefore the observer can never truly posses knowledge in and of himself because the sum and substance of reality has absolutely nothing to do with him qua him at all, making observation entirely moot. This makes it impossible that there is actual observation occurring, since an observer who possesses no real conscious knowledge, because he is entirely irrelevant to the “objective reality” he observes, is an observer who is entirely obsolete, and therefore so is observation. Meaning that as far as reality is concerned, it is not actually being observed.

Without an observer, there is no observation, by definition. I submit that it follows then that a reality which is unobserved cannot be said to exist at all, let alone objectively, since there is no means and no frame of reference by which it can be defined…that is, described…in the first place. It is, absent an active, conscious observer, entirely meaningless, entirely purposeless, and therefor entirely irrelevant, all of which renders its existence null, since the question “What objectively exists?” or “What is objectively real?” can have no answer. With no observer, there is nothing to say—to describe—what it is or is not, which means that there can be no it in the first place.

Without an observer, reality cannot be described, and therefore it can have no description, and therefore there can be no descriptive claim, no “is” from which the observer can derive his “ought”. Objective reality, you see, cannot describe itself to itself…this is a redundancy which makes description null. With no active observer and thus no one and nothing to derive any knowledge of or meaning, purpose, and relevance from reality, that is, to describe reality to form knowledge and thus establish the actual truth of reality, reality remains necessarily undefinable, meaningless, purposeless, and irrelevant, and thus can never be described as being anything at all, and thus cannot be said to be a thing which actually exists and is real in the first place. The corollary relationship between the observer and the observed is simply ineluctable.

Further, the implicit (or even explicit) assumption that observation is fundamentally passive (and it is a fundamental assumption, dealing with the nature of observation at its metaphysical root) is false because that which is fundamentally passive is by definition not doing anything, including observing, and thus “passive observation” is the antithesis of observation. “Passive observation”, in other words, means “not observing”. An observer to whom reality dictates itself—or “describes” itself—is a passive observer, meaning an unconscious observer, and is thus not actually observing,

The problem with the implicit-to-Hume’s Law assumption of passive observation and dictated description is that it is simply an impossibility.

Dictated truth—dictated description about what actually is real—to the observer by reality is impossible because this suggests observation without any objective meaning nor any objective use to the one doing the actual observing. In which case, observation itself is utterly pointless and irrelevant. The observer is not real, you see. He is outside of reality, or it is outside of him, in which case “observation” is nothing more than reality simply dictating its own description of itself to itself. Which is just another way of saying that there is no observation at all, and therefore no observer. The sum total of knowledge then is purely a meaningless, pointless description of that which has nothing whatsoever to do with the one who supposedly knows—the observer.

As far as reality is concerned, the observer doesn’t exist. You qua YOU, conscious you, have no true existence, only subjective, relative existence. Whether you live or die, objective reality remains fully objective reality. Indeed, this is the root of all “empirical” and “rational” philosophies: Even if you did not exist or never existed, objective reality is always objective reality. There is an infinite and eternal ontological chasm between the transient, fleeting observer—his consciousness blipping in and out of existence at random with birth and death, possessing no real meaning nor effect—and eternal, immutable reality. There is no corollary relationship between the observer and the observed except that of mutual exclusivity…which of course is no relationship at all.

If we accept that such a claim like “the sky is blue” is objectively true because it is an accurate and consistent description of reality, then we must accept that the observer who observes this possesses objective observation, and by declaring it—by describing reality in language—possesses objective knowledge. Knowledge, I submit, implies meaning and purpose, and thus must be something the observer can apply to such purpose. Which means that there is in fact an objectively correct way to apply knowledge and an objectively incorrect way—there are objectively right behaviors, and objectively wrong behaviors. In other words, that there is such a thing as volitional action which can be objectively valued, which means there is such a thing as objective morality.

The observer is active, meaning he is conscious. He is aware of the the distinction between himself qua himself, the Conscious Self—he, himself, being not merely a body, but an observational constant, so to speak—and that which he is observing—that is, his environment—and understands that the distinction is corollary, not mutually exclusive. Observation is thus relevant, meaningful, and purposeful, which means that observation is knowledge which the conscious, active observer thus applies in order to orient, manifest, and promote himself in the environment. In short, objective reality is objectively observed by an objective observer who possesses objective knowledge by which he makes objective decisions about how to objectively act in order to objectively promote himself in the environment.

Or, we could say it this way:

He who observes objective reality is by definition an objective observer (he, himself qua himself, is objectively real), and he is fully capable therefore of observing objectively and thus acquiring objective knowledge, which is called truth. This objective knowledge he then uses to make objective decisions about how he shall objectively manifest and promote his existence in the environment. In doing so, he acts in accordance with objective truth and thereby acts objectively good, or, morally.

Hume’s Law erroneously presumes that morality is fundamentally about something that one “ought” do. This is incorrect.

Hume’s Law presumes that “oughts” are purely subjective, and depend upon explicit or implicit “ifs”. This is correct, and would be relevant if morality were fundamentally about “oughts”, which it is not.

The logical extension of the assumption that morality is purely a function “oughts”, which are subjective, is that objective morality then must be devoid of things one ought do and instead contain things one must do. Of course if they are things one must do then they are not choices, in which case there is no volition involved, and thus we are no longer talking about morality. If one must perform certain acts then they are not volitional…they are not acts of will, and therefore these choices and behaviors cannot be said to possess any moral value.

So you see, If one does not get a choice, because there is no volition involved, because it’s about what one must do, then it’s not morality. Yet if one does get a choice, and thus does engage the will, then one does not have to make a specific choice, for this is the nature of choice—whether they do or not has no bearing on, nor anything to do with, objective reality. The “is” descriptive premise is neither obligated to nor dependent upon the “ought” prescriptive premise—and thus the behavior can only ever be subjectively moral. In short, you either have subjective morality or no morality at all.

Hence the reason why Hume’s Law is often informally rendered “Hume’s Guillotine”, the metaphor being that of a blade which decapitates any argument in favor of objective morality. Any appeal to objective morality necessarily terminates in a self-nullifying contradiction.

However I submit that this is not so, because the implicit premise of Hume’s Law—that morality is entirely predicated on what one “ought” do (a premise upon which the validity of Hume’s Law entirely rests)—is completely false, and fails to consider the more obvious ethical root of morality, which is not “ought” but rather “shall”.

“Shall”, in terms of moral ethics, is simply this: What one shall do are those actions which rationally and therefore necessarily follow from the epistemological premise, in this case, that truth exists as a function of the conscious observer and is rooted in his description of objective reality. In other words, what one Shall do is that behavior which is implied by the Truth.

“Shall” should not be confused with “will” or “must” which are entirely different concepts, ethically speaking. Objective morality is certainly a matter of volition, but this volition is a function of what the observer, as his metaphysical root implies. shall do because he is what he is. That is, what he shall do in the capacity of actually being that which he is: the observer. His choices and behavior shall be rationally consistent with himself, and to do not what he shall do is a fundamental denial and rejection of himself, which renders his volition a lie, because it denies the very source of volition—himself qua himself. In other words he cannot by his will deny that he has will. He cannot by his existence deny his existence.

Morality is not at root about what one ought or ought not do—not about making good or bad choices—it is about engaging the will in a manner consistent with the truth…the truth which exists in the first place because it is a function of the the observer; and that for one to attempt to act in manner inconsistent with the truth is a denial of one’s own self and is a contradiction. One cannot deny that he IS by an act of his will.

Morality is simply man acting out the truth that he objectively exists as himself qua himself. It is about valuing choices and actions according to how they validate man’s objective existence at his metaphysical root, and it’s about valuing consequences of actions according to the degree to which they validate him.

An immoral act is an act of self-rejection at the very metaphysical root, and the result is chaos, and, inevitably, suffering for the perpetrator, his victims, and those who choose to indulge him and his lies. The consequences for immoral actions are not “punishment”—this is a term and concept relevant only to legal ethics, not moral ethics (and, yes, they are mutually exclusive)—but the response of reality and truth to a metaphysical aberration. A man who attempts to murder another man has fundamentally presumed to own that other man’s life, which, this idea being wholly irrational and a lie, becomes in fact a rejection by the murderer of his own life. The intended victim is entirely justified then in using deadly force to defend himself. He is not obligated to respect the life of the murderer who refuses to rationally acknowledge his own, and will act out his lie by attempting to murder his fellow man instead of affirming him.

The correct way to render the ethical “shall” premise is this way: You are, therefore you shall. Meaning that to attempt to do what you shall not do is a fundamental denial of you—“You shall do X if you want to deny yourself”, is an obvious error. The denial of you of course means that you couldn’t possibly do or have done X in the first place. Thus, to attempt to reduce “shall” to some form of ethical subjectivity results in a meaningless, contradictory assertion.

Knowledge must be consciously applied, which means purposefully, which means volitionally, which means that volitional action is a fundamental function of the possessor of knowledge…that is, the observer. If what is observed is objective, then observation must also be objective, because the “purely subjective observation of objective reality” makes observation and reality mutually exclusive. So if observation is objective then knowledge thus is likewise objective, and thus there must be an objective way to apply that knowledge. This objective application is objective morality—what one shall objectively do because one objectively is. To attempt to do other than what one shall do is an attempt to consciously deny oneself—that is, consciously deny one’s own consciousness; willfully deny will; choose to deny choice. This is meaningless and null.

If the observer observes objective reality, then observation itself is necessarily objective. Subjective observation of objective reality is a contradiction in terms when we are speaking in fundamental terms. The observer, in order to be in a position to observe objective reality, must himself be objectively real. Both the observer and his observation, which is at root his consciousness, possess equal ontological value to that which is observed. The observer and his consciousness—the means by which he actively observes—are as objectively real as objective reality.

Observation necessarily spawns knowledge of and about that which is observed; knowledge is necessarily meaningful to the observer; and meaning implies relevance; and relevance implies purpose. Knowledge therefore is practical, and its practicality is manifest and realized through application.

Application of knowledge must be volitional…it must be an act of the will. Non-volitional application of knowledge is impossible—if what is known cannot be willfully applied, then knowledge is irrelevant, and therefore meaningless. “Meaningless knowledge” is a contradiction and is thus null. Knowledge which is not willfully applied is not consciously applied, and therefore it cannot truly be called knowledge. Without knowledge there is no observation; without observation there is no observer. If there is no observer of reality, then there is no one to define what reality actually is. Reality which cannot be defined cannot exist, “What is real? or “What exists?” or “What is?” are impossible questions because they can have no answer. That which cannot be defined cannot be declared to be anything, and thus cannot actually be anything at all. If objective reality is not true to that which can conceptualize it, and translate its existence into something with purpose, meaning, relevance, and value, then it is existentially redundant. Without an observer, what something is is entirely irrelevant; and irrelevancy at the root metaphysical level means that there is no difference between a thing existing and not existing. It is fundamentally irrelevant…whatever it does, including exist, amounts to the very same degree of meaning and value as if it did not. It’s existence—its place in reality—is of the same root metaphysical value as non-existence. It exists as though it did not. This is a contradiction to reality and thus is null.

The truth is that not only is there no existential mutual exclusivity between the observer and the observed, they are inexorably corollary. One always implies the other. This would seem obvious—transparently axiomatic based upon the overt terms—“observer” and “observed”; “consciousness” and “that which consciousness is conscious of”. Yet Hume’s Law, as I have illustrated in this missive, implicitly and fundamentally bifurcates them to the point where not only does one not imply the other, but “objectively reality” implies that there, in fact, can be no such thing as an observer at all, because consciousness is nothing more than reality projecting itself back onto itself. This is a contradiction and is thus null.

Thus: No volitional observer, no conscious observer, no observation, nothing observed, nothing defined, nothing meaningful, nothing relevant, nothing at all. No will, no observer, no reality. Or, put most succinctly: No morality = no reality.

To summarize:

If what is observed is objective, then observation is, in fact, observation of the objective, which means that observation is not exclusive of objective reality and thus is likewise objective. This means that knowledge of the observed objective reality is also objective. Knowledge must be applicable to be meaningful and relevant, and application means volition, which makes the observer a volitional observer, which means he is a conscious observer (is naturally aware of the distinction between that which he is and that which he observers). Thus knowledge, being objective and implying willful application, implies that there must be an objective way to apply knowledge. There must be an objectively correct way to apply knowledge and therefore an objectively incorrect way; an objectively good way and an objectively bad way; an objectively moral way and an objectively immoral way; objectively moral actions and objectively immoral actions.

Objective Reality = Objective Observation = Objective Knowledge = Objective Application = Objective Morality

Reality = Observation = Knowledge = Application = Morality

Metaphysics (Observed, Observer) = Epistemology (Knowledge) = Ethics (Application of Knowledge)

Metaphysics = Epistemology = Ethics

It seems that the truth of objective morality has been staring us in the face for several millennia now. Who would have thought?

The purpose of this post was not to elaborate upon which specific behaviors are moral or immoral, it was simply to prove that objective morality is both possible and necessary, and that Hume’s law rests upon false presumptions concerning the nature of the the observer and observation, the nature of reality, and the nature of morality. These false assumptions are a.) That observation is fundamentally passive, and b.) That volitional action is a purely subjective matter of what one “ought” do based upon information entirely dictated to the observer by an objective reality which exists utterly outside (meaning, entirely exclusive of) his conscious frame of reference. A further flaw of Hume’s Law is its failure to recognize that the assumption that knowledge is objective but the application of knowledge is subjective is in fact a contradiction and is therefore null.

END

When Mathematicians and Physicists Become Our Philosophers and Priests…

May 8, 2022Metaphysics, morality, scientific determinism, Uncategorizedroger penrose, science as religion, scientific determinismArgo

When mathematicians and physicists become our philosophers and priests we are all f**king dead.

https://iai.tv/articles/consciousness-is-the-collapse-of-the-wave-function-auid-2120

Penrose here is saying that consciousness, which is a frame of reference, and inexorably so (all arguments to deny this frame of reference must necessarily contradict, since they must be made from a place of consciousness), is a direct function of something outside of it. Which is as nonsensical as it is impossible. He is saying that the conscious observer is a function of what he observes. Spot the contradiction…it shouldn’t be too hard. It’s about as subtle as a hand grenade.

This is why these people shouldn’t be allowed within a thousand miles of metaphysics. A. They are absolutely horrible at it. And B. Their ideas can only have one ethical outcome: mass murder.

From Penrose’s claims we can only conclude that consciousness is not actually conscious; the observer is utterly irrelevant because he does not actually perceive anything…that is, he does not actually think. Which means that you are not really you; I am not really me. All human existence and conscious experience is merely the manifestation of a mathematical (wave function) process which can have no beginning and no end; no premise and no conclusion; no purpose and no outcome, because the process itself is all that actually exists. The Process is Reality because it is the Process; Reality is the Process because it is Reality. Tautology is the rationale of Scientific Determinism, and this religion is poison.

No one actually exists, as such, is what we must ironically understand about the nature of our existence, according to Penrose. Thus, there is no victim; there is no murderer. It’s all just process. Ethics are zero sum, and all politics therefore can only ever be expressions of power…which is also zero sum, because power is simply the infinite Mathematical Process expressing itself…the “wave” collapsing into “reality”; “reality” returning to the “wave”, and on and on and so on and so forth.

Welcome to hell.

Questions Which Can Have No Answer…:Why benevolent government is impossible (part two)

April 26, 2022forced compliance, government, individualism vs collectivism, law, morality, Uncategorizedgovernment, legality, moralityArgo

Explaining how the inherent contradictions of the questions I listed in part one relate specifically to government is the purpose of the remainder of the posts in this series. Today’s post will examine question one.

1. How shall we enslave them to set them free?

A wise man with whom I used to regularly associate, John Immel, once said that government is authority and authority is force—his point being that coercion is not merely a characteristic of the State, but is in fact the state’s most fundamental characteristic, and likely the only truly relevant one. Absent force there is literally nothing about the State which has any meaning whatsoever. I agree with this completely, and the only thing I would add to John’s aphorism concerns the Law. I might put it this way: The Law is government, and government is authority, and authority is force. Meaning that once Law is declared or implied as the guiding societal principle then government is established to compel obedience…because law absent forced compliance is not law, but suggestion. Government is the physical incarnation of the Law’s right, or Authority, to compel obedience. No citizen gets decide for himself whether he shall obey or not, for if this were the case then the law would, again, not actually be law, but suggestion.

This goes to the heart of why I have for the last several years assiduously asserted that legality is a fundamentally distinct ethic than that of morality, and that, in fact, the two are mutually exclusive. To build a society rooted in the ethic of legality—that men’s behaviors shall be bound and constrained by law—is to ensure that that society is not and never shall be a moral one.

Morality is an ethic that necessitates that men must will and choose; legality is an ethic which declares that choice and will are fundamentally irrelevant…men will do what the law demands or they will be disabled or destroyed. Period. Legality deals in punishment; morality in consequence…and the difference between them is not in the least bit subtle. Consequence is earned; punishment is meted out. You cannot earn a punishment; you cannot be dictated a consequence. The law cannot acknowledge that you earned your punishment precisely because it does not acknowledge the legitimacy of your will and choice. You will obey or else; what you want, what you will, and thus to what end you shall exercise your choice, is utterly meaningless to the law. The law dictates your behavior, and you will act. You have no choice in the matter. Law is not cooperative. “Cooperative law” is a contradiction in terms. You don’t earn. You act, or you are in some sense or literally erased from society. You act as the law demands or you don’t exist. There is nothing for you to earn. The law IS, you act. That’s all. There is no “consequence”, nothing is earned; nothing is given to you or happens to you because you don’t have any real individual autonomy under law.

The law says how you must or must not behave, period. Further, any behaviors not specified by the law are still obliged to it, for the entire context of all behavior is framed by the law. If the law can demand your compliance in one behavior, it can demand it in all of your behaviors. At the root of all your relevant actions is your volitional Self, and this Self is utterly singular. Thus, to claim to own just one of your behaviors is a claim to the ownership of all of YOU, entirely. The law implies that at any point it may demand any behavior from you, full stop. The law is the basis for the authority over the race of men by those who are called, elected, installed, etc. to enforce it.

Let’s look at the following example:

Person A attempts to rob person B; person B shoots person A as person be B defends his property.

Now, both Morality and Legality will value the act of robbery and the act of self defense according to a given standard, and the standard is simply that which the action can be said to ultimately serve. This is where the two ethical systems diverge, never to be reconciled—where their utter incompatibility is illustrated. With morality, the standard is the individual, and thus is likewise that which must be preserved in order that the individual may have actual, rational, objective, meaningful existence. In other words, the moral standard is that which must be preserved in order for the very existence of the individual to be possible on both the physical and metaphysical levels. The moral standard then is Self, and, by extension, that by which the Self is made manifest in reality: life (being alive in the world), liberty (being consciously and willfully active in the world), and property (the means by which being alive and being active can efficaciously occur). In short, the individual is the moral standard, which necessarily makes choice an integral component of ethics, as choice and will are ineluctably integral to the individual. We can therefore value the action of defending one’s property as being a moral action because it is in service to the individual; and the consequence of being shot in the attempt to rob another person as being a moral consequence.

Legality offers us a different interpretation of the scenario entirely. The Law, as I have explained, rejects choice and will as having any ethical meaning whatsoever. The law is about obedience, and obedience is by definition the rejection of choice. “Choose to obey” is a contradiction in terms, as one cannot choose to have no choice. One can choose to cooperate, but not choose to obey. Slaves obey, free men cooperate. And no sane person would ever equate slavery and choice, because “freedom” and “slavery” are opposites. To say one is the other is, to put it mildly, complete nonsense.

So what is the ethical standard according to legality? Well, the ethical, or legal. standard is not the law, precisely, it is fundamentally the Collective Ideal, incarnate via the government (Ruling Class) and which forms the metaphysical basis for legal ethics, but for any truly meaningful purposes we can presume that the Law itself is the standard. We really don’t need to get bogged down in metaphysics to make the point here.

What is the point, then, you ask?

The point is that the action of defending one’s property and the action of getting shot whilst attempted to rob that person of their property are going to be valued according to the degree to which they are in compliance with the Law. The law is the legal standard. If this seems circular, or redundant, well, that’s because it is. The law is, I submit, a wholly irrational ethic…untenable because it’s at root perfectly senseless.

At any rate the law is the legal standard, meaning that if the law says that one must not rob, then the act of robbery shall be unethical…”illegal” is to legal ethics as “immoral” is to moral ethics. Similarly if the law says that one may, or must, shoot someone trying to rob them then the act of shooting the robber shall be deemed ethical. The act of getting shot whilst trying to rob another is thus likewise deemed ethical.

Notice that I did not make getting shot a consequence of the attempted robbery…there is the act of shooting and the act of getting shot. Legally speaking, there is no such thing as consequence. No two actions are necessarily ethically connected in this regard. There is no action-reaction, or choice-consequence, only action-action. There is no necessary ethical value which can be logically drawn from any given behavior to any reciprocal behavior.

Let me try to clarify this point.

The law may declare it unethical (illegal) to rob someone, and likewise declare that one may not defend his property. The law may declare that the act of defending private property (there is no such thing under law, by the way, but that’s besides the point) is the sole purview of the State, for example…the police we could say, and that while it is illegal to rob it is also illegal to defend one’s property. There is no contradiction here…the law demands what you shall do in service to the law, and if the law decides that it is in service to the law for you to both not be robbed and also to not defend your property then that’s what shall be demanded of you. The law defines the context for your behavior and thus your existence, and whatever it declares you must do you will do. If those things seem contradictory or incongruent to you…well, what is that to the law? The law doesn’t care what you want, it doesn’t give you a choice, and thus it doesn’t care what you think. It rejects your consciousness as having any legitimacy at all, so what things seem to you with respect to the law is utterly beside the point.

On the other hand, morality is not like this at all. In morality, it not only is possible but necessary that there be ethical value shared in actions which are reciprocal to other actions. Morality accepts as axiomatic cause and effect, choice and consequence, action and reaction, and this is because morality implies will and choice as necessary to human existence, and thus it understands that there are natural outcomes of behavior which are driven by choice, and that those outcomes are thus necessarily tied in value to one’s behavior. If it is considered to be of value that a man shall own property then it must, morally speaking, be of value that man shall defend his property from theft, which means that if a man must shoot the robber in order to defend his property then getting shot is a moral consequence of attempting robbery.

Now, I certainly understand the moral question of whether or not one should use deadly force in the prevention of the theft of some inexpensive thing, like a pencil or marble, for example…but that actually furthers to illustrate my point. The reason we can have ethical conversations like this is because of morality; such questions are not a remonstrance of it. It is because morality fundamentally values the individual that we can ask questions about things like whether it is a good thing or not to shoot a person who is trying to steal a pencil. With the law, the answers to such questions are simply dictated to you and I. If the law declares that yes, you must shoot, or are allowed to shoot, one who is attempting to rob you of your pencil, then that’s settled. The law says it, you obey. It’s not for you to ask questions…and don’t think. It’s not for you to think.

What has all of this to do with the question, “How shall we enslave them to set them free”?

Well, it may not be entirely intuitive, but it’s not complicated to see the error implicit in the idea of the “benevolent State” as it applies to the rule of law…and I submit that law is implicit, if not explicit, in a slave-mater relationship. The master declares what behavior the slave must perform…this is the law for the slave. The slave obeys. It’s no more complicated than that…the only real difference is that in the state-citizen relationship, with our “free” and “democratic”, and “representative” government, with the smokescreens of “elections” and “constitutional rights”—the U.S. Constitution being the prototypical blueprint for the “benevolent state”—there are many masters and many millions of slaves.

Within the “benevolent state”, like every other state, there are rulers and there are the ruled, and this authority-submission dynamic is the very essence of the most basic forms of slavery. The benevolent state is nothing more, unfortunately, than a master who demands compliance from his chattel. The relationship is rooted in law…behavior is dictated, and obedience, not choice, is the only value the citizen brings to his government.

I understand that this is not a popular idea anywhere, not even in politically conservative or even libertarian circles, which stop short of declaring the state entirely bereft of morality and legitimacy. My perspective that it is entirely bereft of morality and legitimacy is said to be naive, oversimplified, myopic, purely ideological. I wish that were true…honestly I do. Unfortunately, a cursory look around the turgid nation where I reside, the U.S.A., reveals the objective reality, which is this: that what was once arguably the free-est nation on earth, the rights of the individual codified in its most fundamental of governing documents and heavily informed by individual-empowering enlightenment philosophy, has dissolved into nothing more than a pseudo-tyrannical, bloated, perpetually indebted, foolhardy, war-mongering peddler and exporter of neo-Marxist racist dogma which has decided that the apogee of virtue and virtue’s only meaningful objective is “social justice”, and that “social justice” is nothing more than at best doing to innocent white people the very same thing which was done to innocent black and brown people, which is about as lazy and stupid and hypocritical as is possible, and is literally less effective at creating a just society than doing absolutely nothing at all. Yet here we are. We fought a revolution over stamps and tea, but 30 trillion in debt, exploding inflation, World War Three, disintegrated borders, state-compelled “vaccinations” with experimental drugs, perpetually subsidized unemployment, government-sanctioned riots, and abortion rates of up to 70% in certain communities…well, hey, nothing one more election can’t fix. Give Trump four more we’ll be positively drunk on freedom.

The idea of the benevolent state and the rule of law is the idea that no one is above the law. Sounds good. We all cooperate together under law for freedom’s sake. No slave; no master. The government is a mere steward of that law which is established to enfranchise men to act out their natural rights. Law protects and promotes freedom…without it we are at the mercy of the whims of evil men.

Sounds good. However, it’s all just platitude. The hard, gun-shaped truth is that law is nothing without an authority to enforce it. That authority is the government, and the government which must enforce the law in order that the law can have any relevance and meaning whatsoever cannot simultaneously be obligated to that law. It is simply a contradiction and cannot work…which is precisely why it doesn’t. The reason the United States has dissolved into a black hole of corruption, greed, cognitive dissonance, and totalitarian fantasy is because of the fundamental philosophical premises which underwrite it, not because we simply don’t have the ‘“right people” in power. “If the slaves just had a different master they’d no longer be slaves” is a ridiculous claim, yet we continue to think that if we just elect the right men and women to political office we can turn the ship around and return to the halcyon days of beautiful individual freedom. No we cannot, because freedom does not and cannot proceed from the foundational documents which inform this nation. At root these documents speak to only two truly relevant things, and only one if we consider them mutually inclusive of one another: A government shall be established, and there shall be law. This demands, inevitably, that no matter how benevolent the intentions of the Founding Fathers, the nation will inevitably find its way to totalitarianism and collapse, just as we have seen time and time again in virtually all nations and all governments throughout history in all the world.

You cannot and will not free men by enslaving them…and government means slavery. Period. Benevolent or not. Benevolent government may be a benevolent master, which is preferable to a hateful master, surely, but a benevolent master is still a master, nonetheless; and you are still a slave; and just you wait and see how long your master remains benevolent once you decide that you no longer want to be a slave.

END

Lockdown Hell: Altruism Instantiated (Part ONE)

May 20, 2020Authority, collectivism, collectivist metaphysics, Ethics, forced compliance, government, individualism vs collectivism, Man's Ability, Metaphysics, morality, Violencealtruism, collectivism, Communism, coronavirus, covid-19, Marxism, Social Justice, tyrannyArgo

One of the many interesting aspects of the unprecedented and disturbingly open, unabashed, and undisguised unconstitutionality being foisted upon the American public during the fabricated coronavirus crisis, is the novel iteration of the western sociopolitical zeitgeist, altruism. Altruism, in a nutshell, in its sociopolitical context, is the State-forced sacrifice of those deemed “privileged” to those who are deemed “under…or un-privileged”. This of course contradicts the very notion of “privilege” in that it by definition makes the “unprivileged” the greatest beneficiaries of the State’s coercive power, and the “privileged” the greatest victims…which renders the categories quite ironic, in that they are, in actuality, opposite. The ‘unprivileged” are significantly luckier than their privileged counterparts. But don’t strain your mind or credulity by attempting to square that circle. It cannot be done. The ethics of altruism are based on collectivist and determinist metaphysics which are by nature utterly irrational, and therefore in actuality inscrutable, which is why under the authority of the government agents of altruism you are not called to understand anything they say, but to simply obey. They are the enlightened philosopher kings, you are the unwashed barbarian masses. Comply or die. That’s the sum and substance of your usefulness to them and the total value of your existence, period.

When interpreting the categories of “privileged” and “unprivileged” according to our State overlords, we must understand that these, again, are ideas which are rooted in the inscrutable metaphysics of determinist collectivism, and consequently are interpreted according to mystical and thus fundamentally obscure notions, yet paradoxically they are quite hyper-specific when physically dictated. At any rate, the general description is that being “privileged” or “underprivileged” has absolutely nothing to do with the “why” but only the “what” of human existence. In other words, WHY someone is categorized as “privileged” or “unprivileged” is simply “because they are”. And by this I mean that it has nothing at all to do with the volitional choices and subsequent actions of the individuals so classified, or those related to the individuals so classified, such as parents or friends, with whom the “privileged” or “unprivileged” individuals may have been in some manner meaningfully related and thus so influenced. It has everything to do with one’s root existential state. That is, if you are “unprivileged” it is because you were born that way, and vice versa. “Privileged” and “unprivileged” is a product of your nature. That’s it. Thus, there isn’t anything you can do to manifest or could have done to prevent or ensure this natural condition. This is precisely why the State must implement equality and equity by force (legalized violence), and cannot rely upon citizens to work out their differences by their own choices and actions. No action or choice can change one’s very nature, for all actions and choices are a product of that nature, and thus all actions necessarily affirm and reinforce one’s “privileged” or “unprivileged” status. At the same time, ironically, or perhaps contradictorily, there is a sense of absolutist ethics which are secondary to the ethical primary of altruism, and these ethics are known as “social justice”, which is imbued and implied by one’s existential status as either “privileged” or “unprivileged”. The “unprivileged” are victims of some great and terrible injustice which though could not have been avoided as it is a function of their nature and not of any volitional action or consequence on the part of themselves or others nevertheless entitles them to ALL the legal benefits the State has the violent power to grant them in the interest of “social justice”, which again is the notion of existential and universal equality, which of course can never be achieved because the distinction between “privileged” and “unprivileged” is ALREADY, a-priori, itself existential and universal. Now, concordantly, the “privileged” are the evil perpetrators of all the injustice to which the “unprivileged” are so tragically subjected, and thus must be “held-accountable” and forced at State-gunpoint to “pay their fair share” in the interests of universal equality, despite the fact that there is no choice nor action which could have prevented the “privileged” from exploiting those who are “unprivileged”, or which could have prevented the “unprivileged” from actually becoming “unprivileged”, or themselves from becoming “privileged” in the first place…because, again, both groups are simply born that way.

And here again we see the inscrutable nature of collectivist metaphysics roaring to the forefront today with predictably disastrous consequences…those disastrous consequences being the complete undermining of the American Republic and the plenary and indefinite suspension of constitutional law, not to mention the irreversible and alarmingly substantial diminishing of the economy and faith in the nation on the whole in service to the “protection” of the public from the latest contrived boogeyman, but this one a phantom, which is supposed to be even more scary, called coronavirus. Once again do not try to apprehend the reasons, do not try to interpret or discern the meaning behind the actions of your government overlords, for it is not yours to know, because it is not you who has been given the “grace to perceive”. For that is reserved for those who have been called to rule. For you, on the other hand, it is forever a cloud of steam in your fist. The metaphysics of collectivism and the concordant ethics of altruism require only your submission. The “unprivileged” are required only to receive, the “privileged”, to sacrifice.

But which one are you?

Now that is a very interesting question. And the answer is predictably enigmatic, as I’m sure you understand: it depends. In the meta, you are both and neither…it is subjective, it is fluid. In context however it is terrifyingly empirical, objective, and corporeal. And as we are talking about the manufactured coronavirus crisis, here I can provide a much more specific answer. Which I will do in part two.

END part ONE

Coronavirus Conundrum: The futility of ethics by means of mathematics

May 1, 2020Authority, collectivism, Ethics, forced compliance, government, individualism vs collectivism, moralitycoronavirus, Ethics, government, State, tyrannyArgo

In Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, there is a scene where Spock tells Kirk, who is struggling with an ethical dilemma, that “Logic dictates that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one”.

For many years this never sat well with me, for reasons that I could not quite articulate. I was unsettled. I had a suspicion that the claim was not logical at all. I mean, I suppose it was logical mathematically, but still something seemed off.

Years later I realized the specific problem. Spock is confusing ethical consistency with mathematical logic. Ethics are not mathematics, and the logic which governs the premises and conclusions of the two isn’t necessarily interchangeable. Philosophical logic, or what is better termed “rational consistency”, or “reason”, does not assert mathematical logic as axiomatic. This is because mathematics is wholly abstract, where philosophy is meta, incorporating both the abstract and the concrete. Philosophy, of which ethics is a major category, concerns the nature of existence, itself, not merely the abstract measurement and categorization of it.

Since the dilemma facing Kirk is an ethical one, and ethics are not mathematics, Spock’s claim that “the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few or the one” is entirely meaningless with respect to the problem at hand. It was a pointless and decidedly ILLOGICAL waste of time and breath. Ethically, the needs of the many DO NOT outweigh the needs of the few or the one. This is because there is no rational ethical comparison between “many” and “one” when considering individual human beings. Each person is an utterly singular observer. There is no such thing as deriving an objective “us” or “we” or “many” from an absolutely singular conscious agent. There is SELF, and there is OTHER, where both are singular agents, fundamentally, but the combination of SElf and OTHER into “we” or “us” or “many” is an entirely abstract notion. “We” does not exist, fundamentally, at all. “We” is an abstract concept which combines individuals for purely practical, mutable purposes, never for root ETHICAL ones. Therefore, it is a failure of reason to claim that it is somehow better for, say, one to die than one million. The individual, at the level of SELF, is absolute…he or she IS THE OBSERVER, and he or she is CONSTANT. This is why the individual is so ineluctably necessary to existence and reality. Axiomatically, absent the frame of reference of one’s singular and constant absolute SELF, no claim can be made about anything…nothing known, nothing claimed, nothing verified, and thus nothing can exist, because an existence which cannot be known and thus cannot be valued and thus serve no purpose is a categorically IRRELEVANT existence. And irrelevant existence cannot actually exist, because it can never meaningfully DO anything, including EXIST.

So, that in mind, Spock is really attempting to assert that the needs of the many ABSOLUTES outweigh the needs of a few or one ABSOLUTE. Do you see the paucity of logic here? Spock implies that the death of one person is better than the death of a million, but there is no such thing as a comparison between a single Absolute, and a million Absolutes. “A million absolutes” is no more a quantity of absolutes than a single absolute. There is no AMOUNT of absolute SELF. There is ONLY SELF. Any quantification of individuals then is purely abstract. It is of practical use, but NOT of ethical use. When God says “thou shalt not kill” he doesn’t qualify that command by quantifying it. One death is as equally tragic as a million.

Moving on to the cornonvirus. Today I saw a Vox headline from April 1 which read “The Coronavirus is NOT the FLu. It’s Worse.” I didn’t read the article, because I didn’t have to. The title alone told me that reading the article would be a waste of time, because as far as I was concerned, this isn’t and never has been the issue. Comparisons between the coronavirus and the flu are not the fundamental point anyone should be making.

First of all, the title itself is massively subjective, as “worse” can be defined in multiple ways, and easily manipulated to bolster one’s own personal opinion, no matter what that opinion is. And even if we go with the ostensible meaning of the word—that by “worse” we mean “more dangerous, and with a higher mortality rate”—a month later from when the article was written, incidence testing around the world has proved that the coronavirus is NOT worse than the flu, and may in fact be LESS dangerous.

But who cares about this…this is incidental to anything involving the coronavirus insofar as society and public health is concerned. It’s not about how dangerous the coronavirus is or is not relative to the flu, or any other virus. We live in a context where, under the auspices of State Authority, we exist first and foremost as members of a collective. This makes any crisis, even a pandemic, not an ethical problem, but an examination of probability, and this implies the enumeration of the people. The people become numbers, and these numbers are then plugged into a much larger and more fundamental equation, which is this: What course of action best promotes and preserves the position and power of the State? And this is why government can react so differently to similar crises (eg swine flu vs coronavirus), and why its methods and actions are often so incongruent with emprical data (eg the ongoing lockdown despite evidence that the coronavirus is not a significant threat to the nation). The crises are similar, but the policies which best promote State power can widely vary from situation to situation.

And it is here were we get to the root of it all.

The biggest mistake we who are suspicious and critical of government interference make with respect to interpreting government response to crisis is that we confuse government, which is an institution of object violence, with an ethical entity…and more precisely, a MORALLY ethical entity. It is not. Its only purpose is to compel the collective masses into a particular abstract ideological standard that it alone legitimizes, no matter what appeals are made to individual rights or freedom, etc. Government, itself, not you or me or our neighbors, our businesses, our money, our health, our jobs…nothing matters besides that which affirms the State, and promotes the collective Ideal which legitimizes it (in the case of the US, where I am, this Ideal is the very nebulous “the People”). The government IS the nation…to save the government IS to save YOU and ME, so the “logic” goes. We are the State, the State is us. There is no individual to consider in the equation, and THIS is why the coronavirus is not a true ethical dilemma.

Those who are decrying the government’s draconian measures to control the virus are citing the numbers in an attempt to win the ethical debate. They are claiming that many, many more people will die in the long run from the severe economic catastrophe that the unconstitutional lockdown orders are inflicting. I, myself, have asserted this, and will continue to do so. After all the truth is the truth—if you look at the data gathered by highly competent and established epidemiologists and virologists there is simply no way a rational person can conclude that this virus is paticularly dangerous for the VAST majority of human beings, And if you look at the economic data, there is no way a rational person can deny that the measures taken to control the pandemic will kill many more people than the virus ever will. However, as this is not a specifically ethical argument, it will fail thus when employed as one. ETHICALLY, those who would rather doom a billion people via the government’s orders to lockdown society in order to save a few thousand people who might otherwise die from the virus are NOT wrong. It is NOT ETHICALLY (specifically, it is not not morally) wrong to suggest that the smaller number of lives saved by government are EQUALLY and possibly MORE important than the billions who will be destroyed by the ongoing lockdown. Why? Because, as I said, this is NOT an ethical dillema. You cannot make an ethical comparison of the importance of one life over another, so to persist in the fallacious idea that you can possess moral and rational superiority by simply appealing to the math is ludicrous. IF the government wants to kill a billion in order to save a few thousand, an ethical argument about the value of this many lives versus that many is NOT an effective argument because the situational context has nothing to do with the value of individual life.

But, you might say, why not then simply appeal to the mathematical logic? You might say that it doesn’t make sense, numerically, for the governemnt to doom a billion to save a few thousand. Surely it is in the best interest of the State to rule over many than a few, right?

The answer, as I’m sure you’ve already guessed, is: not necessarily. It might, but it might not. The bottom line is that IF the State feels that it is in its best interest to destroy the many in order to save the few then this is the course of action it WILL pursue. If you think that the power and position of those in goverment are not the supreme consideration in dealing with any and all issues related to a nation, be it a pandemic or any other thing, then you simply do not understand the true and root nature of the State and the nature of your position under its authority. And there is no ethical argument you can bring to bear which will alter the course of government action. You can quote numbers all day long, and conflate mathematics with ethics all day long, but it will do you no good. It is an exercise in futility and will only serve to exasperate, frustrate, and disappoint you. The only way you will ever get the State to change its course is to somehow convince it, or hope that it will at some point be convinced, that it is in ITS, not YOUR, best interest to choose a different direction.

And here we DO actually get a glimps of the ethics of government. What is “good” for the State is technically an ethical question. Yet we must make a distinction between MORAL ethics and LEGAL ethics. In this article, for semantic’s sake, I used “ethical” as a synonym for “moral”, which I’m sure you understood. After all, any discussion of ethics as it involves human beings may typically be seen as a discussion of morality. But moral ethics are not the same as legal ethics, and I have several articles on this blog where I deal specifically with the difference, so I will not do that here. The point I want to make is that in order to convince the government to change its course, one must convince it that such a change is first and foremost GOOD for the STATE. What is good for the person, for you and me, for the individual, for the human being, is entirely irrelevant, and will never prove efficacious in persuading the government to do anything.

END

The Law is at War with You (Part 3, Conclusion)

January 23, 2020Authority, collectivism, collectivist metaphysics, Ethics, forced compliance, government, individualism vs collectivism, law, Metaphysics, morality, Violence, Voluntarismauthority and collectives, authority and government, collectivism vs individualism, legality vs morality, nature of ethics, the law and free will, the law and warArgo

At the beginning of this article series, I opened with the question: Without the law what is to prevent someone from committing evil action X should they have the opportunity; and what then is the consequence?

From this question, often asked by apologists for legal ethics (those who assume that Coercive Authority, i.e. the State, is utterly necessary for human ethics to exist), two things can be assumed beyond a reasonable doubt. First, that the law is not necessary to declare moral value—indeed, that moral value must be known before the law exists (e.g. law is to prevent evil action X, an action of which its moral evil warrants the creation-intervention of law). And second, that evil has no negative consequence without law.

The idea that there is no consequence for immoral action absent law presents us with a contradiction; this contradiction is “resolved” by rejecting morality entirely, and replacing it with legality. Here is the contradiction: by asserting that there is no negative consequence for immoral action, an immoral action can no longer be defined as immoral. You see, in ethics, it is axiomatic that action and consequence are corollary, yet the law “splits” this corollary by making action a function of moral ethics and consequence a function of legal ethics. But morality and legality are two completely distinct ethical systems, each with its own very specific premises and corollaries and conclusions, and, most importantly, its own metaphysical foundation. (Morality is based upon will and choice, its metaphysics are individualist; legality is based upon authority and coercive force, its metaphysics are collectivist). They simply cannot be merged/integrated in any rational or efficacious way. So what happens is that morality by default becomes merely propagandistic conveyance for the implementation of legality, whereupon morality is discarded by the Authority (ruling class) and replaced with legality as the author and arbiter of the ethical value of both action and consequence. And this is done quite naturally, and is not necessarily consciously conceived by those arguing for the State and the Rule of Law or the ruling class. For as soon as we assume and accept that consequence must be a function of the law, then it becomes impossible to determine the ethical value of an action without also appealing to the law; and this is due to the inherent mutual exclusivity between legal ethics and moral ethics. This is the nature of ethics.

All of this being the case, in response to the question at the top of this article, we are forced to reply as follows:

Wihout law, why should we think that evil action X is in fact evil? In other words, how do we know that action X, or engaging in action X, is a bad thing?

The answer is of course that we do not; we cannot. Because by asking the question we necessarily concede that legality, not morality, is the only relevant and possible ethical system. Outside of the law, there is no ethic. Any action outside the law cannot by definition be called illegal, and thus it cannot be called unethical, and thus it cannot be called “bad”. The law, in accordance with the logical rules of ethics, is both prescriptive and proscriptive. It dictates which actions are good or bad (or said another way, it dictates the goodness or badness value of a given action) and it dicatates the consequences for actions. The law declares what you must do and what you must not (which is fundamentally oxymoronic, because one cannot do a “not”….so the law fundamentally dicates all behavior at root). And this is why law has nothing at all to do with choice and will. Human action is fundametally driven by individual will. But will is not recogniznzed by law, which by nature is coercive, not cooperative, which is why as time goes by, the law—the State, the Ruling Class—becomes more and more oppressive; it smothers humanity, it does not, and cannot, free it. The nature of the law is to dictate, not emancipate. Law rejects human choice and will, it does not provide some kind of cohesive and moral context for them. The “freeing power of democratic law” is just lie you have been told to make you more amenable to the whims of the ruling class, nothing more. You are coerced by very persuasive, euphonious, idealistic indoctrination, which is much cheaper and more profitable than state terrorism, gulags, guillotines, death squads, and gas chambers, and less messy as well. The chattel bear more service and substance if they walk willingly to their cages and pastures than if they struggle or try to run away. Though terror, gulags, guillotines, death squads, and gas chambers, or some manifestation thereof, will eventually appear no matter how ostensibly democratic a system is…and there are reasons for this, but they are a subject for another article.

Finally, I will end with this:

The law does not provide a context for the implementation of efficacious morality. Law is, according to the ethics of morality, entirely opposed to moral behavior.

In other words, the law is categorically immoral.

END

The Law is at War with You (Part 2)

January 4, 2020Authority, collectivism, Ethics, forced compliance, government, individualism vs collectivism, law, morality, Violence, Voluntarismaction, consequence, law, law and choice, law and punishment, law vs moralityArgo

In part one of this essay series, I concluded with the declaration that the law is not a means of enforcing moral ethics, or a conveyance of them, but is in fact a replacement of them. And it is on this point that I would like to elaborate.

Most of us assume, because we are indoctrinated to do so from our very first breath, that the law, as a tool of moral ethics, has to do with willful action and consequence. That is, if your willful action is to break the law, your consequence is punishment under the law. But this is not actually so. When dealing in legality, we are inexorably and necessarily simultaneously dealing in Authority. The law and the authority to enforce the law are indeed corollary…without an Authority to force compliance and punishment according to the law, then the law cannot be manifest. Law, absent authority, in other words, has no consequence…and therefore its commands have no substance, and therefore the law does not exist in any practical sense. Said another way, once people have a choice as to whether or not they will obey the law, then there is no law. The very nature of law is to disregard choice entirely…that’s the whole point. If someone chooses to disobey, then the law shall punish them. That’s how the whole thing works. One’s choice to disobey the law does not get them out from under it…not at all. It merely invites punishment according to the law. The law does not recognize your choice as legitimate, and that is why you are punished according to the law when you disobey it. If your choice was recognized as legitimate by law, then there would be no punishment for disobedience. Punishment exists in legal ethics precisely as a means to nullify choice, not to affirm it. Before your choice can result in a consequence which fundamentally satisfies that choice, the law steps in to punish you. Instead of a natural consequence to your exercise of individual will, you will relinquish your money to the State, or suffer garnished wages, or a jail cell, or a firing squad, a noose, guillotine, cross, electric chair, needle…etc.. At the very least, you spend your days “on the run” and in hiding. In any case, the point is that the law steps in long before any true, natural consequence of your free choice can ever manifest.

But of course this is not what most of us suppose…we are taught that punishment (and also reward) is a consequence of choice. If the law punishes the “evildoer” then it is because he is simply “reaping what he sows”. If he had not chosen to disobey, then he would not have been punished. However, this is not in reality how law works. Obedience, by definition, has nothing to do with choice, yet it has everything to do with law. One does not choose to obey, for that is a contradiction in terms. One obeys legal commands, or else one is punished. The commands are dictated by the Authority; the punishment is likewise and equally dictated by the Authority. Both the commands of the law and the punishment for disobedience of the law are equal manifestations of the Authority. They are One, and man is obligated to it. He will either obey, regardless of what he wants, or he will be punished, regardless of what he wants. Said another way: He will either obey, regardless of what he’d rather choose, or he will be punished, regardless of what he’d rather choose. The command to “obey or else” hasn’t the least bit to to with individual will, and thus hasn’t the least to do with choice. The law is dictated TO man; it is not a product of his will, then, but of the will (and whim) of the Authority, which is predicated upon a collective Ideal into which humanity is to be forced, not Individual agency exercised as choice. Man is born into law—he belongs to it, NOT vice versa. And law is a giant rock which is falling on his head; he may move out from under it, but only by stepping off a cliff and onto the jagged rocks below. In this situation, the choice he makes leads to the exact same conclusion, having nothing fundamentally to do with him or his choice at all. And that’s the whole idea. That’s LAW.

From this, a fundamental truth now becomes clear, where before it was hidden and obscured by layers and layers of misunderstanding, disinformation, misinformation, rationally bankrupt philosophy, and sadistic self-loathing tradition: law doesn’t have anything to do with individual action and consequence. At all. Your actions are compelled, thus denying your will, which denies your mind, which denies your singular consciousness (your awareness of Self), which denies your root individual nature, which denies your existence entirely. Manifestations of individuality, like choice (true, objective freedom) are thus ipso facto illegal…which simply means that they not recognized as existentially legitimate and natural. Law is philosophically collectivist, not Individualist. It compels man against his will by collectivizing him and then directing and defining the collective whole into Its legal obligation to serve the Authority (ruling class). And it compels man necessarily against his will because it does not recognize his will, because it does not recognize his individuality. The law views man’s existence as fundamentally collective, thus making man a function of an Idealized reality, not a rational reality. The Ideal is an abstract, the collective thus likewise an abstract, the collective becomes an ironic monolithic entity, and man the individual is thus forced to live in this dream-reality which the State (the Authority/ruling class) intends to make manifest by coercive FORCE, and the law serves as the blueprint and ethical exuse for the resultant bloodshed. This is how the State excuses its mass murder of millions of men and women on the battlefields of governemnt wars and other places whilst simultaneously condemning every random “lawbreaker”—a tax avoider, a drug dealer, a man operating a barber shop without a business license—as a moral villain to be ridiculed as an affront to human prosperity and progress.

The law, my friends, is not a natural context for action and consequence, as if it is merely an expression of object and endemic human free agency, where we all just get together and happily agree to play by the rules. Without a ruling class, there are no legal rules! Those rules we all followed as kids in our games of backyard sports, or tag, or pretend play, these are not law! They are rules without the ruler…which makes them the opposite of law: cooperation based upon an arrant individual willingness to be part of the game, without threat of punishment, nor any means to effect punishment for withdrawing or choosing not to play, save the loss of maybe a little face, or at worst separation from that particular group of individuals merely due to disparate individual interests, upon which another group may be joined, or not.

This is voluntarism, not collectivism. It is not the State, it is Stateless. It is not legality, it is morality. It is not obligation to Authority, it is the freedom to act morally.

END part 2

The Law is at War with You (Part 1)

December 24, 2019Ethics, forced compliance, government, law, moralitylaw and moralityArgo

If the question is “Without the law what is to prevent or dissuade someone from (committing this or that evil action) should they have the opportunity and should they feel like it; and what then is the consequence?” …yes, if this is the ethical question with respect to the law, and it is, then we can argue that the law is not necessary to determine the moral value of the action in question. Indeed, we can argue that to even ask the question in the first place is to admit that moral judgement must already have been rendered upon the action. So we know that by the very (ostensible) point of the law in the first place—to dissuade men from and to punish men for evil actions—that law itself has nothing to do with how and why actions are morally valued. In other words, if an action can be valued as “good” or “bad” outside the law, and indeed this value is an a priori premise of the law, then it can be concluded that the law has nothing at all fundamentally to do with moral ethics. And this is very important. Because what this means is that the law can neither fundamentally promotes moral action nor provides for moral consequence.

Let me explain.

Moral ethics are often the ostensible reason why men feel the need to apply law in defense of morality, but those who are committed to law as a conveyance of morality rarely, if ever, claim that law is the means by which morality is defined. And this makes sense, as the very definition of ethics as a bonafide philosophical category must include both action and consequence of action—these are corollary. In other words, even men who are comitted to law as a means to implement morality accept that the morality of both actions and consequences are wholly defined and understood apart from the law. Said another way, even those who promote the law as a defense of morality tacitly admit that morality is a fully-formed, complete, self-sustaining/self-contained, comprehensive ethical system. It already describes what is good and bad, and therefore it necessarily describes the consequences of good and bad actions, and how to promote the former and prevent the other. The moral value of an action and the corollary moral value of its consequence necessarily imply the moral means of defending and promoting morality. Moral ethics don’t actually need the law. At all.

Which begs the question: why do we have law then?

I’ll get to that. But I suspect you already know/have figured it out.

Law is instituted in defense of morality only after moral actions and consequences have already been observed, defined, and understood. Ergo: “We must have law in order to prevent/punish people from/for doing this or that BAD thing”. That is, law is seen to be a tool of moral ethics. But here’s the problem: it has nothing actually to do with moral ethics…and this is the grand ethical irony. The Ethics of Morality already provide the utility for which the law is said to be necessary. In other words, in any true, legitimate ethical system—of which morality is indeed the only rationally consistent example—the prevention of and consequence for unethical action is endemic to the system. Morality provides for its own conveyances of prevention and consequence. It does not need the law…the law, as far as moral ethics goes, is utterly superfluous. Morality already endemically declares that “if thou do X then thou shall necessarily reap Y”. The future prevention of negative moral action X is the example/experience of reaping of the necessary corollary moral negative consequences of Y…both of which are defined and understood according to morality, not according to the law.

Which brings us to the next point in this essay series: The law then, by deduction of relatively simple logic, is not a tool of morality but a replacement of it. It does not save or protect the innocent, it wrecks the distinction between the morally innocent and the morally guilty, and places the declaration of ethical value squarely in the hands and the whims of a subjective ruling class (Governing Authority…the State). The establishment of a ruling class is, as a fundamental premise, is the deposing of morality and the institution of legality in its place. And this is necessarily the death of humanity, not the salvation of it.

END part one

The Conflicting Realites of State and Individual Citizen: The ethics difference

October 2, 2019Authority, collectivism, collectivist metaphysics, Ethics, forced compliance, government, individualism vs collectivism, law, Metaphysics, morality, ViolenceAuthority, Ethics, fall of nation, government ethic, legality, Metaphysics, morality, state corruption, state murder, state theft, tyrannyArgo

All governments by nature and implicit definition are founded upon collectivist, not individualist, metaphysics; and I have discussed the differences between these two metaphysical constructs many times on this blog. Government represents an Ideal, which is simply an abstract archetype for Reality, itself…a superstructure, or meta-structure, if you like, but it is completely subjective. Government is is tasked with organizing the existence of both humanity and its environment into this grand, overarching ideal, which, being subjective, could be anything at all: a Worker’s Utopia; We the People; the Aryan Nation; Society of Social Justice (i.e. Marxist Communism); God’s Chosen People; the Diversity Paradise; the King’s Land…you get the idea. In order to do this, government must first interpret Reality in a collective sense…that is, it must assume that all that is seen is a direct and absolute function of the Ideal, and government’s job is to subdue the ostensibly disparate components of Reality, including humanity, and organize them into a cooperative system which works collectively to singularly serve the interest of the Ideal…which functionally means serving the governemnt—the State—which is the material incarnation of the Ideal, containing the sum and substance of the Ideal’s entitled power of practical utility. To the individual citizen, this power, as it inevitably becomes more and more overt and comprehensive, looks like tyranny; he sees soaring tax rates and expanding government interference in commerce and free market value exchange as theft; he sees the subterfuge, doublespeak, hypocrisy, artifice, racketeering, and general political corruption as bearing false witness; he sees the warmongering, empire building, law-enforcement excess and brutality, the facilitation or outright commission of foreign and domestic political coups, false flag crises, and the insatiable military industrial complex as murder. In other words, the individual, particularly one living in a western reprentative democracy, which is founded upon the illusionary and completely contradictory-to-government notions of individual right to life and liberty…yes, the individual is operating on a different set of ethics, and this is because he is, even subconsciously, operating likewise from a different metaphysical interpretation of reality (usually…I’m speaking in general terms). You see, the individual assumes that he exists as himself, a singular agent and agency, a Self qua Self, with a singular and efficacious and actual Volition, which exists of and for and to HImself, and therefore possesses a innate and inherent right to own himself. And this means that the role of the State—though impossible, representing the very denial of government entirely—is to protect and promote his body, which he owns, and thus the product of his body’s labor, and thus to promote free association and uncoerced value exchange as a means of social, politcal, and economic association. From this Individualist principle the Individual thus assumes that coercive State policy (threats of punishment to achieve political ends) constitutes implicit (and often explicit) murder; contradiction, hypocrisy, pandering, doublespeak, subterfuge, exagerration, and propaganda is lying; taxes (at least in some forms…in reality, however, all forms), debt, economic meddling, coporate and special interest bribery, and subsidization (at least in some forms…in reality, all forms) is theft. The individual feels this way because the ethics to which he subscribes—the ethics of morality, as opposed to legality—demand that he do so. Moral ethics establish the Individual as the Standard of Universal Good and Truth. And since the Individual is defined according to the metaphysics as Singualar, Conscious, Conceptualizing, and therefore fully Volitional/Willfull, then uncoerced value exchange (i.e. trade/contract in all of its various forms, both formal and informal) represents the only ethical means by which the metaphysics can be applied rationally to Reality. The forced removal of ones property, or theft, becomes evil; violations of one’s body become murder; interpreting or rendering reality in ways which violate the Individual’s ability to properly ascertain and thus organize it (hypocrisy, false witness, deception, etc.) becomes lying. Murder, theft, lying…these are all evil according to the ethics of morality; and morality is entirely and only a function of Individualist metaphysics. And morality is NOT legality, and thus, it has nothing to do with the State. And what’s more, murder, theft, and lying only exist as a function of moral ethics. They are not and cannot be meaningful to legal ethics. In other words, as far as the State is concerned, the lying to, and the murder and theft of the individual do not exist. And this is because the Indivdual, from the frame of reference of the collectivist metaphysics from which the State operates, does not exist. You cannot take from one who does not own himself; cannot lie to one who does not know himself; cannot murder he who is not himself.

And here we begin to see the conflict…the mutually exclusive frames of reference between the Individual Citizen and the State Official is the singular foundation of all social choas, in all forms both public and private I submit, and is implied and necessarily animated and catalyzed by the State, with increasingly authoritarian consequences. The establishment of the State creates a society where individualist and collectivist metaphysics collide. The implicit and natural awareness of the moral right of the individual to own himself is disasterously combined with the implicit legal right of the State to coerce by force the indivdual into a collective reality. The friction begins as a small festering sore which is aggravated by ever increasing government despotism against which the individual rebels in whatever way he can that will not run him afoul of the law, to no avail, as he is hopelessly outgunned by the money and violent power of the State, and marginalized and demagoged by powerful and powerfully dogmatic explicit and implicit collectivist institutions and philosophies which overtly and inadvertently promote collectivist metaphysics, like the media and the scientific and religious determinists. Thus, as more and more individuals wallow in the misery of a marginalized and meaningless existence in an ever-increasing insane asylum of collectivist disciples run by an almost unfathomably powerful and rich ruling class, and as more collectivist polices are inacted to “help” those who suffer from polices designed to destroy them by denying their existence altogether, the moral and psychological foundations crumble. The ruling class implements more and more draconian strategies to deliever on the collectivist “Eden” promised to “the People”, many of the ruling class unaware that they are the only ones who can ever possibly live in it because they are it. All of these strategies fail, of course, because they necessarily must, because the logical presumption of collectivist metaphysics, whether a given politician knows it or not, is that the eradication of individuals is the ethical Good, and the arrant achievement of the Good is the whole damn point of of the metaphysics in the first place. Through the socialization of just about everything—from healthcare to food to education to transportation to employment to childcare to leisure—indolence is affirmed, promoted, and perpetuated. This subsidized indolence leads necessarily to the irrelevance and forsaking of one’s mind, which leads to the forsaking—implicit or explicit— of one’s Self. Eventually, no longer able to extract any more meat or leather from the tax cattle, and no longer able to pay its foreign and domestic creditors, and collapsing under the weight of debt and infighting and external pressures and threats, and thus with no one left to functionally rule and thus no one left to compel into the Collective Ideal, the ruling class collapses or dissipates or scatters or infiltrates other societies/social networks and so goes the nation. This unavoidable end is often bloody and ferocious and apocalyptic, but sometimes it fizzles with a whimper. Either way, end it shall, and there are always mass graves of some sort or another left behind to remind us of the failure of collectivist metaphysics. Not that anyone really notices because, like the Matrix, it always starts all over again eventually.

You will never convince the State that it is tyrannical, no matter how egregious its excesses or atrocious and self-serving its transgressions, because it simply possesses no frame of reference for its own tyranny. It certainly sees itself as the Authority of the land, but you must understand that it holds to a fundamentally different interpretation of the concept. To the individual citizen (and to the individualist it is explicit and obvious), State authority is simply force—government coercing via violence and threats of violence its citizens out of their life and property. In other words, though they perhaps expect the State to act morally, they comply with the State’s legality. That is, they understand that the way the State operates is to take from the individual against his will, considering will as irrelvant with respect to legal obligation, in the interest of the “greater”, or “common good”. The individual operates from a place of uncomfortable cognitive dissonance for much of the lifespan of the nation, accepting a weird and ultimately unworkable amalgamation of legal ethics and moral ethics. Eventually the people begin to notice the stark shift of social norms in the direction of the legal end of the ethical “spectrum”; this is inevitable, as the whole point of the State is to eventually subsume all vestiges of individualism into collectivist “reality”. There is greater reliance on government violence and coercion to “solve” problems, compromise or cooperation become more and more unlikely as the polarization between individualist and collectivist ideology becomes a “cold civil war”; voters are bribed with government promises to subsidize their concerns away, which inevitably requires higher taxes and even higher national debt, polarizing the nation even more as concerns about the solvency of the economy and the legitimacy of the system on the whole begin to send waves of anxiety and anger throughout the populace. Citizens are distracted from the obvious political corruption and mendacity through the bromide of political circuses, vapid entertainment heavily submerged in socialist ideology, and the corporate and political encouragement to engaged in all forms of hedonism, specifically gluttony and sexual promiscuity, with the destruction of the nuclear family and the epidemc of abortion and single motherhood further destroying social cohesion and trust, promoting even more anger and fear, all of which is naturally exploited by the ruling class towards the achievement of even more power and wealth. The citizenry is also distracted by the wanton and widespread legal double standards which excuse the political and celebrity and corporate classes from everything from child sex trafficking to open murder, whilst the middle class is terrorized by threats of being ostracized, or worse, and called insane conspiracy wackos for merely pointing this out; and accused of all forms of bigotry for not accepting its “responsibility” to “pay its fair share”, which is simply code for accepting and embracing neo-Marxist ideology and in particular socialist economics. The lower class, whilst being imprisoned in massive numbers for the slightest and most anodyne of infractions, and imprisoned in general in ghettos of institutionalized poverty and nihilism, is used to threaten the middle class…the ruling class will have no choice, you see, but to unleash the hordes of lower/working class “victims” who are just itching to exact revenge upon their middle class slavemasters—the middle class being the bourgeoisie root of all “evil” in the world according to the Marxist collectivists who increasingly own the narrative, and this as the media becomes little more than a State Ministry of Propaganda . Borders are purposefully left porous, as a tacit lower class invasion is permitted by the State, terrorizing the middle class into greater submission. The celebrity, corporate, and political classes are of course safe and sound behind the thick, high walls, bristling with guns, of their ivory towers, so such threats and invasions against the middle class come often and easy, as those who wield power rest imminently secure. After all, worst case scenario, they can always flee to Costa Rica or some other foreign haven, and access their tax-free offshore accounts to finance their lavish lifestyles until kingdom come.

But understand, again, that because the State functions entirely from the ethics of legality and not morality, it does not acknowledge that tyranny is possible for it; it does not accept that its Authority can ever be authoritarian. For the State, theft, murder, and false witness do not exist. It cannot steal from, kill, or lie to that which it owns according to the metaphysical principles upon which it established. Remember, according to the State’s collectivist metaphysics, all of Reality is to be brought into accordance with the Collective Ideal, which is the absolute source of Reality, and the means of doing this and thus the practical (material) incarnation of this Ideal is the State. In other words, the collective Ideal is Reality, and the State’s job is to organize it so that it reflects this Ideal aesthetically. And the “perfect” aesthetics are achieved by making a “perfect” Reality, epistemologically, ethically, and politcally, all beginning with the metaphysics.

The State machinations of this undertaking may to us look like murder, theft, deception, incompetence, and corruption…and in fact they are (for the metaphysics of individualism are perfectly rational, and never contradict, which makes them True and Good; Collectivist metaphysics are thus necessarily False and Evil…and their near infinite rational inconsistency on every level bears this out). But to the State—the ruling class and their corporate/celebrity bedfellows—murder, theft, et al is merely the necessary discharging of its collectivist obligation; the perfunctory disposing of its own naturally-entitled property. Why do you think Eichmann was so blasé about his complicity in the mass extermination of Jews in Nazi Germany? Because as far as he was concerned, it was merely an administrative task…like filing records, date entry, and keeping the books. He said as much himself. And, to be frank, he was being entirely consistent with the metaphysics which he accepted as absolute and irreducibly true. The State technically owned the Jews and everyone else, in his mind…and therefore it can’t be murder then. After all, the State has a right to do what it wants with what it rightly owns.

And by the by, all of this is true for the Church, which defines God implicitly as a Collective Ideal which it exists to discharge upon the earth by force and threats of hell and torment and excommunication. God cannot sin, you see, not fundametally becaue he is wholly rational and considers all men to be their own agents, entitled to their own lives and property and choice…in other words, not because He is moral. But because He is the Collective Ideal…He IS everything, and therefore owns everything. Thus, there is no such thing as murder, theft, et al for God. It’s all His legal right to exercise the legal ownership of His property. And the Church is His Presence on earth. So to those of you who think they shall find refuge in a some kind of “moral theocracy”, think again. “Moral theocracy” is a contradiction in terms.

END

The Law Murders Even God

April 28, 2019Authority, collectivism, collectivist metaphysics, Ethics, government, law, moralitydoes God obey the law, God vs the Law, Jesus and Jewish Politics, Jesus and Roman law, Jesus politcal execution, law, legality, moralityArgo

[NOTE: Before reading this article, I recommend you read the preceding one, “The Cross of Contradiction”, where I explain the relationship of Jesus to the Law…that is, the morality of Jesus-as-God relative to his legal obligations as a man and a Jew. With that foundation, the following article will probably be more understandable.]

It is often argued that Christ’s death on the cross was the example of God’s greatest humility. And this may be true. But consider another act…one I submit was even greater, because it was an act that not only implied but made inevitable the crucifixion of Christ, which occurred many hundreds of years later. In fact, I would assert that it killed God long before the Romans did.

That act was giving the Jews the Law.

The Law is a LEGAL ethic, not a moral one. Morality and Legality are utterly exclusive of each other. Morality looks to love. Legality looks to Authority…and Authority is Force. And force does not negotiate, it does not think, it does not plan, it does not consider, it does not value, It is a hammer that smashes; a gale that levels; a beast which mauls. Everything good is submitted to it; everything of love is stomped into oblivion under its jack boot. But the Jews just had to have it. They needed a Law, which meant they needed a Ruler, an Authority. and as God is Love, this ruler could not be him. So they got a king. And at that moment the Jews were ushered into an absolute existence of Authority and Submission; of rulers and the ruled. Of those above and those below. Of those whom the law would exploit and discard, and those for whom the law would become a sword…and then a gun, and then a bomb, and then a nuclear bomb, and then a smart bomb. And at that moment…at the moment of the giving of the Law, God became just another one of us in the crowd of unwashed masses. Just another subject of the State. Just another voice which matters not, except when it dissents, and then like a laser the scope of the ruling class gets its bead right between his eyes. And he finds himself branded not a religious enemy, but a political one. And then he is destroyed. Sermons, speeches, invocations, appeals, supplications, warnings, proverbs, parables, miracles…all of no consequence as far as the Authority is concerned. He is simply you or me…which means no one. And into the ground he goes….just another day in the life of the State. God he may be, but even God must give way to the “Common Good” it seems.

Yes, my friend, we didn’t have to wait for Golgotha. God was dead before Moses even left the mountain. God gave his life on that day, because man demanded a law, and God has never, ever been he who spends his time pointlessly quarreling with his children. He negotiates, and then as reason—that is, Truth—dicatates, he relents in the face of their recalcitrance, defiance, and threats…but not out of fear or exasperation. He simply treats them like the adults they are and lets them lie in the beds they make. With the giving of the Law, God himself got in line with the masses, and conceded Authority to the ruling class which now must take his place. Which, incidentally, is why Christ came as a pauper, not a prince.

THIS is humility, my friend. THIS is love.

For true love understands the reality of choice, and with that the reality of consequence. Even when that consequence includes the death of Himself on a Roman cross.

Now, please don’t hear what I’m not saying. None of this means that God consigns himself to some ultimate non-existence…for God, like man, is an eternal being. The Law can never actually subordinate he who rightly refuses to accept that it has any real or just power to govern his eternal essence. The law SEEKS to replace man with itself and the Authority, but this ultimately cannot happen because at root it’s a contradiction. Both God’s and Man’s eternal life is secure…for this is rational, and law and authority are enemies of Truth, and thus they are ultimately toothless. Jesus walked through mobs of those who sought to murder him, and walked on water to find his friends, and made a cornucopia from a smattering of bread and fish. God leveled an entire army through one man, sustained Jonah in the belly of the whale, quickened David against Goliath, brought the Babylonian empire to its knees with a dream, and rendered Nebuchadnezzer’s fiery furnace of no more danger to human flesh than a sun room. The law marginalized God and murdered his Son, it is true, as the law will do. But they were never actually at its mercy.

In the same way that Jesus rose, God could never be subordinated to the Law that the Jews demanded of him. Law which was indeed demanded as a function of the insistence that man needed to be governed, and thus could NOT BE FREE. The Jewish slave mentality which they had acquired in Egypt never left them as they fled into the desert. But lest we blame the Jews entirely for this, we must realize that this mentality was not a Jewish invention. The fact that governments, like Pharaoh’s, already existed is proof that the suppressive and oppressive idea of Law and Authority were not unique to the Jews. Far from it. No, my friend, all manner of men are complicit in this evil.

Look around you. How many of us are actually devoted to a stateless society? How many voluntarists or REAL anarachists do you know? And I don’t mean the leftist, neo-marxist demon hoard anarchist posers. I mean ACTUAL anarchists…those who preach morality not legality; the Individual and his property as the metaphysical plumb line for truth and goodness, not the commie Collective Ideal of the “Workers”, “Diversity”, “Common Good”, “Social Justice”, “Equality” or whatever other authoritarian socialist trope du jour happens to be on the democrat menu this week.

Hell, I AM a voluntarist and I don’t know of any others in my circle of friends, family, and acquaintances. I know of a few public intellectuals here and there who claim anarchism as their primary political philosophy, but even they tell me that I should vote for Trump, so it seems they haven’t yet acquired introspection enough to avoid indulging in hypocrisy and contradiction. And I’m guessing that you, my friend, yourself, aren’t a voluntarist. And even I wasn’t one until a mere seven years ago. My point here is not to rebuke or disparage you or me. I’m simply saying this: We’d better not dare lay all fault upon the Jews for ushering in the death of morality and, in the process, the death God. If the Jews are indeed to blame then we are ALL Jews. It’s been 2000 years since Christ was executed as an enemy of the State, and judging by America’s 22 TRILLION dollar debt we havne’t learned a damn thing.

[*The debt, by the way, as far as I can tell is mathematically unpayable, which means that American currency is backed only by the Largest Military in the World Standard…as opposed to the gold standard, for example. Thus, it appears more and more that considering ourselves “slaves” to the State should be less of a figurative or philosophical idea and more of a literal one.]

Consider this excerpt from my last article:

”Christ had to die because that’s what Law demands. Once the Jews demanded legality instead of morality they replaced God with the Law, and consigned themselves [and God] to death. The Law brings death absolutely and indiscriminately. It murders BOTH man and God by replacing THEIR inherent existential morality with its own absolute LEGALITY. It replaces the RATIONAL ethic of morality with that of IRRATIONAL legality.”

Expanding on this, understand that there is no fundamental philosophical difference between religious law and political law. Which means that there is no fundamental difference, period. ALL law is, in fact, political, because it implies an Authority to compel man’s behavior. In other words, all law implies governing authority, which implies Government. So when I speak of the law here, there is no distinction made nor necessary between God’s law and man’s law…Jewish law or Roman law. Sharia law or Soviet law. Church law or U.S. law. All mean the exact same thing: Authority, obedience, death.

So what do we learn then from the crucifixion of Christ? Well, first we must understand that it was NOT Divine condemnation or a consequence of violating Jewish tradition, but was, rather, a political execution intended to diffuse a possible sectarian revolt in the interest of perpetuating the power of the imperial ruling class; whilst at the same time it served as a warning to other potential enemies of the State.

And so here’s what we learn:

The law condemns even the Son of God. Meaning that for those under law, God cannot save. Indeed, as far as the law is concerned even HE must obey…for the law is NO respsector of persons when it comes to its jurisdiction. It is intended to transform volitional agents like God and man into mere extensions of the ruling class in service to a subjective Collective Ideal. It replaces moral choice with legal obligation; Self-will with Rank Obedience.

The law condemns all men, even the Jesus. Being God’s Son, miracles and all, did not grant even Christ a moral pass from the politcal authority. Roman law demanded the death of God’s Son, and for the most insipid and obvious of reasons: he was a threat to the ruling class…to the Jewish teachers and the Roman officials alike. They negotiated their most advantageous political positions by using Christ as a bargaining chip. So, in the end he was murdered in the interests of both Jewish and Roman power. Period. There is nothing more to it than that. Nothing particularly deep, nothign cosmic, nothing mystic, nothing transcendent, nothing allegorical or poetic or beautiful. Just power. That’s it. Same as always.

You see, the mistake we make is attempting to draw some sort of relevant or meaningful distinction between Roman law and the religious law of the Jews, either Pharisaical tradition or the law of Moses. Jewish leadership saw Roman law as merely an extension of its own authority, as evidenced by the supplication they made to the imperial officials as a means to eliminate Jesus, who was a threat to their power and polity. The Pharisees, though they employed Roman law when necessary and expedient, did not really recognize Roman authority over them, and they had no problem seeing the Romans as a tool…a convenient means to cleanly dispose of their political enemies. The Roman Empire was a hired thug until such time as they could co-opt its politcal institutions and turn it into a theocracy with them comprising the ruling class.

That this didn’t happen doesn’t mean it wasn’t an objective. Religious institutions have always craved state power, and will always do so, whether overtly or implicitly. For example, for all of their talk of love and mercy and compassion and cooperation, Christians in America have no problem with politcal advocacy to the point of making it a corollary IDEOLOGY…they don’t see it as hypocrisy at all. The perfection of Christian Virtue is the State using its monopoly of coercive violence to force the masses to obey “God’s laws”. And as far as Islam is concerned…well, State Power is the open and obvious corollary to its doctrines. They don’t bother trying to cloak it in any sort of western enlightenment garb. After 25 years in the protestant church, I actually find that sort of honesty refreshing. I’d rather be told to “obey or die” instead of “God loves you, so agree with me or he will throw you into hell”. At least Islam is consistent in its messaging.

So, no, the Pharisees saw no contradiction with using Roman law to condemn and execute an enemy of the Jewish religious establishment. None whatsoever. They knew that law equals authority, and that authority means power. And THEY, according to their traditions, were the only legitimate power in the land. And power answers to NO ONE, not even to the man who spent his life bringing sight to the blind, creating food for the poor out of almost nothing, and showing divine mercy to the Pharisees OWN congregants…doing the work the Pharisees wouldn’t. In short, even GOD was not to be pardoned for the crime of threatening their political hierarchy. It didn’t matter that they appealed to Rome to do their dirty work…Roman law, Jewish law, it all equaled they exact same kind of condemnation that they sought to bring against Jesus, with the desired outcome: death. Law is Authority, and Authority is always manifest by the State. The Jewish religious institutions with their Clerics and Rome with her emperors—they are both servants of those who deem themselves Authority. The law belongs to them and thus they will use whatever politcal power is necessary and most expedient to enforce it.

And not even God has a Get Off the Cross Free card.

END

unreformingtheology

Faith, Philosophy, Physics through Reason