Tag Archives: force

Legality and Morality: Completely opposite ethical systems

Uncategorized, , , , ,

We often see law and morality, or legality and morality, as corollary, or interchangeable. However, the category of Value, speaking philosophically, known as Ethics, is not an admixture of morality and legality, but rather may contain either/or, depending on how we define the nature of reality, and from that how we define truth and falsehood (metaphysics and epistemology, respectively), but never both. Because the truth is that Legality and Morality are mutually exclusive ethical paradigms. The former is an ethical structure which exists outside of the individual at the metaphysical level and consequently is something to which the individual must be coerced by an Authority which necessarily disregards his will. The individual’s will comes from inside himself, and the ethical primary, the Law, is outside of him…he is obligated to it, irrespective of his will. That’s why its the Law, you see.

The latter, morality, is an ethical paradigm and system where the individual is the ethical standard, and individuals cooperate—which implies the use of individual will, not its rejection—in service to each other’s success and happiness. A violation of morality is a violation of the individual’s essence…his conceptualizing nature, and thus his will, and from that his choices, and from that his labor and property. Consequence for moral violations can range from a refusal to cooperate with the perpetrator of the violation, up to his destruction or restraint depending on the level of severity. This can be done cooperatively by moral people, and this cooperation does not necessitate or constitute government. Rather, it is a group of individuals who recognize their individual worth and will cooperate with each other in order to protect and promote it.

Much more can be said about morality and its practical application specifically, but I will leave it for now. I will only add that A. Morality is fundamentally a much easier ethic to define, contrary to opinions about morality being categorically subjective (Hume’s guillotine and whatnot), and much less prone the kinds of chaos and confusion and irrationality which lead to things like 2500 page bills being put to a vote in the US Congress whilst giving no conscientious representative any reasonable amount of time to read it. And B. That to reject law is NOT to reject ethics. Lawlessness does not necessarily mean the absence of ethical value. It can, and should, if we are being rational, mean that one rejects ethics via coercion and violence by an authority of the group in favor of ethics via cooperation and mutual appreciation for the individual at the root existential level. In other word, morality is through love of the individual, legality through the hatred of him. If you will permit me a slight irony, morality is the “Law of Love”.

The Law is a collectivist ethic—a set of ethical values that affirm a Collective Ideal (the Nation, the People, the Tribe, the Race, the Socialist Utopia, etc,). Because this Law is collective, the individual is disregarded for the group—conformity to the group is something not intrinsic to the individual’s nature, so he is compelled into it by the authority of the State, which acts as the incarnation of the Collectivist Ideal on earth. When I say “State”, of course, I primarily mean the Government. (For philosophical purposes, the two are usually interchangeable.) When I say “Government”, I mean any individual or set of individuals which claim authority over the group to compel the group by force into “legal obligations”. Authoritative force is corollary to Law; without this force, the law is nothing more than suggestion. “Suggestion” and “Legal Obligation” are about as synonymous as “freedom” and “slavery”, or “life” and “death”. Appeals by the State to an individual’s legal obligations, codified or merely asserted, are often couched in manipulative terms such as “collective good”, or “social contract”, etc. etc.. In realty, there is no such thing as the “collective”. Human beings are metaphysically individual. We have a single and singular conscious frame of reference. We say “I”. The group is nothing more than individuals who share a conceptual framework for reality in language, and in turn, may cooperate to achieve individual ends which, taken in aggregate, may, and usually will, benefit the group of individuals. “Collective responsibility” is an appeal to some esoteric, ethereal, utterly subjective, and utterly abstract “Collective Ideal” which no individual can ever access because their frame of reference, as an individual, is mutually exclusive of it; and yet he must somehow recognize its virtue and sacrifice himself to it. If he does not, he will be sacrificed to it by the Authority. Government officials should more realistically be considered as a mystic priest class, which claims to possess some transcendent knowledge and connection to the divine Ideal which you, the mere pew sitter, cannot possess, because, well..just because. That’s the thing, there is no explanation that you can understand because your very existence precludes this. It’s about faith, you see, not actual understanding.

The idea of a separation between church and state is a noble one, but utterly impossible to achieve. The church is the state; the state is the church. There will never be any other way.

The Fallacy and Futility of the Vote: Is society a function of you, or you of society? (The intransigence of the metaphysical axiom, and its necessary determinism)

General Philosophy, Metaphysics, , , , , , , , , , ,

Is the individual a direct function of the society or is society a direct function of the individual? The answer to this question will determined how a society functions, as well as the “logical conclusion” of the society with respect to the life or death of the denizens within it.  That is, depending on which format we choose, the conclusion will either be a perpetual realization of freedom and life for humanity, or humanity’s destruction.

The conclusion, you see, is inevitable; we should not waste our time trying to think of ways we might prevaricate around the necessary end to the premise.  One way or another, and sooner or later, the logical conclusion of a given premise will be realized; and in this case, the metaphysical premise will dictate the outcome, truly life or death, of the individual–of the society of individuals–which holds it.  The premises accepted and employed in a society with respect to the ontology of man is, in fact, what defines reality for him.

Never mind the specious logic of the Objectivists or the Empiricists…there is no such thing as an “objective reality OUTSIDE of man”…at least, not in the idealistic sense they describe, where the environment “outside” of human beings possesses its own self-contained definitions, purposes, and relevancy.  Another self-evident problem with the notion of “objective reality outside of man” is that it thus implicitly avers that man is not, in fact, objectively real; and by this they man that man’s consciousness is inherently subjective–not possessing the inherent capability of ascertaining the “objective truth” of the material universe “outside of him” (though they will claim otherwise–that man IS able to apprehend reality via his senses; an impossible notion given that, according to the root idea, there is an absolute distinction between reality “outside” of man and man’s conscious mind (presumably, the place where his senses end and his consciousness begins)).  Which…if you believe this, any Objectivist or Empirical assertion you hold is irrelevant by definition. If you are not objectively real, then any notion to which you ascribe has no functional bearing on, well…anything.

Contrary to this, I assert that all of reality (what is real in the meaningful, relevant sense to MAN, which is the only sense which matters, because man is, absolutely, and only, HIMSELF; for that is his context, period) is a function of how we define man.  Either man is fundamentally his own singular existential reference…meaning, your conscious awareness of SELF is the absolute and immutable frame of reference for your existence, and for all that you can claim is real (it must be real TO YOU, or it cannot be defined as real at all), or your awareness is a direct function of something “outside” of you…some other absolute and immutable frame of reference, like the “laws of physics/nature which govern”, or “God’s divine/sovereign Will/Plan”.  In the societal sense, speaking of geopolitical nation states, the immutable frame reference and compelling force is the authoritative mandate of the appointed proxies of the Collective abstraction, which may be referred to as the “common good”; the “people”; the “nation”; the “tribe”; the “country”; or some social demographic (“minorities”, “disadvantaged”, “business elite”, “aristocracy”, “middle class”, “workers”, etc.).

Every person has, I submit, in his or her mind, already conceded the metaphysical “cause and effect” relationship in one direction or the other. Every human being who has reached awareness–who possesses the ability to articulate a distinction between himself and his surroundings–has embraced either the idea of the individual as a function of the group/collective/society or the the group/collective/society as a function of the individual.  Another way of stating it, is that every individual has conceded to the idea that he or she is a direct extension of his/her surroundings–his/her group affiliation (and these affiliations can be defined and categorized in many ways, but in this case, I mean “society”, or “nation”, etc.) or vice versa.

The ostensible, and completely spurious compromises people make as they integrate the mutually exclusive dichotomy (SELF vs. Collective Society) are nothing more that equivocations upon the inherent and necessary contradictions present as individuals attempt existence within the social structures of a collection of human beings all governed by a central ruling authority which possesses, above all, and at its very irreducible foundation, the source of all its power, a monopoly of force (violence) to compel individual outcomes in service to what it propagandizes as “the good of the many”, but what is in reality simply its own power and wealth.  Because, you see, in reality there can be nothing else to which the monopolizers of force can compel the citizens.  Its all about the logical and unavoidable conclusion, the idea of which I began the article, proceeding from the metaphysical/ontological premise: “what is man?”.  I will explain this in greater detail later in the article.

*

Both the fundamental individualist and the fundamental collectivist will entertain various contradictions in a lifelong, but futile, effort to avoid the inevitable destruction of a society ruled by a government intent on serving the “common good”, which is purely an abstraction and does not actually exist in any material or effectual sense, which is why such a government must eventually destroy the very individual citizens it claims to represent.  For example:

The law-abiding individualist will pay his taxes, obey stop lights even when there is no one else around, consent to warrant-less inspections and interrogations at sobriety, immigration, and public safety checkpoints; he will vote for his rulers in an ostensible display of democratic “freedom”, applauding this brazenly collectivist activity as a patriotic obligation to which all Americans are bound in order to honor the altruistic sacrifice of the Founding Fathers.  He will pledge allegiance to an anthropomorphized rectangular piece of cloth and dye, asserting irrationally that it somehow has a distinct and inherent value apart from his own individual presence in society, not understanding or not admitting that any such symbol only has meaning insofar as individuals find perpetual and absolute value to and for themselves in the society it represents, and that it literally has no relevancy beyond this.  He will consent to being pressed into military service for the sake of protecting his “nation” as though the nation has any value for him once its rulers demand that he kill another human being in service to it, or to openly and actively support those who do, under threat of violence (incarceration, seizure of property).   He will fund schools for the masses because he accepts that it is in the best interest of “society” if its “individual” citizens–again, ignoring the contradiction–are educated so that they, collectively, can compete with the rest of the geopolitical collectives of the world.  He will say “yes” when asked if he is an American, or a Unites States citizen, when crossing borders, as though such information is fundamentally relevant to anything at all except the irrelevant and irrational idea of abstraction (society/country/nation) as reality—as though being a direct function of a group does anything but contradict his own unique and distinctive existence.  Yes, the individualist will do all of these things because that’s what a good, law-abiding individual does.  He concedes the contradiction that being a good individual means complying with the strictures of society as dictated by the purveyors of force  (rulers) who compel him in service to the “community”; which he also understands (and yet implicitly denies), being an individualist, has no relevance beyond his own unique existential frame of reference: himSELF.

The collectivist, on the other hand, will also speak of the virtues of the vote. The good, modern American neo-Marxist known as today’s democratic party affiliate, will vehemently deny that our society cannot possibly be totalitarian, you see, or inherently destructive to the very essence of individuality, because each one of us gets a vote.  Each one of us gets a “say”.  Indeed this Marxist will even declare that it is our individual duty to vote our “free” conscience for those who will rule the collective, and force us into compliance with its mandates which are dictated by the monopolizers of force, even though at the very root metaphysical/ontological level, the collective can have no actual interest in the individual beyond their forced sacrifice to its abstract ideal.  And because we have the “right” to vote, and the “right” to speak, there must be, so the loose logic goes, inherent deference to the individual amongst the collective of society.

The collectivist will respect the rights of everyone to choose their own way, to employ their own expressions of morality and truth, so long as it poses no relevant or substantive affront to the epistemological and moral plumb line of the “common good”, as he arbitrarily defines it  He will tell us that each one of us can do whatever we want, and assemble and discourse with whomever we choose, so long as we don’t “discriminate” against whatever societal group the collectivist has deemed “special” or “protected” according to their subjective criteria.  In America the special groups which are seen as those to which a forced deference must be compelled by the ruling authorities have ranged anywhere from the business elites and early American aristocrats, military service members, and various Christian denominations, to the poor, the racial minorities, various non-Christian religious groups, and non-hetero sexual orientations.  And yet the collectivist either does not see or willfully ignores the irony and contradiction which says that one has a right to assemble and discourse and exchange value with anyone they choose and yet may not discriminate, as if there is no equivalency between the freedom to assemble and freedom to discriminate.

The collectivist will extol the virtues of the middle-class Main Street shop owner and then in the same breath will decry that shop owner when he or she will not serve, with his own time and his own property, members of some arbitrary “protected” class, and will demand government violence for the purposes of compelling that individual shop owner, with his or her “rights” of assembly and affiliation, into compliance with the collectivist “moral standard”.

The collectivist (even a “libertarian” one) will make overtures to the rights of individuals to worship as they choose, and yet will cry for the blood and incarceration of government workers who refuse to comply with a given demand that they affiliate, through their government post, with this group or that because it violates their religious conscience.  And instead of asking the more important and relevant question of why a government employee is in the position of having to violate his or her religious conscience in the first place (as though government has any rational business being involved in any relationship between individuals where no direct violations of human beings are occurring) they will cheer when violence is meted out against the individual who dares oppose the collective will.

But none of these equivocations, from either the individualist or the collectivist, unravel or parse the fundamental metaphysic involved in the root premise.  And this is because there is no such thing as compromise between, or an integration/intersection of, the ideas that man is SELF and man GROUP.  There is no middle ground.  There is no vacuum of space which separates you, the individual, and society.  One is a direct and uninterrupted function of the other. Period.  Any attempt to reconcile them practically will always result in the destruction of humanity, because once you compromise the individual metaphysic, you have no choice in the end but to compromise the individual himself.  There is no other outcome.  It makes no difference how much you desire or plead for there to be another outcome; how much you dream, or demand it.  Once you have chosen your premise, there are no other choices possible with respect to the necessary existential conclusion.  If man is not himself, he is nothing…he is not, and he is dead.  All will and choice is, from that moment on, fundamentally irrelevant.  A metaphysical, ontological premise will NOT be denied its conclusion.  It does not matter what you think or do or say or how hard you work.  Once you’ve conceded the irreducible, there is nowhere else to go except where it will lead you.  The premise you concede about what you are at your foundation determines your end.  You get either death or life.  And that, as they say, is that. The only way to avoid the necessary end of one irreducible premise is to concede its rank and polar opposite.

If you are SELF, then SELF is what you will reap.  You will reap the necessary reality of the singular, irreducible context and standard of truth and morality:  YOUR infinite existential, metaphysically singular context of YOU, alone.  Infinite and forever.  Life everlasting.  If you are NOT SELF…if you are “group”, then you will be sacrificed.  Death everlasting, starting from the very moment you decide that you are not, in fact, you at all.  That you, as an extension of the group, cannot possibly have a frame of reference for anything, because you are material and group is abstract, and there is no way for one to experience existence from the context of the other, because they are entirely exclusive.  Your only obligation is to become empty, so that what you “really” are–the collective–will “live”.  Whatever that means. Because, well…you cannot really know, can you?

*

The foundation of human conceptual thinking is, I submit, comprised of two basic categories.  The first is the material concept, and this category is comprised of the visceral “objects” humans can sense…the physical environment/universe, if you will, or what some empiricists, rationalists, and Objectivists might call “objective reality”.  To an extent, this is a satisfactory description.  It’s a bit narrow and lacks depth in terms of the metaphysics, but it will do fine for our purposes here.  Concepts in this category would be your concrete nouns:  tree, cat, car, skyscraper, Huey Lewis and the News, etc. The other category is comprised of the abstract concepts…those things which are not visceral, and cannot be observed.  Blue, left, fear, joy…as well as other, more complicated and arcane abstractions, such as mathematics, metaphysics, politics, public relations, doctrine, and the laws of nature.

With respect to “collectives” what is too often and falsely assumed is that the “collective” or the “masses” or the “group” is a material concept to be found in objective reality when in fact it is an abstraction.  Government, the Church, the Nation, the Race, the Workers, the People, Society…these are not material, but abstract. They are immaterial.

In other words, there is no such thing as a group, per se.  The nation or the community or society doesn’t actually exist in material reality.  The “people”, “the community”, “society”, the “Church body”, doesn’t take up space.  It doesn’t have volume.  It cannot be touched or felt or seen.  It isn’t there, is the point.  What I am saying is that once you remove the individual human being, there can be no group…no collective.  For the individual person is the only actual, physical component of any group.  There is no such thing as a “society” which doesn’t begin and end with the individual.  Subtract the person, and the collective becomes meaningless, and therefore, impossible.

Thus, all collectives are a direct function of the individual, not the other way around.  So, to ask an individual to make concessions to the group is to ask what is material…or, better said, to ask what is real to sacrifice itself to what is not.  To ask an individual to provide (often at gunpoint by the monopolizers of force) a measure of his property to a group of “others”, based upon a collective commonality that cannot be exactly and equally applied to each individual within that collective, is inherently irrational and must therefore be destructive.  It is impossible, you see, because there can be no collective equality when the collective is comprised of metaphysically and ontologically distinct, and infinitely so, individuals.   What I mean by this is you cannot make equal that which is infinitely and singularly distinct and fully of itself.  Each human being is distinctly himself, at the metaphysical level.  At this level–at the level of being–there is no connection to another.  It simply does not exist.  Each person is utterly themselves; the beginning and end of their own essence; existence; being; IS.  The idea of “equality” amongst group members then is impossible because it cannot be rationally applied.  You cannot apply an equality of individuals without violating the singularly individual metaphysic.  And this violation occurs when the collective metaphysic is applied to individuals, making them a function of GROUP, not of SELF. And once this is done we are forced to concede that the individual person is not an individual at all, but is in fact a direct function of the abstraction of “group” (“nation”, “society”, “race”, “community”, etc.).  With respect to your individuality then, what is declared “real” is the abstraction of GROUP.  What is not empirical–what cannot be sensed; what is not, in fact, physical, becomes the “real” truth, and you, as a physical, singular self-aware agent, becomes the abstraction.  The illusion.  The absolute servant of the collective “reality”.  He who thinks and observes himself as one, is not, in fact, himself.  He is everyone.  He is all.  He is society.

But how can it be rationally argued that the collective is not in fact fundamentally grounded in the individual? How does the collective exist once the individual is removed?  How is it possible to arrive at EVERYONE from a metaphysic which demands the existence of NO ONE (no individual)?  How do you get a group of people when the most basic and smallest component from which that group is derived is eradicated from the existential equation?

Well…you don’t.  It is impossible, full stop.  And this is why ALL nations, governed by a central authority responsible for governing on behalf of the “people”, and “society”, and the “common good”, no matter how ostensibly benign, no matter how rationally sound its Constitution may seem, no matter how benevolent its intentions are, must inevitably dissolve into the oppression, exploitation, and eventual murder of the individual on a mass scale.  Once each one of us becomes a metaphysical function of an abstraction like “society”, there can be no society at all.  We all must be sacrificed to society, because our self-evident individual material presence, and our undeniable singular conscious frame of reference–the existential reference of SELF–becomes a rank offense and affront to the collective of society.  The abstraction is absolute.  IT, not the individual, is the infinite metaphysical singularity.  Only it gets to exist, for “real”.  And as long as there are individuals out there saying the word “I”, its fullness cannot be realized.  Humanity must be destroyed so that the fullness of the “truth” of the collective can be realized.

*

A common refrain from those with left leaning politics is the idea that “without society” the individual would and could not be in a position to acquire the wealth and assets which they wish to commandeer at gunpoint (via the State’s monopoly of force (violence)) in order to redistribute it to the arbitrarily selected “special” classes.  This argument is nothing more than an appeal to the Marxist collectivist metaphysic I discussed above.  You see, the basis of this argument is the idea that the individual needs society–that it is the abstraction which allows for the existence, survival, and prosperity of the actual, physical, visceral individual human being.  Of course this is so obviously fallacious it is a wonder this argument gets any traction at all. But nevertheless, and unfortunately, it does.

Since the collective, or “society”, is impossible and irrelevant without its requisite smallest component–the individual–it is the apogee of sophism and irrationality to argue that somehow the individual, who rightly and reasonably employs the apparatus of “society” to his own benefit, affirmation, protection, and prosperity, is somehow, in turn, obligated to sacrifice himself to society…an idea which could have no relevance and certainly no practical application absent his existence.  Nevertheless this is the socialist/Marxist/collectivist ideology rooted in the requisite collectivist metaphysic.  It is the idea that somehow, that which cannot exist without the individual, and is in fact a direct and categorical product of the individual’s own mind, has some right to demand of its creator an ablution and an offering.

Obviously what is an abstraction, “the people”, or “society”, cannot possibly demand penance and property from the individual human being, and this is why the abstraction’s proxies must act in its stead.  Whenever a politician demands that this person must be robbed of his property in service to the group, or the “greater good”, know that this property cannot in fact go to any end except the whims and contrivances of those who are using their position as the monopolizers of force to “serve” on “behalf of the group”.  Remember, “group”, be it the “poor” or “disadvantaged” or “those without healthcare”, or “minorities”, or “single moms” is an abstraction, and these merely direct derivations of the primary group abstraction, “society”, or “nation”, or the “people”, or the “country” (which is why leftist politicians always conflate forced private property redistribution to the poor as of general benefit to “society”–for the “poor” is merely a sub-collective with direct roots in  the primary collective of “nation”, or “America”…there is no actual distinction in their eyes).  What is an abstraction has no need of material goods, nor can it even be in the existential position to accept any such goods, be them labor or money.  Those rulers who represent the group as its human proxies, on the other hand, can.  And they do.  As I stated in my last article, the Collective which is represented by its human proxies, the governing authorities, is already the epitome of existential perfection.  It is already the Standard of Truth and Morality by which all else is measured.  It has no need of anything…it dictates terms.  Its only requirement is that all individuals–all who utter the word “I”–be sacrificed and consumed in service to itself.  It’s inexorable need and objective is for its infinity be absolute and unchallenged.  Its human proxies–its “leaders”, “rulers”, “governors”–exist to make that happen.  They are the “authority” which “stands in its stead”.  They are the ones who absorb the life and property of the individual because, as far as you and I are concerned, there is no difference between them and the Ideal of the Nation; the People; the Society.

But the truth is that society collapses unless the individual is free to exploit it to its own ends, and this is because “society” is an abstraction–it is not human beings; and we need to be clear about this.  Society is a direct function of the individual’s mind, devised specifically in order to make it easier for he or she to realize their individual and personal and singular existence upon the earth as they see fit.  It is individuals coming together voluntarily to exchange value for value in service to individual life and well being; to ensure that each one of us manifests ourSELVES upon our world and our universe as we see fit, and of, by, and to ourselves.  Society belongs to us, we do not belong to it.  The Race, the Workers, the Nation, the Party, the Church, belong to us.  It is of us, and for us…individually; alone and unique and equally unequal.  The individual must always and only gain from his affiliation with and presence within society according to his own standards–his own ideas, his own objectives, his own goals, his own desires, his own purposes, his own schedule, and no one else’s.  Always and utterly, every minute and every second of every day, forever.  There can be NO loss for the individual, ever, to “society” in his eyes.  Because once that happens, its all over.  The minute man is compelled to lose something–to suffer a net and un-reimbursed debt–in service to “society” the metaphysics are flipped completely on their heads.  Once man is asked to give without any gain to the “group”, he has become a function of the abstraction.  What is has become what is not.  You are no longer you.  You, and all you know, are a lie.

Man is Self, and “society” is his abstraction he must use for his own individual, perpetual gain, as he desires and defines for himself.  Any other understanding or application of the idea of “society” is a rank corruption.  It is a lie, and it can do nothing and will inevitably do nothing else but erase its human progenitors from the face of the earth.

The Fallacy and Futility of the Vote, Part One: American Democracy and Its Inherent Destructive Collectivism (There is no escape from the logical conclusion of an accepted premise)

Calvinism/Philosophy, Epistemology, General Philosophy, Metaphysics, , , , , , ,

If you are like me, you cannot even bring yourself to suffer a single minute of a single political “debate” because you understand that the nature of such showmanship is purely obfuscation.  And it need not even be conscious…it simply is by the nature of the collectivist philosophy which underwrites the notion of a central governing authority.  Which, by its very nature, appeals to its AUTHORITY to act “on behalf of the people”.

Ah, but since the “people” is, and can only be, referred to in the collectivist sense–because no democratic government claims to represent the interest of just a person (“you” or “me”, individually)–then acting on behalf of the “people” (collective) really means acting on behalf of itself.  Why?  Well, because it alone possesses the mandate of force necessary to compel the group’s collective will upon society…which is to say, the environment.  And this mandate has been given to it by the collective, by the majority group, and not by any one person, or one citizen, in general.  Because any ONE person is, by definition, too small a minority to “elect” that which is being tasked with perpetuating upon the environment the will of the group.  It’s not your will, or any individual will, it cares about, because no such individual will has anything to do with a government that is elected by the people in the collectivist sense, which is the only sense the term “people” can have when we start talking about government…which is the Authority which acts on behalf of Group; and there is no such thing as a group of one. That is an obvious contradiction in terms.  This means that such an Authority can never act in service to YOU, yourSELF.

Your only hope then, once you’ve acceded to this governing Authority, is that it acts is in such a way that you happen agree with its actions; or that you are un-offended by them.  But by no means can you assume that the government acts on behalf of YOU as an individual, since it does not recognize YOU, individually, but only the collective it represents–which, being an abstraction, has nothing actually to do with YOU in the ontological sense at all. To vote then for a government to rule on behalf of the collective, which you as an individual must then by definition be completely and perpetually at metaphysical odds with, presents a very dangerous and intransigent existential dilemma.  You have, by conceding to the premise that man is, metaphysically (at the very irreducible heart of being) a function of the group, abdicated your ownership of Self; and moreover, you have abdicated the REALITY of Self.  You have denied your own fundamental material and ontological and self-evident Truth in favor of an abstraction.  You have rejected your own ability to interpret reality for the impostor of reality given to you by those called to rule you on behalf of the “people”, or  “society”, or the the “workers”, or the “disadvantaged”, or the “nation”, or the “kingdom”, or the “church”, or the “common good”.  You have willingly placed yourself inside the iron maiden of existential entrapment and have assumed as “truth” and as “benevolent” and as “moral” the idea that you, as an individual, are entirely insufficient to life.  You have agreed that you no longer get to be, in fact, you.

*

At any rate, since these politicians are vying for the job of ruling you, it seems odd that they would need to, fundamentally or relevantly, procure your permission for such a position.  You see, being ruled is, in fact, the polar opposite of being asked.  If you are asked, you can say no.  If you are ruled…well.  Try telling the IRS that you no longer permit them to draw taxes from your wages; try telling the politicians in Chicago that the gun on you hip is moral and justified because you simply chose to opt out of the article of city law which prohibits such items on your person.  Go ahead and see what happens when you try to “opt out” of the government you get to “freely” vote for; you get to “freely” choose; which “represents” “you”.  I’ll be sure to write you in prison; maybe send you a carton of cigarettes to barter for a week of chastity.  Or to smoke afterwards, whatever suits the situation.

To freely vote to be ruled is a contradiction in terms.  This is patently obvious.  Even if you assume that you have some say in how you are to be ruled (you don’t, if you are being rationally consistent to the idea of a governing authority which acts on behalf of the group), the fact is that since you cannot opt out and still be recognized as a free, legitimate, actual, relevant, moral, and equally ontologically valid self-aware being, voting to be ruled according to the ideas of the COLLECTIVE, even if you happen to agree with them, still must subordinate your individual identity to the identity of the group.  And since the group’s identity can only be manifest by the authorities “elected” to enforce it (that is, to make it “real”; that is, to manifest the group”s identity on reality; that is, to define reality), it is NEVER truly your will which is being expressed and rendered, but the collective’s.  And the logical conclusion of this is that the individual MUST be subordinated to the collective will.  And this cannot be done voluntarily because the individual cannot, by definition, from his singular frame of reference (his individual metaphysic) apprehend the reality of the collective.  Reality is a function of the collective, not the individual.  And those tasked with rendering reality are the proxies of the group, and no one else.  And those proxies are the rulers.  And rulers rule by authority, and authority is force, and force is violence.  Period.  Full stop.  And their authority is a direct function of the abstraction of the Collective, to enforce Collective Will UPON individuals, since it cannot enforce it upon the Collective, itself being a direct function of it.  The Collective and its ruling Authority are, in effect, one and the same.  They are corollaries.  They are sympatico.  It is not then the Collective which needs ruling, it is the individual.  The Collective is ALREADY the epitome of perfection.  It has no need to be ruled; it only has need to RULE.  And what does it rule?

You.

And you don’t see the destruction bearing down on you like a rolling thunderstorm just over the horizon because you are too busy worrying about who to vote for, and cheering the idea of “government of and by the people” as though its some kind of rational tribute to liberty.   But here’s the truth.  There is no “people”.  There is only you, and me, and he and she.  And we are not a collective, we simply are Self.  To vote to be ruled by a government committed to the electoral outcomes of a collective is to deny your very nature as a being of One.

And just how long do you think it takes before those in power recognize this dynamic, and realize that the collectivist philosophy to which they (and most of the citizens they “represent”) subscribe must place an insurmountable barrier between the individual and the collective which they have been called to represent?  Just how long do you think it takes them to realize thus that the individual citizen cannot possibly have any relevant or legitimate any say in the governing of the collective, be it through voting or any other means, because he is by definition contradictory to the GROUP?  Well, a casual glance at history will reveal the inexorable slide of every nation in every continent on the face of earth into the smoldering ruins of collectivist ideology (socialism, Marxism, fascism, feudalism, theocracies, monarchism, even democracies like, say…America). History would seem, then, to indicate that it takes very little time at all.  In fact, in my opinion, I’d say it takes on average less than two years after the formation of any society ruled by a central governing body before anything but an illusion of “representative” government, “elected” and doing the “will of the [individual] people”, remains.  And maybe even less than that.

*

Above, when I mentioned political debates at the very beginning of this essay you’ll have noticed that “debate” is in quotes.  This is because, to me, political debate is more like a grand advertisement for a product I don’t really need (a centralized juggernaut of force) but which I’m told I must have if I want to “fit in”.  And in this case “fit in”, means to possess an adequacy to my own existence.  In other words, if I don’t have some massive central governing apparatus with all its requisite leaders and rulers to define reality for me (e.g. tell me what to eat, to drink, to drive, to smoke (or not), who I can marry, when my kids are “properly educated”, and by what method, etc.), then I am doomed to death–the product of my inherent depravity.  In the religious sense, depravity means that I am the abstraction of evil in its visceral, material incarnation, and thus can do no good except I that am compelled by threats and force by God’s ministerial proxies “standing in His stead”.  In the political/governmental sense, my depravity is summed up by the generally unspoken but almost universally accepted notion that: Man MUST be governed; for without the collective (the group), led by its elected officials (the arbiters of the collective’s authority, which simply means that they rule, ultimately, by force) man cannot hope to survive.

The simpler translation of this is:  as an individual man does not possess the inherent tools to exist.  He needs the collective; and the collective, being purely an abstraction (because individual human beings are the only material, tangible, and visceral components of ANY group), needs its human rulers to manifest its authority (force) to regulate society (to define collective “reality”) in material reality in order that the infinitely depraved individual can survive.

Oh, what irony we live with!  The logical conclusion of this is: we must destroy the individual’s identity entirely in order that the individual may live. The individual doesn’t actually exist (and fundamentally cannot exist) because he possesses no relevancy to reality except that he be sacrificed to the Collective, in order to (ironically, and contrarily) ensure his survival.  For remember, the assumption in a democracy, though it is not openly admitted as such, is that man must be governed; thus, he cannot by nature provide any relevancy to reality because he is insufficient to his own existence as an individual.  Reality, you see, must be rendered only by the authority of the collective; because, again, it is impossible that the individual can render it because the individual, left to himself, MUST die off.

In fact, man’s death as an individual is so assured that one cannot make an argument that man as an individual can even be born at all.  For his insufficiency to existence is an infinite product of his very root nature; it is infinite ontological depravity; infinite existential insufficiency.  And because of this, it isn’t possible that man can be rationally considered as having any innate ability to be born as an individual AT ALL; since individuality and existence are, according to the operative collectivist philosophy, mutually exclusive. There is no birth into existence for that which is infinitely insufficient to existence.  There is no birth into existence for that which is infinitely unable to exist in the first place.

In other words, the collectivist metaphysic (and the root of all collectivist economic philosophies (socialism, Marxism, fascism, democracy even, dare I say)) demands, horrifically, that the real “abstraction”–the real “illusion”, is the individual.  The only “true reality” is the collective, which, through its agents of authority–rulers, leaders, officials, etc.– subordinate the abstract individual to the collective reality.  What YOU as an individual sense…what you as an individual claim to “know” from the singular existential frame of reference of SELF, is a lie.  Or an illusion.  Or a dream.  You have no say about reality because you, alone, individually, cannot possibly grasp reality by nature.  Your sole responsibility then is to subordinate yourself to the collective; or, more precisely, to those whom the collective has “called”  in order to meet you in your illusion–the individual human “authorities” which have been “elected”, or “appointed” or “called” or “divinely established”, or whatever, who have the human “form” you can recognize in your delusion.  And the reality is that all forms of such authority are ultimately rooted in force (violence) because, in your illusion and your infinite individual state of depravity, you cannot be trusted to actually ACT of your own volition in service to the “truth” of the collective.  For you, being infinitely depraved as a product of your infinite individual existence have no frame of reference for the understanding necessary to exercise volitional obedience.  So, even though ostensibly it looks as if your rulers are reasoning with you, and willing to reason, and entreating your vote, this is purely for show, whether they consciously know it or not.  Reason is utterly irrelevant when you have no choice but to obey.  Once they are elected, you either obey their collective mandates, or you, at best and if you are lucky, will find yourself deprived of the lion’s share of your material possessions.  In the end, however, the ultimate conclusion of such a system is always much, much worse, as history bears witness.   The sacrifice of the individual to the collective–which really means its human governing proxies–always becomes literal when all is finally said and done.

Take a long, pensive gaze at the dusky horizons of the past…look upon the smoldering civilizations littered across the crimson wastelands of human collectivist history.  It is always real blood spilled when those in power finally wake up and realize that there is only one “perfect” way to go about manifesting the “truth” of their “calling”.

Where “Begging” Means Threats and “Imploring” Means Force: Collectivism masquerading as the Christian Orthodox Ideal, Part 15

Calvinism/Philosophy, Epistemology, , , , , , ,

I quote the following from  pages 32, 33  of  the booklet “Community: Your pathway to progress”, published by North Point Ministries, 2008:

“Let’s face it; we’re all prone to wander.  Commitment and conviction just aren’t enough to keep us from drifting.  If they were, we would be far skinnier and richer…Two out of three functioning legs on our proverbial spiritual stools just aren’t enough to support the weight of our lives.  We need the third leg of connection if we’re to remain upright.

‘See to it, brothers, that none of you has a sinful, unbelieving heart that turns away from the living God.  But encourage one another daily, as long as it is called “Today” so that none of you may be hardened by sin’s deceitfulness. (Hebrews 3:12-13)’

We are corporately commanded to encourage one another.  The Greek word that’s translated into English as “encourage” is not the equivalent of a slap on the back…Rather, it’s an urgent appeal, an exhortation–a begging even.  The author implores us to join with a group of people willing to do whatever it takes to keep each other faithful.  It assumes a connection where accountability is welcomed and reciprocated.”

*

Aaaaaaand…we’re back.  Welcome, my friends, to another episode of “How Many Presumptions, Contradictions, Deceptions, and Spurious Explications Can We Pass Off as Sound Doctrine”, brought to you by our esteemed mystic sponsor, straight from the hot and sunny nether coast of Hell itself, North Point Ministries.

*[Applause]*

Back to our show.

First things first. Let’s get the ostensible contradiction out of the way, and then we’ll deal with the larger issue.

Notice this portion of the quote:

“It [encouragement] is not the equivalent of a slap on the back…Rather, it’s an urgent appeal, an exhortation–a begging even.”

Now notice how the author(s) italicize the word “begging” for emphasis…that is not something I added.

Now, here’s the next part of the quote I would like to bring to your attention:

“The author [of Hebrews] implores us to join with a group of people willing to do whatever it takes to keep each other faithful.  It assumes a connection where accountability is welcomed and reciprocated.”

Let me give you a few minutes to use your impressive powers of observation and reason (and I’m not being sarcastic here…I understand well the rational faculties of my readers) to note the ostensible contradiction; and then to discern why contradiction is not really the problem, it is how they render the verse with respect to the Reformed epistemology of:

Encouragement = Accountability = Authority = Force (“whatever it takes”) = Obedience = “Real” Faith = “Salvation” = Encouragement = Accountability…and the cycle simply repeats itself (this is known in today’s counter-movement, The Truth About New Calvinism, fronted by the ineffable Paul Dohse from paulspassingthoughts.com, as the heretical, yet never expressly named, doctrine of “progressive justification”).

Okay…I’ll assume you’ve completed your examination, and commence to explicate what you’ve very likely apprehended already, but perhaps not in so many words.

The first issue this article will explore is, again, the ostensible contradiction.  If the “sinner” is in a collective of people who all, including the hypothetical “sinner” in question, welcome and reciprocate “accountability”, then why does the “sinner” need to be begged and implored to keep himself from sin’s allure VIA collective accountability within his community group?  Refraining from sin is a function of collective accountability, which, North Point Ministries says, is a function of small groups full of people who “welcome” and “reciprocate” such accountability.  So why all the begging?

As I understand it, to “welcome” and “reciprocate” something specifically indicates a prominent willingness to engage in that thing.

For example, you don’t, by definition, need to beg me to go to the coffee shop with you if I’ve already welcomed your invitation.  In the same way, if I then reciprocate the invitation, you don’t need to iterate or reiterate the practical, absolute, and/or relative benefits of coffee shop patronage.  This is what we colloquially call “preaching to the choir”.  I’ve already conceded the the value of coffee shopping with you, and welcomed and reciprocated the idea.  So why beg and implore? To beg someone who’s already said yes is actually counterproductive to the issue.  If you beg and plead in the face of rank acquiescence then you certainly show yourself a madman…one of which should be avoided at all costs, up to and including a restraining order.  Which means that your encouragement to a given end is beside the point.  You are insane and so must be, by logical extension, your ideas and avocations and group affiliations.  You don’t need to beg for something you already possess, is my point.  For all you Reformed Christians, you should save your begging for Judgement Day, because on that day, since your salvation is completely arbitrary, you might need it.

Then again, I suppose by the fact that Reformed “salvation” is by God’s arbitrary whim, and has nothing whatsoever to do with you, because you are evil personified according to your very own metaphysic of Total Depravity, you probably won’t.

At any rate, notice that the contradiction is, again, purely ostensible.  It’s not really what the author(s) are saying here.  And this is why we must be so very careful not to get involved with this movement (Reformed theology, especially new Calvinism). Because, for all of their sophism and the buckets upon buckets of cognitive dissonance, they are very good at presenting their appeals to their absolute authority and divine right to coerce you into their will by FORCE and VIOLENCE and INTIMIDATION as something to which you must personally agree and something which somehow involves your voluntary participation and permission and valued contribution.  They have had years to perfect their surreptitious approach, and they wield their subliminally seductive style as masterfully as a snake wields its technique of hiding perfectly still, with prodigious patience, until its prey is within striking distance and is utterly, utterly helpless.

You see, North Point Ministries is not actually engaging in contradiction here.  They are not suggesting that you be begged and implored to walk the straight and narrow path of righteousness and holiness.  They are begging and imploring you to affiliate with a North Point Ministries “community” group (also known variously as “care”, “small”, or “home” groups depending on which neo-Calvinist church you attend)…and in that group is where you will find a group of consciously or subconsciously indoctrinated thugs who intend to “do whatever it takes” to keep each other “faithful”.

And this phrase “whatever it takes” should naturally terrify us.  A cursory glance at the internet reveals just what “whatever” includes.  Specifically, I invite you to read John Immel’s article on spiritualtyranny.com which examines the history of former Sovereign Grace Ministries pastor, Larry Tomczak, and the terrifying horror show of his split from his employer.  A Hollywood script-writer could scarcely envision a more sinister and dystopian plot…one which involved, among other things, the abject crime of blackmail, whereupon Tomczak’s very child was used as leverage.  Indeed, Wes Craven, God rest his soul, would have been hard pressed to conjure up a greater form of evil in his prodigious imagination.

And these are the men who are going to beg you to do anything?  As if! You will all obey or you will, sooner or later, suffer the consequences of your temerity.  And so will your family and anyone who dares call you “friend”.

This is not to exonerate Tomczak, mind you.  As far as I’m aware he is a fully unrepentant Calvinist in his own right, who appealed to the very same right of pastoral authority as those who sought his excruciating demise until that authority was turned upon him.  And much like the serial killer who ironically begs for his life before being forced, bawling and blubbering and dripping with snot and spit, into the electric chair, Tomczak begged for absolution from his own Calvinist ideas without ever substantially rejecting them, and which demanded his treatment at the hands of SGM, and demanded that he affirm their actions as just.  The irony is just so glorious, and yet so overlooked by these people.

The point I am making is that when these mystic tyrants declare that they will do “whatever it takes”, they mean “whatever it takes”; and we would do well to remember this.  When you get down to the root of it, belonging to a church in America today is almost certainly not about salvation…or love, or peace, or prayer, or charity, or compassion, or encouragement, or acceptance, or benevolence, or counsel.  It is about Authority, and Authority is Force, and Force is always and fundamentally DEstructive.  It is NEVER CONstructive.  I promise you this:  should you involve yourself in the Reformed movement, with its appeals to the metaphysic of man’s Total and Pervasive Depravity, you will be removed from yourself, one way or another.  The point of the ministry is not to exonerate you before God, but to set you before Him–which means THEM, as they are “standing in His stead”, eradicating the difference from your point of view–for the purpose of abject, summary, and categorical destruction; and this after they have taken from you as much free labor and mammon as they can possibly get into their grubby little hands.

So…once you have been love-bombed into the church, and then “begged” and “implored” (which…hilarious choice of words because, as a church member, you have no real choice in the matter; you WILL join the community group or you WILL be ostracized, at best, and quite possibly thought of and pitied as an unsaved, devil-worshiping apostate)…yes, once you are in the church and then “begged” into your quaint little harem of “community”, the question which remains is: Why is it that you feel so obligated to “welcome” and “reciprocate” the “accountability” (sin-sniffing/relentless skepticism) within that “community”?

The answer by now should be self-evident.

Fear.

The fear of violence.  The fear of intimidation.  The fear of ostracism.  The fear of excommunication.  The fear of their Authority to pronounce you hell-bound for all eternity, whilst God and His proxies rejoice and eat s’mores over the perpetual combustion chamber which is your ass.

*

“…it’s an urgent appeal, and exhortation–a begging even.”

Now, this is where the suspension of disbelief is absolutely necessary.  For if we concede the metaphysic of man’s Total Depravity, we must concede the fact that man is entirely insufficient to existence.  He can DO no good because he can KNOW no good.  And he cannot KNOW good because he cannot DO good.  Knowing and doing—-assumptions and actions, are corollaries.  If man can know good then he must be able to observe the outcomes of good assumptions, for assumptions do not exist in a vacuum of themselves.  And the only way good assumptions can, in fact, be understood as good is to observe them efficacious to a good end.  And to observe good outcomes man must concede that they are good with respect to his own inexorable existential frame of reference: himSELF.  Which means that the outcomes of those good assumptions are such that man must directly and materially (meaning, in his body) benefit from those assumptions.  Which means at the very least man must be able to actively engage in said outcomes, even if he is not the direct cause.

In order for you to receive a good gift, for example, you must be able to enjoy it.  And enjoying something requires a material, behavioral interaction with it.  The emotional satisfaction one gets from a gift is only possibly if that gift can be physically engaged in some form or another.  And if this is true, and it is, then man’s body cannot be totally depraved because it is precisely man’s body which is the means by which man manifests practically and relevantly the good things he is given.  All of this is merely to say that there is no such thing as a man who can KNOW good but can never actually, practically, DO good.  For even simply enjoying a gift of God must involve not just the mind, but the body. That is, recognizing the goodness of a gift is only possible if man can physically receive it; and to willingly receive a good gift is, in fact, to DO a good thing. That good thing is: acknowledging the goodness of the gift and to physically accept it, or to emotionally or intellectually accept it (as in receiving the “good news”) and then apply its implications practically, which requires the action of the body…or doing, in the very physical and material sense.  I have said it before and I will say it again:  There can be no assumption without a corresponding behavioral action.  If there is absolutely no corresponding action, then the assumption is not, in fact, assumed.  This is axiomatic (and complex…and warrants several articles, if not more, in its own right).

But if we concede that man is totally depraved, then neither acknowledging nor doing anything good is possible.  Since man is governed entirely by his sinful nature (his depraved metaphysic), he possesses no capacity to choose between a good thing or a bad thing, be it an actual object or a message, and then to act upon that choice because he is entirely a product of his depravity.  Moral choice is precluded in such a case.  Man IS his evil.  There is NO distinction between man and depravity.  And since what IS depraved MUST always choose depravity, there is no such thing as choice at all.  If you must always choose coffee over tea, because your cognition (“consciousness”) is a product not of your capacity to be self-aware and to rightly evaluate your environment with respect to the absolute reference of your own SELF-context, then the very notion of “choice” becomes ineffectual.  It becomes moot.  A total contradiction; practically and relevantly impossible.

And since this is the case when we concede Total Depravity, what is the point in begging?  What is the point in imploring?  You cannot implore the rock not to fall any more than you can implore the wave not to crash.  You cannot beg the ice cream not to melt in the summer heat any more than you can beg the cream not to ice in the sub-zero temperatures of a winter’s day.  You cannot beg the flame not to devour the match or the shark not to devour the wounded sea lion. They do not respond to begging or exhortation because they are not capable of choosing.  It is in their nature to do the very thing you implore them not to do; in which case there is no such relevant thing, to their absolute frame of reference, their nature, as begging.

The only effective action is FORCE.

We must force the flame not to devour the match by snuffing it out.  We must force the shark not to devour the sea lion by either killing it, making a pretense of killing it and thus appealing to its survival instinct, or placing a barrier between it and the sea lion.  We force the ice cream not to melt by sticking it in the freezer.  We force the rock not to fall by moving it, or by stretching a steel net across it.

In the same way, the ecclesiastical leadership at North Point Ministries absolutely know that begging and imploring are useless tactics against the unwashed, depraved masses.

And even more, we must understand that in the context of the Reformed doctrine held by North Point Ministries, begging and imploring are not reasoning.  They, themselves, become a very means of force.  A cajoling by deception; a manipulation of man’s instinctual and base emotions.  It has absolutely nothing to do with appealing to man’s capacity to recognize good options from bad ones, and rationally so, in order that they may display a Christ-like charity which values the individual human being, and his exultation over his slavery to death and misery.

On the contrary, it is merely another manifestation of their assumption that you don’t really get to choose.  That your “salvation” must happen in spite of you and your time and your money.  You belong to them; and if they could use abject state violence and/or threats of violence to force you into the pews on Sunday, just as the Puritans did, they would.  And trust me, they are seeking state power like the dog which has gotten a taste for avian blood seeks the chicken coop where that blood was first taken.

And then, once they’ve manipulated you into the the small groups by their “begging”–by their ostentatious, obsequious, overtures of “love” and “understanding” and “compassion”…the small groups where accountability is “willingly” “welcomed” and “reciprocated”–they will do WHATEVER it takes.  And, trust me, that will by no means be limited to “begging” or “imploring”.

The pretense will eventually vanish; and behind the fog you will find not begging, but threats and fear; and ultimately, the greatest panacea to their constant striving for absolute authority:

Pain.