Alright. So. I'm going to try this "google documents" thing that I saw Lindsay doing. And when I'm done with it, I might transfer it over to the Observer In Denial blog. The difference between writing here and there is that I feel I have the option to keep it here, whereas with it being over there - or, if it's moved "here", here - is that it is evident right away that I'm writing in what seems to me to be a hostile environment. I don't have the advantage of "hints" as to whether my comments are welcome or not, since I would rather have them welcomed than not. Accordingly, this means that I am insecure. I will revisit this sometime perhaps.
What is currently on my mind is philosophy. Well, no; not just philosophy. Atlas Shrugged, my recent move to a new place that Lindsay found, Brainpolice2, confederalsocialist, objectivism, nihilism, God, and conflict. ... I don't like the format of this document - wide.
With a smaller format, - well, with a more familiar one,
given that I'm used to paragraphing every half-sentence
or so, I prefer this format both for its familiarity, and
for the ease. It's easier to see my points if they're closer
together, being directly above. This differs from the wide
view in that I don't have to move my eyes side-to-side.
Just up and down. If there's too much side-to-side, I've
found that I end up skipping lines and getting confused.
For obvious reasons, this doesn't happen with up-down.
I kind of wonder a bit at first thought why I didn't
immediately switch to Google Documents - but I know
the reasons.
Reason 1 is that I was emotionally attached
to writing with a pen, and the format of the notebook.
The em... no, they weren't even specifically emotional
reasons. I had read about how the personality is seen
in your handwriting, and feared that if I transferred it
to the text format, that I would lose some element
that, generations later, people would want to know about.
However, I did not look any further into that idea, and
so the emotional remnant of "for the future generations..."
was all I was using. And THAT is the emotional reason.
It is also unfounded, as I have not thought any further on
it. I suspect that it might hold up to scrutiny, but that
its parallel will be found in both text format, and typing
style.
Reason 2 was that I was writing TO other specific
people, and not just to have documentation.
With the format thoughts checked to be looked into
further after I get to what I wanted to I want to discuss
with myself in the first place - Atlas Shrugged, objectivism,
relativism, and the conflict of brainpolice and confederalsocialist -
I will begin.
The speech John Galt gave in Atlas Shrugged on the radio
is one of my focal points. ... I'm going to try to find some
text so I don't slow this process down by trying to recall
it. Losing steam in this sort of this is both annoying and
demotivating, since I want to express a concept and my
struggle therewith.
... found it.Source & path:
{
}
"You have destroyed all that which you held to be evil and achieved all that which you held to be good. Why, then, do you shrink in horror from the sight of the world around you? That world is not the product of your sins, it is the product and the image of your virtues. It is your moral ideal brought into reality in its full and final perfection. You have fought for it, you have dreamed of it, you have wished it, and I–I am the man who has granted you your wish.
"Your ideal had an implacable enemy, which your code of morality was designed to destroy. I have withdrawn that enemy. I have taken it out of your way and out of your reach. I have removed the source of all those evils you were sacrificing one by one. I have ended your battle. I have stopped your motor. I have deprived your world of man's mind.
"Men do not live by the mind, you say? I have withdrawn those who do. The mind is important, you say? I have withdrawn those whose mind isn't. There are values higher than the mind, you say? I have withdrawn those for whom there aren't.
"While you were dragging to our sacrificial altars the men of justice, of independence, of reason, of wealth, of self-esteem–I beat you to it, I reached them first. I told them the nature of the game you were playing and the nature of that moral code of yours, which they had been too innocently generous to grasp. I showed them the way to live by another morality–mine. It is mine that they chose to follow.
"All the men who have vanished, the men you hated, yet dreaded to lose, it is I who have taken them away from you. Do not attempt to find us. We do not choose to be found. Do not cry that it is our duty to serve you. We do not recognize such duty. Do not cry that you need us. We do not consider need a claim. Do not cry that you own us. You don't. Do not beg us to return. We are on strike, we, the men of the mind.
"We are on strike against self-immolation. We are on strike against the creed of unearned rewards and unrewarded duties. We are on strike against the dogma that the pursuit of one's happiness is evil. We are on strike against the doctrine that life is guilt.
"There is a difference between our strike and all those you've practiced for centuries: our strike consists, not of making demands, but of granting them. "
It is in the format of wide, so I will bold or italicize,
if I just see the need for one or the other, or use both
if I wish. If you are wondering why I address you
in this way, as though I am speaking to a general
audience, I answer:
I am speaking this way because I am presenting a
proof. If anyone else cares to see it, they may,
but this proof is for me. I speak for myself, and
as is evident here, TO myself. However, as is also
evident, I am processing thoughts from others,
and text from, often, ancient others. It is my
intent to shred the false, and find the diamonds
of consistency and truth. One of these could be
said to be, 2 + 2 = 4.
It is not my intent to process that at thismoment, but I might come to it later. When?
I don't know. Could it be determined? Yes.
How? I don't know... yet. Aside from that it
would be in relation to this itself, since it
was the thing that I mentioned.
" We have chosen not to blind you any longer and have left you free to face reality–the reality you wanted, the world as you see it now, a world without mind. "
This principle - to show... I'm not sure what to do with it, but it makes sense.
But why now?
" "We have granted you everything you demanded of us, we who had always been the givers, but have only now understood it. We have no demands to present you, no terms to bargain about no compromise to reach. You have nothing to offer us. We don not need you. "
And, just because I really enjoy the text, I'm going to
reproduce more of it.
" "Through centuries of scourges and disasters, brought about by your code of morality, you have cried that your code had been broken, that the scourges were punishment for breaking it, that men were too weak and too selfish to spill all the blood it required. You damned man, you damned existence, you damned this earth, but never dared to question your code. Your victims took the blame and struggled on, with your curses as reward for their martydom–while you went on crying that your code was noble, but human nature was not good enough to practice it. And no one rose to ask the question: Good? by what standard? "
Cry the Christians: By God's standard!
Ask the Anti-theists: But, is God good because He is God,
or because he acts in accordance with what we consider
good? If He is good by our standards, then why use God
and not our own? Would you kill your child if God commanded
you to? Yes? That's immoral. No? Then why use God?
Answer the Christians: God is exempt; he uses mysterious
ways.
" "Yes, this is an age of moral crisis. Yes, you are bearing punishment for your evil. But it is not man who is now on trial and it is not human nature that will take the blame. It is your moral code that's through, this time. Your moral code has reached its climax, the blind alley at the end of its course. And if you wish to go on living, what you now need is not to return to morality–you who have never known any–but to discover it.
"You have heard no concepts of morality but the mystical or the social. You have been taught that morality but the mystical or the social. you have been taught that morality is a code of behavior imposed on you by whim, the whim of a supernatural power or the whim of society, to serve God's purpose or your neighbor's welfare, to please an authority beyond the grave or else next door–but not to serve your life or pleasure. Your pleasure, you have been taught, is to be found in immorality, your interests would best be served by evil, and any moral code must be designed not for you, but against you, not to further your life, but to drain it. "
" "For centuries, the battle of morality was fought between those who claimed that your life belongs to God and those who claimed that it belongs to your neighbors–between those who preached that the good is self-sacrifice for the sake of ghosts in heaven and those who preached that the good is self-sacrifice for the sake of incompetents on earth. And no one came to say that your life belongs to you and that the good is to live it. "
" "Whatever else they fought about, it was against man's mind that all your moralists have stood untied. It was man's mind that all their schemes and systems were intended to despoil and destroy. Now choose to perish or to learn that the anti-mind is the anti-life.
"Man's mind is his basic tool of survival. Life is given to him, survival is not. His body is given to him, its sustenance is not. His mind is given to him, its content is not. To remain alive, he must act, and before he can act he must know the nature and purpose of his action. He cannot obtain his food without a knowledge of food and of the way to obtain it. He cannot dig a ditch–or build a cyclotron–without a knowledge of his aim and of the means to achieve it. To remain alive, he must think. "
" "But to think is an act of choice. The key to what you so recklessly call 'human nature,
the open secret you live with, yet dread to name, is the fact that man is a being of volitional consciousness.Reason does not work automatically; thinking is not a mechanical process; the connections of logic are not made by instinct. The function of our stomach, lungs or heart is automatic; the function to think or to evade that effort. But you are not free to escape from your nature, from the fact that reason is your means of survival–so that for you, who are a human being, the question 'to be or not to be' is the question 'to think or not to think.' "A being of volitional consciousness has no automatic course of behavior. He needs a code of values to guide his actions. 'Value' is that which one acts to gain and keep, 'virtue' is the action by which one gains and keeps it. 'Value' presupposes an answer to the standard, a purpose and the necessity of action in the face of an alternative. Where there are no alternatives, no values are possible. "
This is the same type of reasoning I used when I first determined that,
if there were no cars at a stop sign, that if I were in a car, I would
run through the stop light. Why? Because the lights were made for
the use of there being many cars going in a direction that intersect, and
thus, if continue on those paths, would run into each other and have
undesirable results, the worst of which being death. If there are no other
cars, the reasons for the lights being in place become irrelevant.
The lights were designed for a mass of cars*, not one car.*More specifically, for any time that two cars would be likely
to intersect; however, to automate this process is to assume
en masse.
" "A code of values accepted by choice is a code of morality.
"Whoever you are, you who are hearing me now, I am speaking to whatever living remnant is left uncorrupted within you, to the remnant of the human, to your mind, and I say: There is a morality of reason, a morality proper to man, and Man's Life is its standard of value.
"All that which is proper to the life of a rational being is the good; all that which destroys it is the evil. "
" "Man's life, as required by his nature, is not the life of a mindless brute, of a looting thug or a mooching mystic, but the life of a thinking being–not life by means of force or fraud, but life by means of achievement–not survival at any price, since there's only one price that pays for man's survival: reason." "A plant must feed itself in order to live; the sunlight, the water, the chemicals it needs are the values its nature has set it to pursue; its life is the standard of value directing its actions. But a plant has no choice of action; there are alternatives in the conditions it encounters, but there is no alternative in its function: it acts automatically to further its life, it cannot act for its own destruction.
"An animal is equipped for sustaining its life; its senses provide what is good for it or evil. It has no power to extend its knowledge or to evade it. In conditions where its knowledge proves inadequate, it dies. But so long as it lives, it acts on its knowledge, with automatic safety and no power of choice, it is unable to ignore with automatic safety and no power of choice, it is unable to ignore its own good, unable to decide to choose the evil and act as its own destroyer. "Man has no automatic code of survival. His particular distinction from all other living species is the necessity to act in the face of alternatives by means of volitional choice. He has no automatic knowledge of what is good for him or evil, what values his life depends on, what course of action it requires. Are you prattling about an instinct of self-preservation? An instinct of self-preservation is precisely what man does not possess. An 'instinct' is an unerring and automatic form of knowledge. A desire is not an instinct. A desire to live does not give you the knowledge required for living. And even man's desire to live is not automatic: your secret evil today is that that is the desire you do not hold. Your fear of death is not a love of life and will not give you the knowledge needed to keep it. Man must obtain his knowledge and choose his actions by a process of thinking, which nature will not force him to perform. Man has the power to act as his own destroyer–and that is the way he has acted through most of his history. "
" "A living entity that regarded its means of survival as evil, would not survive. A plant that struggled to mangle its roots, a bird that fought to break its wings would not remain for long in the existence they affronted. But the history of man has been a struggled to deny and to destroy his mind.
"Man has been called a rational being, but rationality is a matter of choice–and the alternative his nature offers him is: rational being or suicidal animal. Man has to be man–by choice; he has to hold his life as a value–by choice; he has to learn to sustain it–by choice; he has to discover the values it requires and practice his virtues–by choice. "
"Whoever you are, you who are hearing me now, I am speaking to whatever living remnant is left uncorrupted within you, to the remnant of the human, to your mind, and I say: There is a morality of reason, a morality proper to man, and Man's Life is its standard of value.
"All that which is proper to the life of a rational being is the good; all that which destroys it is the evil. "
More definitions! ^_^ I have used a third alternative I had not thought of - underlining - to distinguish ones I consider pertinent.
"Man's life is the standard of morality, but your own life is its purpose. If existence on earth is your goal, you must choose your actions and values by the standard of that which is proper to man–for the purpose of preserving, fulfilling and enjoying the irreplaceable value which is your life.
"Since life requires a specific course of action, any other course will destroy it. A being who does not hold his own life as the motive and goal of his actions, is acting on the motive and standard of death. Such a being is a metaphysical monstrosity, struggling to oppose, negate and contradict the fact of his own existence, running blindly amuck on a trail of destruction, capable of nothing but pain.
"Happiness is the successful state of life, pain is an agent of death. Happiness is that state of consciousness which proceeds from the achievement of one's values. A morality that dares to tell you to find happiness in the renunciation of your happiness–to value the failure of your values is an insolent negation of morality. A doctrine that gives you, as an ideal, the role of a sacrificial animal seeking slaughter on the altars of others, is giving you death as your standard. By the grace of reality and the nature of life, man every man is an end in himself, he exists for his own sake, and the achievement of his own happiness is his highest moral purpose.
"But neither life nor happiness can be achieved by the pursuit of irrational whims. Just as man is free to attempt to survive in any random manner, but will perish unless he lives as his nature requires, so he is free to seek his happiness in any mindless fraud, but the torture of frustration is all he will find, unless he seeks the happiness proper to man. The purpose of morality is to teach you, not to suffer and die, but to enjoy yourself and live. "
The spelling isa tad off at at times...
" "No, you do not have to think; it is an act of moral choice. But someone had to think to keep you alive; if you choose to default, you default on existence and you pass the deficit to some moral man, expecting him to sacrifice his good for the sake of letting you survive by your evil.
"No, you do not have to be a man; but today those who are, are not there any longer. I have removed our means of survival–your victims. "
" "If you wish to know how I have done it and what I told them to make them quit, you are hearing it now. I told them, in essence, the statement I am making tonight. They were men who had lived by my code, but had not known how great a virtue it represented. I made them see it. I brought them, not a re-evaluation, but only an identification of their values. "
And here are my favorite parts (as far as I am aware so far):
" "We, the men of the mind, are now on strike against you in the name of a single axiom, which is the root of our moral code, just as the root of yours is the wish to escape it: the axiom that existence exists. [italics not added]
"Existence exists–and the act of grasping that statement implies two corollary axioms: that something exists which one perceives and that one exists possessing consciousness, consciousness being the faculty of perceiving that which exists."If nothing exists, there can be no consciousness: a consciousness with nothing to be conscious of is a contradiction in terms. A consciousness conscious of nothing but itself is a contradiction in terms: before it could identify itself as consciousness, it had to be conscious of something. If that which you claim to perceive does not exist, what you possess is not consciousness.
"Whatever the degree of your knowledge, these two–existence and consciousness–are axioms you cannot escape, these two are the irreducible primaries implied in any action you undertake, in any part of your knowledge and in its sum, from the first ray of light you perceive at the start of your life to the widest erudition you might acquire at its end. Whether you know the shape of a pebble or the structure of a solar system, the axioms remain the same: that it exists and that you know it.
"To exist is to be something, as distinguished from the nothing of non-existence, it is to be an entity of a specific nature made of specific attributes. Centuries ago, the man who was–not matter what his errors–the greatest of your philosophers, has stated the formula defining the concept of existence and the rule of all knowledge: A is A. A thing is itself. You have never grasped the meaning of his statement. I am here to complete it: Existence is Identity, Consciousness is Identification.
"Whatever you choose to consider, be it an object, an attribute or an action, the law of identity remains the same. A leaf cannot be a stone at the same time, it cannot be all red and all green at the same time, it cannot freeze and burn at the same time. A is A. Or, if you wish it stated in simpler language: you cannot have your cake and eat it, too.
"Are you seeking to know what is wrong with the world? All the disasters that have wrecked your world came from your leaders' attempt to evade the fact that A is A. All the secret evil you dread to face within you and all the pain you have ever endured, came from your own attempt to evade the fact that A is A. The purpose of those who taught you to evade it, was to make you forget that Man is Man. "
" "Man cannot survive except by gaining knowledge, and reason is his only means to gain it. Reason is the faculty that perceives, identifies and integrates the material provided by his senses. The task of his senses is to give him the evidence of existence, but the task of identifying it belongs to his reason, his senses tell him only that something is, but what it is must be learned by his mind.
All thinking is a process of identification and integration. Man perceives a blob of color; by integrating the evidence of his sight and his touch, he learns to identify it as a solid object; he learns to identify the object as a table; he learns that the table is make of wood; he learns that the wood consist of cells, that the cells consist of molecules, that the molecules consist of atoms. All through this process, the work of his mind consists of answers to a single question: What is it? His means to establish the truth of his answers is logic, and logic rests on the axiom that existence exists. Logic is the art of non-contradictory identification. A contradiction cannot exist. An atom is itself, and so is the universe; neither can contradict its own identity; nor can a part contradict the whole. No concept man forms is valid unless he integrates it without contradiction into the total sum of his knowledge. To arrive at a contradiction is to confess an error in one's thinking; to maintain a contradiction is to abdicate one's mind and to evict oneself from the realm of reality.
"Reality is that which exists; the unreal does not exist; the unreal is merely that negation of existence which is the content of a human consciousness when it attempts to abandon reason. Truth is the recognition of reality; reason, man's only means of knowledge, is his only standard to truth.
"The most depraved sentence you can now utter is to ask: Whose reason? The answer is: Yours. No matter how vast your knowledge or how modest, it is your own mind that has to acquire it. It is only with your own knowledge that you can deal. It is only your own knowledge that you can claim to possess or ask others to consider. Your mind is your only judge of truth–and if others dissent from your verdict, reality is the court of final appeal. Nothing but a man's mind can perform that complex, delicate, crucial process of identification which is thinking. Nothing can direct the process but his own judgment. Nothing can direct his judgment but his moral integrity.
"You who speak of a 'moral instinct' as if it were some separate endowment opposed to reason–man's reason is his moral faculty. A process of reason is a process of constant choice in answer to the question: True or False?–Right or Wrong? is a seed to be planted in soil in order to grow–right or wrong? Is a man's wound to be disinfected in order to save his life–right or wrong? It is the answers to such questions that gave you everything you have–and the answers came form a man's mind, a mind of intransigent devotion to that which is right.
"A rational process is a moral process. You may make an error at any step of it, with nothing to protect you but your own severity, or you may try to cheat, to take the evidence and evade the effort of the quest–but if devotion to truth is the hallmark of the effort of the quest–but if devotion to truth is the hallmark of morality, then there is no greater, nobler, more heroic[?] form of devotion than the act of a man who assumes the responsibility of thinking.
"That which you call your soul or spirit is your consciousness, and that which you call 'free will' is your mind's freedom to think or not, the only will you have, our only freedom, the choice that controls all the choices you make and determines your life and your character. "
-- I hesitate from continuing, for the moment, because this proof
has been side-tracked by the format in my mind of getting revenge
on my mother, principally by rubbing this philosophy/proof in her
face.
It reminds me of when I was talking with Reachel about the
difference between selfishness and selflessness, which sprung from
the possibility of me getting a job. She had come into the room
to ask me about it, and that I was disgusted with taxes (and
hence was avoiding getting a job) was what a 4-hour conversation
came from.
As she started talking about our current system, how the fat cats got the advantage of the political process and got all that money, and
how they were so greedy and lazy, and that was why she was for
communism, because it wouldn't let that happen, her words and manner
became more and more intense. But, like in the novel, how one of the
"evil" people were trying to get one of the others into the "court" to
play tennis with arguments, I suspect that Reachel's frustration lay
in having accepting one premise: the use of force is a good way of
getting things to happen.
Likewise, I'm wondering what premise I have accepted that makes me seek revenge. Change the philosophy, change the emotion.
With this now put in the awareness, onward, with the waiting to
find analogies that will aid me in figuring this out.
" "Thinking is man's only basic virtue, from which all the others proceed. And his basic vice, the source of all his evils, is that nameless act which all of you practice, but struggle never to admit; the act of blanking out, the willful suspension of one's consciousness, the refusal to think–not blindness, but the refusal to see; not ignorance, but the refusal to know. It is the act of unfocusing your mind and inducing an inner fog to escape the responsibility of judgment–on the unstated premise that a thing will not exist if only you refuse to identify it, that A will not be A so long as you do not pronounce the verdict 'It is.' an act of annihilation, a wish to negate existence, an attempt to wipe out reality. But existence exists; reality is not to be wiped out, it will merely wipe out the wiper. By refusing to say 'It is,' you are refusing to say 'I am.' By suspending your judgment, you are negating your person. When a man declares: 'Who am I to know?'–he is declaring: 'Who am I to live?
"This, in every hour and every issue, is your basic moral choice: thinking or non-thinking, existence or non-existence, A or non-A, entity or zero. "To the extent to which a man is rational, life is the premise directing his actions. To the extent to which he is irrational, the premise directing his actions is death. "
"To the extent to which he is irrational, the premise
direction his actions is death."
This thought is what
is behind me telling Crystal that I thought I was
non-thinking myself to an eventual death.
And this is where I wonder if John Galt is wrong. I have blanked out
before and it ... did not seem like it was willful. It was the result...
Or perhaps he is right? ... I suppose my next question would be:
Does John Galt mean suspended by want, or suspended but unable
to reach? Are they different? And are the headaches that I have
experienced in the result of such, and a slight one right now,
the result of the equation that I am trying to understand?
"the refusal to think–not blindness, but the refusal to see"
And I meet my answer with his next few words. Would my
struggle then be in his category of "blindness"? Perhaps, as
with Dagne, the problem is that I do not see enough?
"not ignorance, but the refusal to know."
How would that come about? How can that gap of wanting
to wish existence away come about? John Galt, what about
this What?
"It is the act of unfocusing your mind and inducing an inner fog to escape the responsibility of judgment–on the unstated premise that a thing will not exist if only you refuse to identify it"
This was the case with my lying to Lindsay, and therefore
I shall use it as a reference point to understand this.
" "You who prattle that morality is social and that man would need no morality on a desert island–it is on a desert island that he would need it most. Let him try to claim, when there are no victims to pay for it, that a rock is a house, that sand is clothing, that food will drop into his mouth without cause or effort, that he will collect a harvest tomorrow by devouring his stock seed today–and reality will wipe him out, as he deserves; reality will show him that life is a value to be bought and that thinking is the only coin noble enough to buy it.
"If I were to speak your kind of language, I would say that man's only moral commandment is: Thou shalt think. But a 'moral commandment' is a contradiction in terms. The moral is the chosen, not the forced; the understood, not the obeyed. The moral is the rational, and reason accepts no commandments."My morality, the morality of reason, is contained in a single axiom: existence exists–and in a single choice: to live. The rest proceeds from these. To live, man must hold three things as the supreme and ruling values of his life: Reason–Purpose–Self-esteem. Reason, as his only tool of knowledge–Purpose, as his choice of the happiness which that tool must proceed to achieve–Self-esteem, as his inviolate certainty that his mind is competent to think and his person is worthy of happiness, which means: is worthy of living. These three values imply and require all of man's virtues, and all his virtues pertain to the relation of existence and consciousness: rationality, independence, integrity, honesty, justice, productiveness, pride.
"Rationality is the recognition of the fact that existence exists, that nothing can alter the truth and nothing can take precedence over that act of perceiving it, which is thinking–that the mind is one's only judge of values and one's only guide of action–that reason is an absolute that permits no compromise–that a concession to the irrational invalidates one's consciousness and turns it from the task of perceiving to the task of faking reality–that the alleged short-cut to knowledge, which is faith, is only a short–circuit destroying the mind–that the acceptance of a mystical invention is a wish for the annihilation of existence and, properly, annihilates one's consciousness.
"Independence is the recognition of the fact that yours is the responsibility of judgment and nothing can help you escape it–that no substitute can do your thinking, as no pinch-hitter can live your life–that the vilest form of self-abasement and self-destruction is the subordination of your mind to the mind of another, the acceptance of an authority over your brain, the acceptance of his assertions as facts, his say-so as truth, his edicts as middle-man between your consciousness and your existence.
"Integrity is the recognition of the fact that you cannot fake your consciousness, just as honesty is the recognition of the fact that you cannot fake existence–that man is an indivisible entity, an integrated unit of two attributes: of matter and consciousness, and that he may permit no breach between body and mind, between action and thought, between his life and his convictions–that, like a judge impervious to public opinion, he may not sacrifice his shouting pleas or threats against him–that courage and confidence are practical necessities, that courage is the practical form of being true to existence, of being true to truth, and confidence is the practical form of being true to one's own consciousness.
"Honesty is the recognition of the fact that the unreal is unreal and can have no value, that neither love nor fame nor cash is a value if obtained by fraud–that an attempt to gain a value by deceiving the mind of others is an act of raising your victims to a position higher than reality, where you become a pawn of their blindness, a slave of their non-thinking and their evasions, while their intelligence, their rationality, their perceptiveness become the enemies you have to dread and flee–that you do not care to live as a dependent, least of all a dependent on the stupidity of others, or as a fool whose source of values is the fools he succeeds in fooling–that honesty is not a social duty, not a sacrifice for the sake of others, but the most profoundly selfish virtue man can practice: his refusal to sacrifice the reality of his own existence to the deluded consciousness of others.
"Justice is the recognition of the fact that you cannot fake the character of men as you cannot fake the character of nature, that you must judge all men as conscientiously as you judge inanimate objects, with the same respect for truth, with the same incorruptible vision, by as pure and as rational a process of identifcation–that every man must be judged for what he is and treated accordingly, that just as you do not pay a higher price for a rusty chunk of scrap than for a piece of shining metal, so you do not value a rotter above a hero[?]–that your moral appraisal is the coin paying men for their virtues or vices, and this payment demands of you as scrupulous an honor as you bring to financial transactions–that to withhold your contempt from men's vices is an act of moral counterfeiting, and to withhold your admiration from their virtues is an act of moral embezzlement–that to place any other concern higher than justice is to devaluate your moral currency and defraud the good in favor of the evil, since only the good can lose by a default of justice and only the evil can profit–and that the bottom of the pit at the end of that road, the act of moral bankruptcy, is to punish is the collapse to full depravity, the Black Mass of the worship of death, the dedication of your consciousness to the destruction of existence.
"Productiveness is your acceptance of morality, your recognition of the fact that you choose to live–that productive work is the process by which man's consciousness controls his existence, a constant process of acquiring knowledge and shaping matter to fit one's purpose, of translating an idea into physical form, of remaking the earth in the image of one's values–that all work is creative work if done by a thinking mind, and no work is creative if done by a blank who repeats in uncritical stupor a routine he has learned from others–that your work is yours to choose, and the choice is as wide as your mind, that nothing more is possible to you and nothing less is human– that to cheat your way into a job bigger than your mind can handle is to become a fear-corroded ape on borrowed motions and borrowed time, and to settle down into a job that requires less than your mind's full capacity is to cut your motor and sentence yourself to another kind of motion: decay–that your work is the process of achieving your values, and to lose your ambition for values is to lose your ambition to live–that your body is a machine, but your mind is its driver, and you must drive as far as your mind will take you, with achievement as the goal of your road–that the man who has no purpose is a machine that coasts downhill at the mercy of any boulder to crash in the first chance ditch, that the man who stifles his mind is a stalled machine slowly going to rust, that the man who lets a leader prescribe his course is a wreck being towed to the scrap heap, and the man who makes another man his goal is a hitchhiker no driver should ever pick up–that your work is the purpose of your life, and you must speed past any killer who assumes the right to stop you, that any value you might find outside your work, any other loyalty or love, can be only travelers you choose to share your journey and must be travelers going on their own power in the same direction.
"Pride is the recognition of the fact that you are your own highest value and, like all of man's values, it has to be earned–that of any achievements open to you, the one that makes all others possible is the creation of your own character–that your character, your actions, your desires, your emotions are the products of the premises held by your mind–that as man must produce the physical values he needs to sustain his life, so he must acquire the values of character that make his life worth sustaining–that as man is a being of self-made wealth, so he is a being of self-made soul–that to live requires a sense of self-value, but man, who has no automatic values, has no automatic sense of self-esteem and must earn it by Man, the rational being he is born able to create, but must create by choice–that the first precondition of self-esteem is that radiant selfishness of soul which desires the best in all things, in values of matter and spirit, a soul that seeks above all else to achieve its own moral perfection, valuing nothing higher than itself–and that the proof of an achieved self-esteem is your soul's shudder of contempt and rebellion against the role of a sacrificial animal, against the vile impertinence of any creed that proposes to immolate the irreplaceable value which is your consciousness and the incomparable glory which is your existence to the blind evasions and the stagnant decay of others. "
I somewhat involuntarily took an hour or so to sleep,
and then searched craigslist for either a female
or male to fuck, since I am in great want of
sexual activity; however, being that I am not
so sure of anal activity, along with this
Galt equation, I held off. This resulted in
ejaculation, since I saw no reason not to.
And I stare at these equations like someone
who had fallen asleep at his math desk,
seeing something familiar, but registering
only that it looks tiring. To me this speaks
of an error in how I am approaching it --
perhaps a recall to the mommie revenge.
" "Are you beginning to see who is John Galt? I am the man who has earned the thing you did not fight for, the thing you have renounced, betrayed, corrupted, yet were unable fully to destroy and are now hiding as your guilty secret, spending your life in apologies to every professional cannibal, lest it be discovered that somewhere within you, you still long to say what I am now saying to the hearing of the whole of mankind: I am proud of my own value and of the fact that I wish to live.
"This wish–which you share, yet submerge as an evil–is the only remnant of the good within you, but it is a wish one must learn to deserve. His own happiness is man's only moral purpose, but only his own virtue can achieve it. Virtue is not an end in itself. Virtue is not its own reward or sacrificial fodder for the reward of evil. Life is the reward of virtue–and happiness is the goal and the reward of life. "Just as your body has two fundamental sensations, pleasure and pain, as signs of its welfare or injury, as a barometer of its basic alternative, life or death, so your consciousness has two fundamental emotions, joy and suffering, in answer to the same alternative. Your emotions are estimates of that which furthers your life or threatens it, lightning calculators giving you a sum of your profit or loss. You have no choice about your capacity to feel that something is good for you or evil, but what you will consider good or evil, what will give you joy or pain, what you will love or hate, desire or fear, depends on your standard of value. Emotions are inherent in your nature, but their content is dictated by your mind. Your emotional capacity is an empty motor, and your values are the fuel with which your mind fills it. If you choose a mix of contradictions, it will clog your motor, corrode your transmission and wreck you on your first attempt to move with a machine which you, the driver, have corrupted. "
" "The symbol of all relationships among such men, the moral symbol of respect for human beings, is the trader. We, who live by values, not by loot, are traders, both in matter and in spirit. A trader is a man who earns what he gets and does not give or take the undeserved. A trader does not ask to be paid for his failures, nor does he ask to be loved for his flaws. A trader does not squander his body as fodder or his soul as alms. Just as he does not give his work except in trade for material values, so he does not give the values of his spirit–his love, his friendship, his esteem–except in payment and in trade for human virtues, in payment for his own selfish pleasure, which he receives from men he can respect. The mystic parasites who have, throughout the ages, reviled the traders and held them in contempt, while honoring the beggars and the looters, have known the secret motive of their sneers: a trader is the entity thy dread–a man of justice.
"Do you ask what moral obligation I owe to my fellow men? None–except the obligation I owe to myself, to material objects and to all of existence: rationality. I deal with men as my nature and theirs demands: by means of reason. I seek or desire nothing from them except such relations as they care to enter of their own voluntary choice. It is only with their mind that I can deal and only for my own self-interest, when they see that my interest coincides with theirs. When they don't, I enter no relationship; I let dissenters go their way and I do not swerve from mine. I win by means of nothing but logic and I surrender to nothing but logic. I do not surrender my reason or deal with men who surrender theirs. I have nothing to gain from fools or cowards; I have no benefits to seek from human vices: from stupidity, dishonesty or fear. The only value men can offer me is the work of their mind. When I disagree right, he will learn; if I am wrong, I will; one of us will win, but both will profit. "
" "Whatever may be open to disagreement, there is one act of evil that may not, the act that no man may commit against others and no man may sanction or forgive. So long as men desire to live together, no man may initate–do you hear me? no man may start–the use of physical force against others.
"To interpose the threat of physical destruction between a man and his perception of reality, is to negate and paralyze his means of survival; to force him to act against his own judgment, is like forcing him to act against his own sight. Whoever, to whatever purpose or extent, initiates the use of force, is a killer action on the premise of death in a manner wider than murder; the premise of destroying man's capacity to live."Do not open your mouth to tell me that your mind has convinced you of your right to force my mind. Force and mind are opposites; morality ends where a gun begins. When you declare that men are irrational animals and propose to treat them as such, you define thereby your own character and can no longer claim it. There can be no 'right' to destroy the source of rights, the only means of judging right and wrong: the mind.
"To force a man to drop his own mind and to accept your will as a substitute, with a gun in place of a syllogism, with terror in place of proof, and death as the final argument–is to attempt to exist in defiance of reality. Reality demands of man that he act for his own rational interest; your gun demands of him that he act against it. Reality threatens man with death if he does not act on his rational judgment; you threaten him with death if he does. You place him into a world where the price of his life is the surrender of all the virtues required by life–and death by a process of gradual destruction is all that you and your system will achieve, when death is made to be the ruling power, the winning argument in a society of men.
"Be it a highwayman who confronts a traveler with the ultimatum: "Your money or your life," or a politician who confronts a country with the ultimatum: 'Your children's education or your life,' the meaning of that ultimatum is: 'Your mind or your life'–and neither is possible to man without the other.
"If there are degrees of evil, it is hard to say who is the more contemptible: the brute who assumes the right to force the mind of others or the moral degenerate who grants to others the right to force his mind. That is the moral absolute one does not leave open to debate. I do not grant the terms of reason to men who propose to deprive me of reason. I do not enter discussions with neighbors who think they can forbid me to think. I do not place my moral sanction upon a murderer's wish to kill me. When a man attempts to deal with me by force, I answer him–by force. "
" "You who are worshippers of the zero–you have never discovered that achieving life is not the equivalent of avoiding death. Joy is not 'the absence of pain,' intelligence is not 'the absence of stupidity,' light is not 'the absence of darkness,' an entity is not 'the absence of a nonentity.' Building is not done by abstaining from demolition; centuries of sitting and waiting in such abstinence will not raise one single girder for you to abstain from demolishing–and now you can no longer say to me, the builder: 'Produce, and feed us in exchange for our not destroying your production.' I am answering in the name of all your victims: Perish with and in your own void. Existence is not a negation of negatives. Evil, not value, is an absence and a negation, evil is impotent and has no power but that which we let it extort from us. Perish, because we have learned that a zero cannot hold a mortgage over life.
"You seek escape from pain. We seek the achievement of happiness. You exist for the sake of avoiding punishment. We exist for the sake of earning rewards. Threats will not make us function; fear is not our incentive. It is not death that we wish to avoid, but life that we wish to live. "
" "You, who have lost the concept of the difference, you who claim that fear and joy are incentives of equal power–and secretly add that fear is the more 'practical'–you do not wish to live, and only fear of death still holds you to the existence you have damned. You dart in panic through the trap of your days, looking for the exit you have closed, running from a pursuer you dare not name to a terror you dare not acknowledge, and the greater your terror the greater you dread of the only act that could save you: thinking. The purpose of your struggle is not to know, not to grasp or name or hear the thing I shall now state to your hearing: that yours is the Morality of Death. "
" "Damnation is the start of your morality, destruction is its purpose, means and end. Your code begins by damning man as evil, for him do practice. It demands, as his first proof of virtue, that he accept his own depravity without proof. It demands that he start, not with a standard of value, but with a standard of evil, which is himself, by means of which he is then to define the good: the good is that which he is not.
"It does not matter who then becomes the profiteer on his renounced glory and tormented soul, a mystic God with some incomprehensible design or any passer-by whose rotting sores are held as some inexplicable claim upon him–it does not matter, the good is not for him to understand, his duty is to crawl through years of penance, atoning for the guilt of his existence to any stray collector of unintelligible debts, his only concept of a value is a zero: the good is that which is non-man."The name of this monstrous absurdity is Original Sin.
"A sin without volition is a slap at morality and an insolent contradiction in terms: that which is outside the possibility of choice is outside the province of morality. If man is evil by birth, he has no will, no power to change it; if he has no will he can be neither good nor evil; a robot is amoral. To hold, as man's sin, a fact not open to his choice is a mockery of morality. To hold man's nature as his sin is a mockery of nature. To punish him for a crime he committed before he was born is a mockery of justice. To hold him guilty in a matter where no innocence exists is a mockery of reason. To destroy morality, nature, justice and reason by means of a single concept is a feat of evil hardly to be matched. Yet that is the root of your code.
"Do not hide behind the cowardly evasion that man is born with free will, but with a 'tendency' to evil. A free will saddled with a tendency is like a game with loaded dice. It forces man to struggle through the effort of playing, to bear responsibility and pay for the game, but the decision is weighted in favor of a tendency that he had no power to escape. If the tendency is of his choice, he cannot possess it at birth; if it is not of his choice, his will is not free. "
I suppose a lot of it is astonishment that she claims to love me.
How could a mother damn her children by teaching them Original Sin?
Does she wish to create more to destroy?
No, but it looks like it would fall in line with the sacrifice reason:
that to sacrifice her son/daughter would be an act of loyalty
and of faith. Why, though? And how does this process even
start?
" "What is the nature of the guilt that your teachers call his Original Sin? What are the evils man acquired when he fell from a state they consider perfection? Their myth declares that he ate the fruit of the tree of knowledge–he acquired a mind and became a moral being. He was sentenced to earn his bread by his labor–he became a productive being. He was sentenced to experience desire–he acquired the capacity of sexual enjoyment. The evils for which they damn him are reason, morality, creativeness, joy–all the cardinal values of his existence. It is not his vices that their myth of man's fall is designed to explain and condemn, it is not his errors that they hold as his guilt, but the essence of his nature as man. Whatever he was–that robot in the Garden of Eden, who existed without mind, without values, without labor, without love–he was not man. "
" "They have cut man in two, setting one half against the other. They have taught him that his body and his consciousness are two enemies engaged in deadly conflict, two antagonists of opposite natures, contradictory claims, incompatible needs, that to benefit one is to injure the other, that his soul belongs to a supernatural realm, but his body is an evil prison holding it in bondage to this earth– and that the good is to defeat his body, to undermine it by years of patient struggle, digging his way to that glorious jail-break which leads into the freedom of the grave.
"They have taught man that he is a hopeless misfit made of two elements, both symbols of death. A body without a soul is a corpse, a soul without a body is a ghost–yet such is their image of man's nature: the battleground of a struggle between a corpse and a ghost endowed with the knowledge that everything known to man is non-existent, that only the unknowable exists. "Do you observe what human faculty that doctrine was designed to ignore? It was man's mind that had to be negated in order to make him fall apart. Once he surrendered reason, he was left at the mercy of two monsters whom he could not fathom, or control: of a body moved by unaccountable instincts and of a soul moved by mystic revelations–he was left as the passively ravaged victim of a battle between a robot and a dictaphone. "
" "The good, say the mystics of spirit, is God, a being whose only definition is that he is beyond man's power to conceive–a definition that invalidates man's consciousness and nullifies his concepts of existence. The good, say the mystics of muscle, is Society–a thing which they define as an organism that possesses no physical form, a super-being embodied in no one in particular and everyone in general except yourself. Man's mind, say the mystics of spirit, must be subordinated to the will of God. Man's mind, say the mystics of muscle, must be subordinated to the will of Society. Man's standard of value, say the mystics of spirit, is the pleasure of God, whose standards are beyond man's power of comprehension and must be muscle, is the pleasure of Society, whose standards are beyond man's right of judgment and must be obeyed as a primary absolute. The purpose of man's life, say both, is to become an abject zombie who serves a purpose he does not know, for reasons he is not to question. His regard, say the mystics of spirit, will be given to him beyond the grave. His reward, say the mystics of muscle, will be given on earth–to his great-grandchildren.
"Selfishness–say both–is man's evil. Man's good–say both–is to give up his personal desires, to deny himself, renounce himself, surrender; man's good is to negate the life he lives. Sacrifice–cry both–is the essence of morality, the highest virtue within man's reach. "
" "Sacrifice' does not mean the rejection of the worthless, but of the precious. 'Sacrifice' does not mean the rejection of the evil for the sake of the good, but of the good for the sake of the evil. 'Sacrifice' is the surrender of that which you value in favor of that which you don't.
"If you exchange a penny for a dollar, it is not a sacrifice; if you exchange a dollar for a penny, it is. If you achieve the career you wanted, after years of struggle, it is not a sacrifice; if you then renounce it for the sake of a rival, it is. If you own a bottle of milk and give it to your starving child, it is not a sacrifice; if you give it to your neighbor's child and let your own die, it is."If you give money to help a friend, it is not a sacrifice; if you give it to a worthless stranger, it is. If you give your friend a sum you can afford, it is not a sacrifice; if you give him money at the cost of your own discomfort, it is only a partial virtue, according to this sort of moral standard; if you give him money at the cost of disaster to yourself–that is the virtue of sacrifice in full.
"If you renounce all personal desires and dedicate your life to those you love, you do not achieve full virtue: you still retain a value of your own, which is your love. If you devote your life to random strangers, it is an act of greater virtue. If you devote your life to serving men you hate–that is the greatest of the virtues you can practice.
"A sacrifice is the surrender of a value. Full sacrifice is full surrender of all values. If you start, however, as a passionless blank, as a vegetable seeking to be eaten, with no values to reject and no wishes to renounce, you will not win the crown of sacrifice. It is not a sacrifice to renounce the unwanted. It is not a sacrifice to give your life for others, if death is your personal desire. To achieve the virtue of sacrifice, you must want to live, you must love it, you must burn with passion for this earth and for all the splendor it can give you–you must feel the twist of every knife as it slashes your desires away from your reach and drains your love out of your body. It is not mere death that the morality of sacrifice holds out to you as an ideal, but death by slow torture.
"Do not remind me that it pertains only to this life on earth. I am concerned with no other. Neither are you. "
" "It is your mind that they want you to surrender–all those who whether they promise you another life in heaven or a full stomach on this earth. Those who start by saying: 'It is selfish to pursue your own wishes, you must sacrifice them to the wishes of others'–end up by saying: 'It is selfish to uphold your convictions, you must sacrifice them to the convictions of others.' "
" "If you search your code for guidance, for an answer to the question: 'What is the good?'–the only answer you will find is 'The good of others.' The good is whatever others wish, whatever you feel they feel they wish, or whatever you feel they ought to feel. 'The good of other's is a magic formula that transforms anything into gold, a formula to be recited as a guarantee of moral glory and as a fumigator for any action, even the slaughter of a continent. Your standard of virtue is not an object, not an act, not a principle, but anintention. You need no proof, no reasons, no success, you need not achieve in fact the good of others–all you need to know is that your motive was the good of others, not your own. Your only definition of the good is a negation: the good is the 'non-good for me.' "
" "As this double-jointed, double-standard morality splits you in half, so it splits mankind into two enemy camps: one is you, the other is all the rest of humanity. "
" "For those of you who might ask questions, your code provides a consolation prize and booby-trap: it is for your own happiness, it says, that you must serve the happiness of others, "
" "Such is the secret core of your creed, the other half of your double standard: it is immoral to live by your own effort, but moral to live by the effort of others "
" "Your code divides mankind into two castes and commands them to live by opposite rules: those who may desire anything and those who may desire nothing, the chosen and the damned, the riders and the carriers, the eaters and the eaten. What standard determines your caste? What passkey admits you to the moral elite? The passkey is lack of value. "
" "They claim that they perceive a mode of being superior to our existence on this earth. The mystics of spirit call it 'another dimension,' which consists of denying dimensions. The mystics of muscle call it 'the future,' which consists of denying the present. To exist is to possess identity. What identity are they able to give to their superior realm? They keep telling you what it is not, but never tell you what it is. All their identifications consist of negating: God is that which no human mind can know, they say–and proceed to demand that you consider it knowledge–God is non-man, heaven is non-earth, soul is non-body, virtue is non-profit, A is non-A, perception is non-sensory, knowledge is non-reason. Their definitions are not acts of defining, but of wiping out.
"It is only the metaphysics of a leech that would cling to the idea of a universe where a zero is a standard of identification. A leech would want to seek escape from the necessity to name its own nature–escape from the necessity to know that the substance on which it builds its private universe is blood."What is the nature of that superior world to which they sacrifice the world that exists? The mystics of spirit curse mater, the mystics of muscle curse profit. THe first wish men to profit by renouncing the earth, the second wish men to inherit the earth by renouncing all profit. THeir non-material, non-profit worlds are realms where rivers run with milk and coffee, where wine spurts from rocks at their command, where pastry drops on them from clouds at the price of opening their mouth. On this material, profit-chasing earth, an enormous investment of virtue–or intelligence, integrity, energy, skill–is required to construct a railroad to carry them the distance of one mile; in their non-material, non-profit world, they travel from planet to planet at the cost of a wish. If an honest person asks them: 'How?'–they answer with righteous scorn that a 'how' is the concept of vulgar realists; the concept of superior spirits is 'Somehow.' On this earth restricted by matter and profit, rewards are achieved by thought; in a world set free of such restrictions, rewards are achieved by wishing.
"And that is the whole of their shabby secret. The secret of all their esoteric philosophies, of all their dialectics and super-senses, of their evasive eyes and snarling words, the secret for which they destroy civilization, language, industries and lives, the secret for which they pierce their own eyes and eardrums, grind out their senses, blank out their minds, the purpose for which they dissolve the absolutes of reason, logic, matter, existence, reality–is to erect upon that plastic fog a single holy absolute: their Wish. "
" "The restriction they seek to escape is the law of identity. "
" "Those who tell you that man is unable to perceive a reality undistorted by his senses, mean that they are unwilling to perceive a reality undistorted by their feelings. 'Things as they are' are things as perceived by your mind; divorce them from reason and they become 'things as perceived by your wishes.' "
" "Your teachers, the mystics of both schools, have reversed causality in their consciousness, then strive to reverse it in existence. They take their emotions their mind as a passive effect. They make their emotions their tool for perceiving reality. They hold their desires as an irreducible primary, as a fact superseding all facts. And honest man does not desire until he has identified the object of his desire. He says: 'It is, therefore I want it.' They say: 'I want it, therefore it is.' "
" "Those irrational wishes that draw you to their creed, those emotions you worship as an idol, on whose altar you sacrifice the emotions you worship as an idol, on whose altar you sacrifice the earth, that dark, incoherent passion within you, which you take as the voice of God or of your glands, is nothing more than the corpse of your mind. An emotion that clashes with your reason, an emotion that you cannot explain or control, is only the carcass of that stale thinking which you forbade your mind to revise. "
TRUE DAT!
" "The links you strive to drown are casual connections. The enemy you seek to defeat is the law of causality: it permits you no miracles. The law of causality is the law of identity applied to action. All actions are caused by entities. The nature of an action is caused and determined by the nature of the entities that act; a thing cannot act in contradiction to its nature. An action not caused by an entity would be caused by a zero, which would mean a zero controlling a thing, a non-entity controlling an entity, the non-existent ruling the existent–which is the universe of your teachers' desire, the cause of their doctrines of causeless action, the reason of their revolt against reason, the goal of their morality, their politics, their economics, the ideal they strive for: the reign of the zero. "
" "The law of identity does not permit you to have your cake and eat it, too. The law of causality does not permit you to eat your cake before you have it. But if you drown both laws in the blanks of your mind, if you pretend to yourself and to others that you don't see–then you can try to proclaim your right to eat your cake today and mine tomorrow, you can preach that the way to have a cake is to eat it first, before you bake it, that the way to produce is to start by consuming, that all wishers have an equal claim ot all things, since nothing is caused by anything. The corollary of the causeless in matter is the unearned in spirit.
"Whenever you rebel against causality, your motive is the fraudulent desire, not to escape it, but worse : to reverse it. You want unearned love, as if love, the effect, could give you personal value, the cause–you want unearned admiration, as if admiration, the effect, could give you virtue, the cause–you want unearned wealth, as if wealth, the effect, could give you ability, the cause –you plead for mercy, mercy, not justice, as if an unearned forgiveness could wipe out the cause of your plea. And to indulge your ugly little shams, you support the doctrines of your teachers, while they run hog-wild proclaiming that spending, the effect, creates riches, the cause, that machinery, the effect, creates intelligence, the cause , that your sexual desires, the effect, create your philosophical values, the cause. "
" "When a savage who has not learned to speak declares that existence must be proved, he is asking you to prove it by means of non-existence–when he declares that your consciousness must be proved, he is asking you to prove it by means of unconsciousness–he is asking you to step into a void outside of existence and consciousness to give him proof of both–he is asking you to become a zero gaining knowledge about a zero.
"When he declares that an axiom is a matter of arbitrary choice and he doesn't choose to accept the axiom that he exists, he blanks out the fact that he has accepted it by uttering that sentence, that the only way to reject it is to shut one's mouth, expound no theories and die."An axiom is a statement that identifies the base of knowledge and of any further statement pertaining to that knowledge, a statement necessarily contained in all others, whether any particular speaker chooses to identify it or not. An axiom is a proposition that defeats its opponents by the fact that they have to accept it and use it in the process of any attempt to deny it. Let the caveman who does not choose to accept the axiom of identity, try to present his theory without using the concept of identity or any concept derived from it–let the anthropoid who does not choose to accept the existence of nouns, try to devise a language without nouns, adjectives or verbs–let the witch-doctor who does not choose to accept the validity of sensory perception, try to prove it without using the data he obtained by sensory perception–let the head-hunter who does not choose to accept the validity of logic, try to prove it without using logic–let the pigmy who proclaims that a skyscraper needs no foundation after it reaches its fiftieth story, yank the base from under his building, not yours–let the cannibal who snarls that the freedom of man's mind was needed tocreate an industrial civilization, but is not needed to maintain it, be given an arrowhead and bearskin, not a university chair of economics.
"Do you think they are taking you back to dark ages? they are taking you back to darker ages than any of your history has known. Their goal is not the era of pre-science, but the era of pre-language. their purpose is to deprive you of the concept on which man's mind, his life and his culture depend: the concept of an objective reality. Identify the development of a human consciousness–and you will know the purpose of their creed. "
" "A savage is a being who has not grasped that A is A and that reality is real. He has arrested his mind at the level of a baby's, at the stage when a consciousness acquires its initial sensory perceptions and has not learned to distinguish solid objects. It is to a baby that the world appears as a blur of motion, without things that move–and the birth of his mind is the day when he grasps that the streak that keeps flickering past him is his mother and the whirl beyond her is a curtain, that the two are solid entities and neither can turn into the other, that they are what they are, that they exist. The day when he grasps that matter has no volition is the day when he grasps that he has–and this is his birth as a human being. The day when he grasps that the reflection he sees in a mirror is not a delusion, that it is real, but it is not himself, that the mirage he sees in a desire is not a delusion, that the air and the light rays that cause it are real, but it is not a city, it is a city's reflection–the day when he grasps that he is not a passive recipient of the sensations of any given moment, that his senses do not provide him with automatic knowledge in separate snatches independent of context, but only with the material of knowledge, which his mind must learn to integrate–the day when he grasps that his senses cannot deceive him, that physical objects cannot act without causes, that his organs of perception are physical and have no volition, no power to invent or to distort, that the evidence they give him is an absolute, but his mind must learn to understand it, his mind must discover the nature, the causes, the full context of his sensory material, his mind must identify the things that he percieves–that is the day of his birth as a thinker and scientist.
"We are the men who reach that day; you are the men who choose to reach it partly; a savage is a man who never does. "To a savage, the world is a place of unintelligible miracles where anything is possible to inanimate matter and nothing is possible to him. His world is not the unknown, but that irrational horror: the unknowable. He believes that physical objects are endowed with a mysterious volition, moved by causeless, unpredictable whims, while he is a helpless pawn at the mercy of forces beyond his control. "
And at this point it is a strain to continue, since I wanted
to start with this thing that I'm ending with. ...Hm. Does
that relate to the "A is non A" thing?
cannot reference it without making multiple errors. What is
the gap? The gap is that I am tired and am not used to extending
the thought this far. I have based my writing on interest.
What is my interest now? The trade was that of satisfaction in
having had relieved myself the thought, and of seeing the thinking
that I had been waiting to do.
The wish I have right now is to stop thinking. According to
Atlas Shrugged, this means to stop living. Where, however, is
this tiredness coming from? It is coming from the want to bypass
the necessary explanation of brainpolice2 and confederalsocialist.
Ah - here is the wish: to have fire without the wood. Let me
then have A = A, rather than wishing for A.
brainpolice2 and confederalsocialist, as I understand it,
are something of rivals. They have similarities in philosophy...
I have no idea what I'm talking about. No - I do have an idea,
but not how the things connect.
And, that's what I want to figure out. Even in relation to
Atlas Shrugged. I have, over the last few months, taken
in what I consider to be a ton of data, and I want to think
about it. Here I am, thinking about it. But, what is thinking?
How can I know if I am thinking if I don't know what thinking
is? Thinking is...
a process of figuring out
a comparison of things
answering a question or questions through a process of investigation
and/or comparison
What is thinking? I'm not sure.
Am I thinking? Is this sentence the result of thinking?
I almost asked, "What do I need to know?" It looked
too much like a need-based philosophy.
However, what I meant by it was
"How can I get to the root of what I am trying to
figure out and thereby get rid of needless journey?"
I'll use the definitions that I found from above
(above being from the Atlas Shrugged book,
not God).
"'Value' is that which one acts to gain and keep,
'virtue' is the action by which one gains and keeps it.
'Value' presupposes an answer to the standard, a purpose and the necessity of action in the face of an alternative.
Matter is indestructible,
axiom that existence exists. [italics not added] something exists which one perceives and that one exists possessing consciousness, consciousness being the faculty of perceiving that which exists.
A is A. Existence is Identity, Consciousness is Identification.
All thinking is a process of identification and integration.
Logic is the art of non-contradictory identification.
Truth is the recognition of reality; reason, man's only means of knowledge, is his only standard to truth.
A rational process is a moral process.
A rational process is a moral process.
soul or spirit is your consciousness,
'free will' is your mind's freedom to think or not
Thinking is man's only basic virtue, from which all the others proceed. And his basic vice, the source of all his evils, is that nameless act which all of you practice, but struggle never to admit; the act of blanking out,
"the act of blanking out, the willful suspension of one's consciousness"the morality of reason, is contained in a single axiom: existence exists–and in a single choice: to live.
To live, man must hold three things as the supreme and ruling values of his life: Reason–Purpose–Self-esteem. Reason, as his only tool of knowledge–Purpose, as his choice of the happiness which that tool must proceed to achieve–Self-esteem, as his inviolate certainty that his mind is competent to think and his person is worthy of happiness, which means: is worthy of living. These three values imply and require all of man's virtues, and all his virtues pertain to the relation of existence and consciousness: rationality, independence, integrity, honesty, justice, productiveness, pride.
"Rationality is the recognition of the fact that existence exists, that nothing can alter the truth and nothing can take precedence over that act of perceiving it, which is thinking–that the mind is one's only judge of values and one's only guide of action–that reason is an absolute that permits no compromise–that a concession to the irrational invalidates one's consciousness and turns it from the task of perceiving to the task of faking reality–that the alleged short-cut to knowledge, which is faith, is only a short–circuit destroying the mind–that the acceptance of a mystical invention is a wish for the annihilation of existence and, properly, annihilates one's consciousness.
"Independence is the recognition of the fact that yours is the responsibility of judgment and nothing can help you escape it–that no substitute can do your thinking, as no pinch-hitter can live your life–that the vilest form of self-abasement and self-destruction is the subordination of your mind to the mind of another, the acceptance of an authority over your brain, the acceptance of his assertions as facts, his say-so as truth, his edicts as middle-man between your consciousness and your existence.
"Integrity is the recognition of the fact that you cannot fake your consciousness, just as honesty is the recognition of the fact that you cannot fake existence–that man is an indivisible entity, an integrated unit of two attributes: of matter and consciousness, and that he may permit no breach between body and mind, between action and thought, between his life and his convictions–that, like a judge impervious to public opinion, he may not sacrifice his shouting pleas or threats against him–that courage and confidence are practical necessities, that courage is the practical form of being true to existence, of being true to truth, and confidence is the practical form of being true to one's own consciousness.
"Honesty is the recognition of the fact that the unreal is unreal and can have no value, that neither love nor fame nor cash is a value if obtained by fraud–that an attempt to gain a value by deceiving the mind of others is an act of raising your victims to a position higher than reality, where you become a pawn of their blindness, a slave of their non-thinking and their evasions, while their intelligence, their rationality, their perceptiveness become the enemies you have to dread and flee–that you do not care to live as a dependent, least of all a dependent on the stupidity of others, or as a fool whose source of values is the fools he succeeds in fooling–that honesty is not a social duty, not a sacrifice for the sake of others, but the most profoundly selfish virtue man can practice: his refusal to sacrifice the reality of his own existence to the deluded consciousness of others.
"Justice is the recognition of the fact that you cannot fake the character of men as you cannot fake the character of nature, that you must judge all men as conscientiously as you judge inanimate objects, with the same respect for truth, with the same incorruptible vision, by as pure and as rational a process of identifcation–that every man must be judged for what he is and treated accordingly, that just as you do not pay a higher price for a rusty chunk of scrap than for a piece of shining metal, so you do not value a rotter above a hero[?]–that your moral appraisal is the coin paying men for their virtues or vices, and this payment demands of you as scrupulous an honor as you bring to financial transactions–that to withhold your contempt from men's vices is an act of moral counterfeiting, and to withhold your admiration from their virtues is an act of moral embezzlement–that to place any other concern higher than justice is to devaluate your moral currency and defraud the good in favor of the evil, since only the good can lose by a default of justice and only the evil can profit–and that the bottom of the pit at the end of that road, the act of moral bankruptcy, is to punish is the collapse to full depravity, the Black Mass of the worship of death, the dedication of your consciousness to the destruction of existence.
"Productiveness is your acceptance of morality, your recognition of the fact that you choose to live–that productive work is the process by which man's consciousness controls his existence, a constant process of acquiring knowledge and shaping matter to fit one's purpose, of translating an idea into physical form, of remaking the earth in the image of one's values–that all work is creative work if done by a thinking mind, and no work is creative if done by a blank who repeats in uncritical stupor a routine he has learned from others–that your work is yours to choose, and the choice is as wide as your mind, that nothing more is possible to you and nothing less is human– that to cheat your way into a job bigger than your mind can handle is to become a fear-corroded ape on borrowed motions and borrowed time, and to settle down into a job that requires less than your mind's full capacity is to cut your motor and sentence yourself to another kind of motion: decay–that your work is the process of achieving your values, and to lose your ambition for values is to lose your ambition to live–that your body is a machine, but your mind is its driver, and you must drive as far as your mind will take you, with achievement as the goal of your road–that the man who has no purpose is a machine that coasts downhill at the mercy of any boulder to crash in the first chance ditch, that the man who stifles his mind is a stalled machine slowly going to rust, that the man who lets a leader prescribe his course is a wreck being towed to the scrap heap, and the man who makes another man his goal is a hitchhiker no driver should ever pick up–that your work is the purpose of your life, and you must speed past any killer who assumes the right to stop you, that any value you might find outside your work, any other loyalty or love, can be only travelers you choose to share your journey and must be travelers going on their own power in the same direction.
To interpose the threat of physical destruction between a man and his perception of reality, is to negate and paralyze his means of survival; to force him to act against his own judgment, is like forcing him to act against his own sight.
"Rationality is the recognition of the fact that existence exists, that nothing can alter the truth and nothing can take precedence over that act of perceiving it, which is thinking–that the mind is one's only judge of values and one's only guide of action–that reason is an absolute that permits no compromise–that a concession to the irrational invalidates one's consciousness and turns it from the task of perceiving to the task of faking reality–that the alleged short-cut to knowledge, which is faith, is only a short–circuit destroying the mind–that the acceptance of a mystical invention is a wish for the annihilation of existence and, properly, annihilates one's consciousness.
"Independence is the recognition of the fact that yours is the responsibility of judgment and nothing can help you escape it–that no substitute can do your thinking, as no pinch-hitter can live your life–that the vilest form of self-abasement and self-destruction is the subordination of your mind to the mind of another, the acceptance of an authority over your brain, the acceptance of his assertions as facts, his say-so as truth, his edicts as middle-man between your consciousness and your existence.
"Integrity is the recognition of the fact that you cannot fake your consciousness, just as honesty is the recognition of the fact that you cannot fake existence–that man is an indivisible entity, an integrated unit of two attributes: of matter and consciousness, and that he may permit no breach between body and mind, between action and thought, between his life and his convictions–that, like a judge impervious to public opinion, he may not sacrifice his shouting pleas or threats against him–that courage and confidence are practical necessities, that courage is the practical form of being true to existence, of being true to truth, and confidence is the practical form of being true to one's own consciousness.
"Honesty is the recognition of the fact that the unreal is unreal and can have no value, that neither love nor fame nor cash is a value if obtained by fraud–that an attempt to gain a value by deceiving the mind of others is an act of raising your victims to a position higher than reality, where you become a pawn of their blindness, a slave of their non-thinking and their evasions, while their intelligence, their rationality, their perceptiveness become the enemies you have to dread and flee–that you do not care to live as a dependent, least of all a dependent on the stupidity of others, or as a fool whose source of values is the fools he succeeds in fooling–that honesty is not a social duty, not a sacrifice for the sake of others, but the most profoundly selfish virtue man can practice: his refusal to sacrifice the reality of his own existence to the deluded consciousness of others.
"Justice is the recognition of the fact that you cannot fake the character of men as you cannot fake the character of nature, that you must judge all men as conscientiously as you judge inanimate objects, with the same respect for truth, with the same incorruptible vision, by as pure and as rational a process of identifcation–that every man must be judged for what he is and treated accordingly, that just as you do not pay a higher price for a rusty chunk of scrap than for a piece of shining metal, so you do not value a rotter above a hero[?]–that your moral appraisal is the coin paying men for their virtues or vices, and this payment demands of you as scrupulous an honor as you bring to financial transactions–that to withhold your contempt from men's vices is an act of moral counterfeiting, and to withhold your admiration from their virtues is an act of moral embezzlement–that to place any other concern higher than justice is to devaluate your moral currency and defraud the good in favor of the evil, since only the good can lose by a default of justice and only the evil can profit–and that the bottom of the pit at the end of that road, the act of moral bankruptcy, is to punish is the collapse to full depravity, the Black Mass of the worship of death, the dedication of your consciousness to the destruction of existence.
"Productiveness is your acceptance of morality, your recognition of the fact that you choose to live–that productive work is the process by which man's consciousness controls his existence, a constant process of acquiring knowledge and shaping matter to fit one's purpose, of translating an idea into physical form, of remaking the earth in the image of one's values–that all work is creative work if done by a thinking mind, and no work is creative if done by a blank who repeats in uncritical stupor a routine he has learned from others–that your work is yours to choose, and the choice is as wide as your mind, that nothing more is possible to you and nothing less is human– that to cheat your way into a job bigger than your mind can handle is to become a fear-corroded ape on borrowed motions and borrowed time, and to settle down into a job that requires less than your mind's full capacity is to cut your motor and sentence yourself to another kind of motion: decay–that your work is the process of achieving your values, and to lose your ambition for values is to lose your ambition to live–that your body is a machine, but your mind is its driver, and you must drive as far as your mind will take you, with achievement as the goal of your road–that the man who has no purpose is a machine that coasts downhill at the mercy of any boulder to crash in the first chance ditch, that the man who stifles his mind is a stalled machine slowly going to rust, that the man who lets a leader prescribe his course is a wreck being towed to the scrap heap, and the man who makes another man his goal is a hitchhiker no driver should ever pick up–that your work is the purpose of your life, and you must speed past any killer who assumes the right to stop you, that any value you might find outside your work, any other loyalty or love, can be only travelers you choose to share your journey and must be travelers going on their own power in the same direction.
"Pride is the recognition of the fact that you are your own highest value and, like all of man's values, it has to be earned–that of any achievements open to you, the one that makes all others possible is the creation of your own character–that your character, your actions, your desires, your emotions are the products of the premises held by your mind–that as man must produce the physical values he needs to sustain his life, so he must acquire the values of character that make his life worth sustaining–that as man is a being of self-made wealth, so he is a being of self-made soul–that to live requires a sense of self-value, but man, who has no automatic values, has no automatic sense of self-esteem and must earn it by Man, the rational being he is born able to create, but must create by choice–that the first precondition of self-esteem is that radiant selfishness of soul which desires the best in all things, in values of matter and spirit, a soul that seeks above all else to achieve its own moral perfection, valuing nothing higher than itself–and that the proof of an achieved self-esteem is your soul's shudder of contempt and rebellion against the role of a sacrificial animal, against the vile impertinence of any creed that proposes to immolate the irreplaceable value which is your consciousness and the incomparable glory which is your existence to the blind evasions and the stagnant decay of others. "
Your emotions are estimates of that which furthers your life or threatens it, lightning calculators giving you a sum of your profit or loss. You have no choice about your capacity to feel that something is good for you or evil, but what you will consider good or evil, what will give you joy or pain, what you will love or hate, desire or fear, depends on your standard of value. Emotions are inherent in your nature, but their content is dictated by your mind.
A trader is a man who earns what he gets and does not give or take the undeserved.
there is one act of evil that may not, the act that no man may commit against others and no man may sanction or forgive. So long as men desire to live together, no man may initate–do you hear me? no man may start–the use of physical force against others.
Force and mind are opposites; morality ends where a gun begins.
To force a man to drop his own mind is to attempt to exist in defiance of reality. Reality demands of man that he act for his own rational interest; your gun demands of him that he act against it.
God, a being whose only definition is that he is beyond man's power to conceive–a definition that invalidates man's consciousness and nullifies his concepts of existence.
Society–a thing which they define as an organism that possesses no physical form, a super-being embodied in no one in particular and everyone in general except yourself.
"Sacrifice' does not mean the rejection of the worthless, but of the precious.
A sacrifice is the surrender of a value. Full sacrifice is full surrender of all values.
An emotion that clashes with your reason, an emotion that you cannot explain or control, is only the carcass of that stale thinking which you forbade your mind to revise. "
" "A savage is a being who has not grasped that A is A and that reality is real.
"
Perhaps the reason that I have such frustration when I try
to describe their positions is that I do not, in fact, know
them. I have been using their videos as a means of
understanding, in that I try to disprove all who I see
on YouTube. By this method, I get easy access to
what I consider the best of ideas. Then again, that's
probably because I put the onus on others to do my
thinking.
I have another definition to try out, about thinking:
"All thinking is a process of identification and integration.
Logic is the art of non-contradictory identification.
Truth is the recognition of reality"
When I look at that definition, it makes sense.
My next thought is wondering whether that's
because I have kinship with Atlas Shrugged and
John Galt - that is, to say that it is a leadership
error -, or if it's because it actually makes sense.
Is "All thinking is a process of identification and integration"
an axiom? But, in order to disprove this - to
find a case that is not thinking - is to identify it
as such, and then to integrate it, as I encounter
more instances of it, into my whole of thought.
"Truth is the recognition of reality" is a definition
I have used before. Is "God" the "recognition
of reality"? If he is, then he is a or the truth.
Is "All thinking is a process of identification
and integration" a definition?
What is the difference between an "all-is"
statement and a definition?
Let's try this:
All birds are black.
A bird is ....
oh.
The difference is that "all" encompasses
a property, whereas a definition is something
specific. That is, an "what it is" statement,
at least for an object, can always be made more
specific.
The difference between "What is a bird?"
and "What is a table?" is that "What is a table?"
has a human intention behind it, and therefore,
a simpler definition, as relates to why people
used matter to bring about this specific
configuration called "table".
Additionally, "What is a bird?" relates to another
specific configuration of matter; however, the specific
is ignored, with the mass generalities of how we
relate to birds being the principle reason of the
definition.
There are thus two types of answers that can
be given for "What is a table?" and "What is
a bird?"
The first type is that of "Why do we have
a table?" and "Why is that bird there?" or
"What is that bird's purpose?"
The second type is that of "What is the material
of that table composed of?" The question
in relation to this answer is "How long the
answer will be incomplete?" and "How do
I figure out what x (x being those elements
that have been further classified) is made of?"
What have I been doing? Identification and
categorization. Integration would be ...
I'm not sure what. Integration is...
I don't know. Perhaps the problem is that
I agree with the philosophy, but have not
integrated it, thus leading to a lot o...
YES! That's what it is!
A lot of contradictions.
What is integration?
Integration... is putting one part in full
relation to the whole. No, that sounds off.
"Putting one part" is off.
I shall reference...
" All thinking is a process of identification and integration. Man perceives a blob of color; by integrating the evidence of his sight and his touch, he learns to identify it as a solid object; he learns to identify the object as a table; he learns that the table is make of wood; he learns that the wood consist of cells, that the cells consist of molecules, that the molecules consist of atoms. All through this process, the work of his mind consists of answers to a single question: What is it? "
"by integrating the evidence of his sight and his touch, he learns to identify it as a solid object"
Integration has to do with the senses. Just the senses? What -- no no no, I don't mean
any spiritual realm. What I mean by "Just the senses" is "What about that which I have
already sensed and seen?"
But that originated in the senses. The answer is Yes, just the senses. The model
that you form in your head originated in your senses. When the model is incorrect,
it will be by your senses, or another model (by this I mean a different analogy
in the same aspect as the one you made an error in) to correct it.
If all your models ... No; if all of the parts of the model in your mind have a
fundamental error, it is by your senses and/or? reason that you need to
correct it. ... This is precarious ground.
It reminds me of when I first thought of that stuff, and of Decarte.
What premise does science rest on? That the world is understandable
and predictable. Delicio!
I will now take the definitions and play with them.
("-" means that the statement depends on
the statement it is dashed under
"+" means that the statement is implied
by the statement it is dashed under
"()" means that the word to the left
and the words to the right are equivalent
as denoted by ":"
"{}" means that the word to the right
of the "{}" presupposes what is contained
in "{}")
Existence exists
+something exists which one perceives
+one exists possessing (consciousness : the faculty of perceiving that which exists)
({an answer to the standard, a purpose and the necessity of action in the face of an alternative} value : that which one acts to gain and keep)
(virtue : the action by which one gains and keeps that which one values)
(All thinking : a process of identification and integration)
(Logic : the art of non-contradictory identification)
(Truth : the recognition of reality)
(Reason : man's only means of knowledge; man's only standard of truth)
(A rational process : a moral process)
(soul/spirit : [your] consciousness)
(free will : [your mind's] freedom to think or not)
(Thinking : man's only basic virtue)
(the act of blanking out : man's basic vice)
(the act of blanking out : the willful suspension of one's consciousness : the source of all man's evils : the nameless act that certain characters in Atlas Shrugged practice, but struggle never to admit)
(Matter : indestructable)
(A : A)
(Existence : Identity)
(Consciousness : Identification)
(morality of reason : contained in single axiom: existence exists-and in a single choice: to live)
(To live : man must hold as supreme and ruling values of his life: Reason, Purpose, Self-esteem)
(Reason - only tool of knowlege)
(Purpose - his choice of the happiness which that tool (reason) must proceed to achieve)
(Self-esteem - his inviolate certainty that his mind is competent to think and his person is worthy of happiness, which means: worthy of living)
(Reason + Purpose + Self-esteem)
+[& require] (Rationality, independence, integrity, honesty, justice, productiveness, pride)
(Rationality : the recognition of the fact that existence exists : that nothing can alter the truth and nothing can take precedence over that act of perceiving it, which is thinking : that the mind is one's only judge of values and one's only guide of action : that reason is an absolute that permits no compromise : that a concession to the irrational invalidates one's consciousness and turns it from the task of perceiving to the task of faking reality : that the alleged short-cut to knowledge, which is faith, is only a short–circuit destroying the mind–that the acceptance of a mystical invention is a wish for the annihilation of existence and, properly, annihilates one's consciousness)
(Independence : the recognition of the fact that yours is the responsibility of judgment and nothing can help you escape it : that no substitute can do your thinking, as no pinch-hitter can live your life : that the vilest form of self-abasement and self-destruction is the subordination of your mind to the mind of another, the acceptance of an authority over your brain, the acceptance of his assertions as facts, his say-so as truth, his edicts as middle-man between your consciousness and your existence)
(Integrity : the recognition of the fact that you cannot fake your consciousness, just as honesty is the recognition of the fact that you cannot fake existence : that man is an indivisible entity, an integrated unit of two attributes: of matter and consciousness, and that he may permit no breach between body and mind, between action and thought, between his life and his convictions : that, like a judge impervious to public opinion, he may not sacrifice his shouting pleas or threats against him : that courage and confidence are practical necessities, that courage is the practical form of being true to existence, of being true to truth, and confidence is the practical form of being true to one's own consciousness)
(Honesty : the recognition of the fact that the unreal is unreal and can have no value : that neither love nor fame nor cash is a value if obtained by fraud : that an attempt to gain a value by deceiving the mind of others is an act of raising your victims to a position higher than reality, where you become a pawn of their blindness, a slave of their non-thinking and their evasions, while their intelligence, their rationality, their perceptiveness become the enemies you have to dread and flee : that you do not care to live as a dependent, least of all a dependent on the stupidity of others, or as a fool whose source of values is the fools he succeeds in fooling : that honesty is not a social duty, not a sacrifice for the sake of others, but the most profoundly selfish virtue man can practice: his refusal to sacrifice the reality of his own existence to the deluded consciousness of others.)
(Justice : the recognition of the fact that you cannot fake the character of men as you cannot fake the character of nature : that you must judge all men as conscientiously as you judge inanimate objects, with the same respect for truth, with the same incorruptible vision, by as pure and as rational a process of identification : that every man must be judged for what he is and treated accordingly : that just as you do not pay a higher price for a rusty chunk of scrap than for a piece of shining metal, so you do not value a rotter above a hero[?] : that your moral appraisal is the coin paying men for their virtues or vices, and this payment demands of you as scrupulous an honor as you bring to financial transactions : that to withhold your contempt from men's vices is an act of moral counterfeiting, and to withhold your admiration from their virtues is an act of moral embezzlement : that to place any other concern higher than justice is to devaluate your moral currency and defraud the good in favor of the evil, since only the good can lose by a default of justice and only the evil can profit : that the bottom of the pit at the end of that road, the act of moral bankruptcy, is to punish is the collapse to full depravity, the Black Mass of the worship of death, the dedication of your consciousness to the destruction of existence)
(Productiveness : your acceptance of morality, your recognition of the fact that you choose to live : that productive work is the process by which man's consciousness controls his existence, a constant process of acquiring knowledge and shaping matter to fit one's purpose, of translating an idea into physical form, of remaking the earth in the image of one's values : that all work is creative work if done by a thinking mind, and no work is creative if done by a blank who repeats in uncritical stupor a routine he has learned from others : that your work is yours to choose, and the choice is as wide as your mind, that nothing more is possible to you and nothing less is human : that to cheat your way into a job bigger than your mind can handle is to become a fear-corroded ape on borrowed motions and borrowed time, and to settle down into a job that requires less than your mind's full capacity is to cut your motor and sentence yourself to another kind of motion: decay : that your work is the process of achieving your values, and to lose your ambition for values is to lose your ambition to live : that your body is a machine, but your mind is its driver, and you must drive as far as your mind will take you, with achievement as the goal of your road : that the man who has no purpose is a machine that coasts downhill at the mercy of any boulder to crash in the first chance ditch : that the man who stifles his mind is a stalled machine slowly going to rust, that the man who lets a leader prescribe his course is a wreck being towed to the scrap heap, and the man who makes another man his goal is a hitchhiker no driver should ever pick up : that your work is the purpose of your life, and you must speed past any killer who assumes the right to stop you : that any value you might find outside your work, any other loyalty or love, can be only travelers you choose to share your journey and must be travelers going on their own power in the same direction)
(Pride : the recognition of the fact that you are your own highest value and, like all of man's values, it has to be earned : that of any achievements open to you, the one that makes all others possible is the creation of your own character : that your character, your actions, your desires, your emotions are the products of the premises held by your mind : that as man must produce the physical values he needs to sustain his life, so he must acquire the values of character that make his life worth sustaining : that as man is a being of self-made wealth, so he is a being of self-made soul–that to live requires a sense of self-value, but man, who has no automatic values, has no automatic sense of self-esteem and must earn it by Man, the rational being he is born able to create, but must create by choice : that the first precondition of self-esteem is that radiant selfishness of soul which desires the best in all things, in values of matter and spirit, a soul that seeks above all else to achieve its own moral perfection, valuing nothing higher than itself–and that the proof of an achieved self-esteem is your soul's shudder of contempt and rebellion against the role of a sacrificial animal, against the vile impertinence of any creed that proposes to immolate the irreplaceable value which is your consciousness and the incomparable glory which is your existence to the blind evasions and the stagnant decay of others)
(Your emotions : estimates of that which furthers your life or threatens it, lightning calculators giving you a sum of your profit or loss)
(Trader : a man who earns what he gets and does not give or take the undeserved)
(You : have no choice about your capacity to feel that something is good for you or evil)
Your standard of value
-what you will consider good or evil
-what will give you joy or pain
-what you will love or hate, desire or fear
(the use of physical force against others : one act of evil that may not, the act that no man may commit against others and no man may sanction or forgive)
(To interpose the threat of physical destruction between a man and his perception of reality : to negate and paralyze his means of survival; to force him to act against his own judgment, is like forcing him to act against his own sight)
(Force and mind : opposites)
(morality ends : where a gun begins)
(to force a man to drop his own mind : to attempt to exist in defiance of reality)
(God : a being whose only definition is that he is beyond man's power to conceive : a definition that invalidates man's consciousness and nullifies his concepts of existence)
(Society : a thing which they define as an organism that possesses no physical form : a super-being embodied in no one particular and everyone in general except yourself)
(Sacrifice : rejection of the precious : surrender of a value =/= rejection of the worthless)
(Full sacrifice : full surrender of all values)
(An emotion that clashes with your reason : an emotion that you cannot explain or control : only the carcass of that stale thinking which you forbade your mind to revise)
(An axiom : a statement that identifies the base of knowledge and of any further statement pertaining to that knowledge : a statement necessarily contained in all others, whether any particular speaker chooses to identify it or not : a proposition that defeats its opponents by the fact that they have to accept it and use it in the process of any attempt to deny it)
(Savage : a being who has not grasped that A is A and that reality is real)
I will, perhaps, continue this tomorrow. I have food and
PTCs to attend to... and also sleep and thinking.
John Galt's inventions - his motor specifically - reminds
me of what I once read or heard about one of Mark
Twain's books: that he used a gap, and did not fill it.
In one book, Mark Twain says that a girl figured out
the answer to world peace, but died as some asteroid?
hit the earth. Basically, to make a hole, and then
not fill it, or not have to fill it. The gap that Rand
made is that she basically says that it is irrelevant
how Galt made the motor -- instead, that to think
is to 'solve all of the worlds problems', much in the
same way that anarcho-capitalists use the word
"free market" in a way that could be called
"God-of-the-gaps".
What if her entire book is bullshit?
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