mmmtravis
T-Raz w/ the freaky freak
Registered: May 2002
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Posts: 8649 |
This is Reason Speaking
Forgive the long-winded introductory quote, but its relevancy and eloquence surely surpass my own statements on the subject.
quote:
An excerpt from Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
"I am the man who loves his life. I am the man who does not sacrifice his love or his values. I am the man who has deprived you of victims and thus has destroyed your world, and if you wish to know why you are perishing--you who dread knowledge--I am the man who will now tell you.
You have heard it said that this is an age of moral crisis. You have said it yourself, half in fear, half in hope that the words had no meaning. You have cried that man's sins are destroying the world and you have cursed human nature for its unwillingness to practice the virtues you demanded. Since virtue, to you, consists of sacrifice, you have demanded more sacrifices at every successive disaster. In the name of a return to morality, you have sacrificed all those evils which you held as the cause of your plight. You have sacrificed justice to mercy. You have sacrificed independence to unity. You have sacrificed reason to faith. You have sacrificed wealth to need. You have sacrificed self-esteem to self-denial. You have sacrificed happiness to duty.
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, and 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 I have withdrawn that enemy.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 I have withdrawn those who do.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 impotent, you say? I have withdrawn those whose mind isn't. There are higher values than the mind, you say? I have withdrawn those for whom there aren't.
While you were dragging to your sacrificial altars the men of justice, of reason, of independence, 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 the 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 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. We are evil according to your morality. We have chosen not to harm you any longer. We are useless, according to your economics. We have chosen not to exploit you any longer. We are dangerous and to be shackled, according to your politics. We have chosen not to endanger you, nor to wear the shackles any longer. We are only an illusion, according to your philosophy. 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.
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 to you, no terms of bargain about, no compromise to reach. You have nothing to offer us. WE DO NOT NEED YOU.
Are you crying: No, this was not what you wanted? A mindless world of ruins was not your goal? You did not want us to leave you? You moral cannibals, I know that you've always known what it was that you wanted. But your game is up, because now we know it too.
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 rewards for their martyrdom--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?
You wanted to know John Galt's identity. I am the man who has asked that question.
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 know any--but to discover it.
You have heard no concepts of 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 immortality, 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 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.
Both sides agreed that morality demands the surrender of your self-interest and of your mind, that the moral and the practical are opposites, that morality is not the province of reason, but the province of faith and force. Both side agreed that no rational morality is possible, that there is no right or wrong in reason--that in reason there's no reason to be moral. Whatever else they fought about, it was against man's mind that all your moralists have stood united. It was 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 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 your stomach, lungs, or heart is automatic; the function of your mind is not. In any hour and issue of your life , you are free to escape from 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 question: of value to whom and for what? 'Value' presupposes a standard, a purpose and the necessity of action in the face of an alternative. Where there are no alternatives, no values are possible.
There is only one fundamental alternative in the universe: existence or non-existence--and it pertains to a single class of entities: living organisms. The existence of inanimate matter is unconditional, the existence of life is not; it depends on a specific course of action. Matter is indestructible, it changes its forms, but it cannot cease to exist. It is only a living organism that faces a constant alternative: the issue of life or death. Life is a process of self-sustaining and self-generating action. If an organism fails in that action, it does; its chemical elements remain, but its life goes out of existence. It is only the concept of 'Life' that makes the concept of 'Value' possible. It is only to a living entity that things can be good or evil.
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. Bur 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."
As a man who takes the task of formulating action logically (instead of emotionally) very seriously, I’m really fucking frustrated.
According to last month's Gallup, this is the United States of America I live in (emphasis created by me):
quote:
Only about a third of Americans believe that Charles Darwin's theory of evolution is a scientific theory that has been well supported by the evidence, while just as many say that it is just one of many theories and has not been supported by the evidence.
what
Forty-five percent of Americans also believe that God created human beings pretty much in their present form about 10,000 years ago.
the
A third of Americans are biblical literalists who believe that the Bible is the actual word of God and is to be taken literally, word for word.
fuck?
As politically incorrect as my statements might be, these people are fucking idiots. The absurdity of dismissing empirical laws because they threaten to contradict their support group which demands "Thou shalt have no other gods before me" can not be overstated! As I'm trying to maintain a civil discussion (in order to keep this thread in PDM), I'll refrain from further articulations on their idiocy while maintaining that their corwardly stances continue to erode our world.
I do not particularly enjoy living amongst persons incapable of comprehending the relationship between cause and effect, I do not want to interact with individuals who behave as if feelings trump reason, I certainly do not wish to be governed by those consistently trying to derive an “ought” from an “is.”
The perceived incentives for abdicating reason are not beyond me—it is simply easier to avoid complex thought—but I feel no sympathy for those who willfully embrace ignorance, expecting the world can be reformed to their own perverse reductions of it.
Perhaps one day someone (a bit more charismatic than I) will deliver Rand’s speech to the world, maybe humanity doesn’t have to reach that critical threshold. Education is paramount. While I sympathize with the libertarian notions tending to discourage governmental sustenance for public education, what is the alternative? Our society is hopelessly intertwined, there is no mountain hideout waiting to be colonized by the elite. My fate is dependant upon yourdecisions, so now what? Are my only options to indoctrinate those around me, enlighten them to the benefits of employing one’s own mind (a contradiction in terms) or to disappear into my own Atlantis?
This post was partially inspired by the intelligent design thread, but instead of derailing that discussion further, I wanted help in determining exactly “what to do” about the current situation.
__________________
Fuck the Red Sox. Fuck the Patriots. Fuck the Celtics. Fuck Vegas. Fuck You. Fuck Boston.
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12-17-2004 09:32 AM
