Guider vs. Creator

If it is possible for the GOP to be serious, it needs to take a side step on religion. It needs to back away from assertions about God as Creator and move towards God as Reconciler, Synchronizer, or Guider. The notion of a Reconciler avails every moral or political aspect of which we need to make reference, while the notion of a Creator defies intelligible approach in any practical sense. Science has to do with that which is preset according to particular rules, and then deriving those rules. The hand of a Guider (as in evolution driven by consciousness rather than by creationism), behind rules that are preset, may be intuited, but, perhaps by definition, will not be scientifically shown.  At outset, is it not contradictory to suppose we should seek to use science to prove that science does not control science?  Or that we should seek to derive rules by which to find or control the source or controller of all the rules that bind us?

When people empathize regarding the sovereign will of the collective, they are, in effect, being open to intuitive moral guidance regarding how they should participate as the will behind the collective unfolds. This is what we do when we "lead from behind": try to intuit or discern the best direction, as it unfolds for the herd. Necessarily implied, but oft unstated, is the belief that there does abide a best direction, and that each of us participates with the conscious effort to move towards it. Each perspective of consciousness is attuned to seeking the best direction, as simply a different lens for one consciousness, by which to reconcile the unfolding of that direction. The various Good Books simply avail metaphors by which to relate to that effort. Thus, we are blessed with guidance from above, but there is no mortal prophet to whose will all others should be subjugated --- at least, not in any materially practical or scientific sense.

Of Sheep, Sheep Dogs, Black Sheep, Shepards, and Wolves

Of Tools and Cronies
(and of sheep, sheep dogs, black sheep, shepards, and wolves):

One may model at least five ways of approaching problems: (1) popular (sheep), (2) traditional (sheep dog), (3) prodigal (black sheep), (4) principled (shepard), and (5) crony (wolf).

Popular is exemplified by the herd (baa) approach: that which the herd is presently approving or thinking is in fashionable good taste. Traditional is exemplified by those who seek safety not in numbers but in the tried and true. Prodigal is exemplified by those who test and find limits (empiricists). Principled is exemplified by those who care more for consistency and truth (science and higher values), who have faith that principled thinking can best lead them or society to new and better insights for approaching unfolding problems. Crony is exemplified by opportunists who stand for nothing higher than their own immediate gratification.

These five categories often sort themselves out among several political persuasions:  Dino, Conserver of Liberty, and Rino. Insofar as their political approaches, Collectivists would be most attracted to the Popular approach, Isolationists to the Traditional approach, and Independents to the Principled approach.

A Populist who is independent of principles and still a leader would be an elite manipulator of easily balked or stampeded baa sheep.  Think of comedian cows (sinister clarabelles, aka dupes to make noise and cut opportunities from the herd for wolfish hedge fund artists).  Populists are uncomfortable with principles independent of the herd fashion of the day, and thus avail every opportunity to get high while castigating Principalists for hypocrisy.  They are very insecure without the approval of a support group and tend quickly to throw anyone who threatens the support group into the fiery pit (Madow was nearly overcome with tears upon hearing Stewart approve of her).  A Traditionalist is independent of change and slow to be manipulated or to receive insights; he will resist leaders except to help control minds of a similar bent. A Principalist, who is independent of the herd and not slow to sense need or advantage in change, will seek to increase learning and opportunity among similarly inclined thinkers.

Herd minded feelers (baa sheep, moo cows, rap lovers, and other Populists) and Collectivists tend to comprise the base for Dinos; Principle minded thinkers and Independents tend to comprise the base for Conservers of Liberty; Tradition minded, slow to change Isolationists tend to sway back and forth between Dinos and Conservatives. So, then, who are the Rinos? The Rinos are the crony wolves and international bankers and corporatists --- who have no loyalty to the herd, to tradition, or to principles. Their loyalty is to the NWO --- so long as they expect it will reward fellow cronies and mafiosi.  As things stand, Principle minded Conservers of Liberty tend to be marginalized and unrepresented.  This is because Dinos and Rinos have perfected the financing and propaganda to keep the pretense going that they represent principled thinkers.

For Crony Capitalism to impose a new world syndicate, two things are needed:  (1) an institution run by cronies for controlling worldwide banking, and (2) a culture for mentoring each succeeding generation of replacement cronies.  The U.S. provides (1) in the form of the Fed; China provides (2) in the form of a nationwide hierarchy of corrupt cronyism.  Nearly everything that is happening in the world politically is about rebalancing the relations between (1) and (2).  Ask:  In every significant venture and rebalancing, who benefits more than China?  The NWO is not allowing American pols to look after American interests.  Everything is about creating vacuums to allow Chinese cronies to fill.  Reducing Iraq helped China, not America.  Choking American energy production helps China, not America.  Free trade helps China, not America.  Flooding America's borders helps China, not America.  In many cases, Western tolerance of Islam helps China, not America.  When it becomes necessary to put the Islamic spider back in its bottle,  that will be readily done by China, not America.

This game is so far down the road that not even real Americans are likely to be able to reverse it, even when they finally wake up to it.  At most, we will go down in glory, if not in whimpers.  If government of, by, and for the people must temporarily perish from earth, we will at least preserve it in our ideals.

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NOTE:  Is not a feeler, in his empathy, an effective thinker?  Moreover, is he not principled, in respect of his empathy for the collective, i.e., his culture or country? So, in respect of what forms or ways of thinking should principles of empathy and of law or mores best be RECONCILED? One ought not say that all feelers of the weal of the collective fail to think or lead, nor that all thinkers regarding the best principles for the collective fail to feel. How then ought instinctive feelers and articulate thinkers reconcile, in a bipartisan way, so as to combine the best of the principled and the empathetic? How ought a liberty loving nation find common ground with the rest of the world order? Why should any particular nation lay down, to allow itself to be replaced by any other less-than-holistic nation? Why should any particular way of living allow itself to be replaced by “progress”? Why should conservers of liberty lay down to allow themselves to be replaced by elitist managers of collectives?

Our philosophies, formulas, and urgings regarding substance, empiricism, logic, and math seem always, when restricted to themselves, to lead to an UNRECONCILED incompleteness.  Indeed, one begins to suspect that --- for every conscious event and experience --- the potential, unfolding shapeliness, context, desireability, and quality of interpretation depends upon how each Independent perspective happens to interfunction as it seeks its reconciliation with the Collective.  Bottom line: Absent inculcation of respect for a caring and reconciling Meta Source, we seem less likely to sustain hope and inclination for pursuing meaningful reconciliation and cooperation among competing perspectives.

Shame and Betrayal

Did you see Obama smirking while announcing the release of his birth certificate? There was no difference from the smirk of an adolescent letting a kitten chase the red or blue dot of a laser light. So, should those who were fooled feel shamed or betrayed? So long as they fail to comprehend what is really going on, they probably feel shamed. Once they comprehend reality, they should become righteously indignant in proportion to the betrayal. Ask: How long and to what end has Obama reserved this ploy in his bag of deceit? Who or what is running Obama, Dems, and Repubs? I submit that elitist greed secondary to the invention of the Fed is dazzling out the dot laser lights that lead the prancing of Rinos, Dinos, and all their followers. Simply put, a consortium has acquired means for controlling the dance of the laser dots. You think you are pursuing a purpose, but you are merely being put to work to the entertainment and support of the masters of the cave on which the dots are being projected. You see blue (911 truther tales) and you think good and all who oppose to be bad, or you see red (Kenyan birth of Obama) and think likewise. But you need to look at the source from which the dots are being projected. There, you will see Obama, Soros, Bush, Trump, and all the friends of the consortium. Ask: Has either party been looking out for the freedom and dignity of ordinary Americans? Have not both parties been: Keeping our borders porous; choking our energy independence; selling our industry to overseas antagonists of liberty; and corrupting our currency? We are betrayed, and we ought to be mad as hell --- not shamed.

How not to Fear the NWO

How I Learned Not to Fear the NWO and to Embrace (?) Crony Capitalism:

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The first immigrants to America came less to gain wealth than to gain freedom of mind and opportunity. Exigencies eventually led them to freedom of enterprise, which produced wealth as byproduct. Is the process likely reversible? Does pursuit of wealth eventually likely lead to freedom of enterprise, then to freedom to choose one's model for moral or spiritual purposefulness? Will Communist and Islamic nations, as they gain in wealth, likely come to respect freedom of enterprise and religion, or will their rulers more likely fashion ways to preserve despotism? Is it worth the risk for Western Civ to willingly trade with and enrich such regimes? Regardless, must all regimes eventually be reduced to be ruled under a global aristocracy of extra-national, international corporatists, who will come to own, operate, reward, and punish all nations, cults, religions, and sects? Will happiness then abide in a Brave New Dream that advertises only illusions of freedom and dignity? Thus, must the economics of governance shift from the Invisible Hand to a hierarchy of Corporate Internationalists? Is this the age of the China Model? Given the fallibility of individuals and given that power corrupts, how happy is such a shift likely to make Americans? Behind masks, is worldwide rule under a New World Order most for the good, the evil, or simply the unavoidable?  Should Western Civ balk at, or embrace, trade that reduces us to a lowest common NWO?  So long as the acts of Rinos and Dinos default to embrace the NWO, and so long as the middle class remains indifferent, ineffectual, or shrinking, the NWO needs no active conspiracy.  All that is necessary is that the middle class do nothing.

 

Compare http://www.snopes.com/politics/ballot/athenian.asp.

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How best should ordered society incentive production of more of that which is good? How active, big, and centralized should governance be? The more artificial the environment, the more the need for government in order to sustain it. Artifice begets need for artifice. Ordered freedom and dignity requires constant reassessment for how best to centralize versus delegate lines of guidance and control.

Workers ought not be paid outside ranges and limits that will keep them working ... at least enough to sustain the artificial environment that society makes. A successful society sustains neither itself nor the fulfillment of its members by underpaying or overpaying its workers. A municipal corporation needs means by which to adjust to circumstances, in order to mete out monetary rewards in such a way as to preserve or enhance its defenses, organization, and wealth. Society will not develop or keep the workers it needs by satiating them with all its rainy day resources. Incentives do not work well on those who are starved into decrepitude or satiated beyond their appetites. Decline is not stopped by whipping people who are doing their best, nor by comforting people who are doing their least.

Rather, smoothing and enhancing the engine of social efficiency and momentum requires that desires must be stoked, slaked, or slackened — as needed. Thus, ask: What meta incentives can best incentive those who spread incentives? Under what merit should those who spread incentives be selected? What is or should be their motivation? Does evolution tend most to reward and motivate those who thirst for individual glory ... or those who thirst to serve meta or collective values?

What should be done with the people and resources of corporations that have succeeded in driving out all competitors, that grow soft in comfort and artifice? Should their progeny be humored to become aristocratic oligarchs? Should ownership of such corporate resources be confiscated, socialized, and spread? How can or should the worthy functions of indecent or non-competitive corporations be restored to decency and efficiency, once neither the model of free enterprise nor the model of socialized governance is shown to prevent cannibalism and decline? Should some kind of NWO model be guided into evolution? Should it be based on international trade by borderless corporations, that invest in owning politicians and governments? Should rewards be filtered mainly to those who please such a NWO? IS CRONY CAPITALISM OFTEN GOOD? Can it establish a long lasting civilization?

Should the resources of indecent and non-competitive corporations be cannibalized, nationalized, or spread, so as to entice all with a greater sense of entitlement, even as subconscious messages are continuously blared in order to stoke people with alternative, greater desires and expectations? How can non-competitive corporations be cannibalized, without consigning their worthy functions to a death spiral? How can production or population be reduced, without consigning remnants to lower standards of living? Should humanity seek to stoke change and evolution towards creative destruction, progressive surpassage, balanced sustenance, or some mix thereof? Should humanity be reduced, in many realms or aspects, to economic units with little expectation of privacy, and in other realms to units of self reliance and private dignity?

Should a brave, new, evolving reality avail the pursuit of individual dignity and autonomous expression only in virtual vice or privacy “holodecks?” Are holodecks to become the new heaven, for availing psychological sensations of sweetness and eternity? Who has a read on what God or History intends (or should intend)? Who can see very far down the unfolding rabbit trail that avails our common fate? What should remain of respect for God or spirituality? Is enlightenment a collective or an individual thing? Apart from learning to empathize to context, is it possible for a reasonably intelligent being to advocate for TRUTH or PRINCIPLES in the spreading of opportunities or materialism that can be morally consistent?

Should we join the NWO, rather than resist it?

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Our world is filled with meretricious delinquents who want to be paid or indulged in their youth, for doing little or nothing of redeeming social value. At an early age, delinquents often find rationalizations for attaching themselves to politicians who deal out dole, earmarks, graft, and thuggery. Socially responsible folk tend to be less involved with looking for government handouts or favoritism. Later in life, seeing the socially corrosive effects of parasitism, they tend to become more politically oppositional, seeking to return government to the supervision of those who are socially responsible. This is difficult because forces for misleading, tempting, and corrupting youth are so opportunistic, malicious, and potent.

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How do particles of consciousness couple and decouple --- with local matter and local inertial fields, often to take advantage of the most callow of body and mind --- to influence evolving cultures and codes of mores? How abides consciousness as conscious of itself, as a changeless essence, which images and/or experiences continuous change? Of what unchanging essence are the following artifactual: time, extension, form, substance, sequence, and change? I doubt such riddle is "solved," merely by postulating some syncretic neologism (such as space-time, wave-particle, or meta consciousness) --- although I do appreciate that such postulations may advance more images upon images and conceptualizations upon conceptualizations --- with no final, reconciling solution in sight or mind. (Example: Is our universe "really" some 13 billion years old? But, if time is an illusion, and space-time is the superior construct for modeling reality, then should not our universe be measured not in time but in space-time? But how can a mortal make a measurement in any such a term?)

Our condition for being immersed in an irresolvable riddle may be termed one of existential angst: What are we, what are we becoming, what should we be becoming, what should we fear becoming, how can we communicate, and how can we best define our terms (even the most fundamental of our terms, such as: existence, being, consciousness, morality, substance, space, and time)? Well, evolutionary pressures impose practical constraints upon our use of terms. Thus, for matters of proximate urgency, we find ways to communicate and make ourselves reasonably well understood. However, when we seek to fine tune our communications, to extend our ideas to the more precise, macro, global, or universal, we tend to find that every non-trivial term we thought was reasonably clear seems unavoidably to blur into ambiguities, inconsistencies, paradoxes, and riddles.

Example --- paradox of being in a state of self awareness: To be aware of oneself as apart from one's environment, one must sense relative change between one's self and one's environment. Thus, one's identity seems constant, even as one's identity seems continuously to be changing. Thus, nothing changes, except that everything changes. Thus, only the present always manifests into existence, yet the variously possible forms of the eternal present continuously change. That which is of changeless essence seems constantly and continuously to be changing ... in every aspect that we can measure or sense. Such is the existential river in which we swim, even though we seem unable ever to discover or determine any complete, coherent, and consistent understanding of that river .... even though that river is common to everything of which we experience and everything about which we may communicate. We wish to be clear .... and, in immediate, pressing, and practical pursuits, we often seem to be clear. Yet, when pushed to wider applications, beyond definitional trivialities, we find no one and no explanation that avails any understanding that is complete, coherent, and consistent. Rather, every reasonably practiced philosopher seems able, eventually, to demonstrate flaws in every attempt at a complete, coherent, and consistent philosophy of nature, morality (or nature-morality?).

Thus we often dispute, to try "rigorously" to measure and differentiate among qualities of existence, states of being, quantities of substance, clarity of information, limits of potentiality, and spirituality of consciousness ... seeking to divide that which is of superior, prior, real, or causal essence (phenomena?) from that which abides merely in appearance, illusion, derivation, artifact, association, or properties (epiphenomena?). Pushed far enough in any debate, even our most fundamental terms become tricksters.

Example: If the only things that "exist" are considered to abide only in their present forms, then it seems that things must wink in and out of existence ... as time passes. In that case, existence seems dependent upon time, rather than superior to time. For some purposes, “existence” is a word we are often taught to deploy under an inference that only that which manifests in present time actually “really exists.”

For other purposes of discussing “reality,” we are taught that time in itself is only a stubborn illusion, and that the “real reality” abides only in respect of a construct of relativity, which we may refer to as “space-time.” When we say: Only that which presently manifests really exists, but the present itself does not really exist except relative to space-time, which itself is relative to context ... then is it any wonder our communications about objective existence and "reality" become so confused? Is reality (or "existence itself"?) an independent, fundamental essence? Or is existence a mere relativistic aspect or property? Must any superior, particular, or holistic substance, quality, or consciousness abide, independently, in itself? One may begin to ask: Does it make good sense to imagine that objective reality can be rigorously divided from that which is only subjective? One may begin to ask: Does the chattering of “Objectivists” make any more "rigorous" sense than the chirping of crickets (or the smiling and winking in and out of Cheshire cats)? One may begin to ask: Can either "existence" or "reality" be rigorously or clearly divided or divorced from reason or consciousness? That is: To what extent does the quantity and/or quality of Existence of every Real thing or activity depend — for its being noun, verb, gerund, property, aspect, essence, connector, or placeholder — upon its contextually measured relation to at least one particular perspective of consciousness? Personally, I don’t think Rand convincingly showed that everything flows from “A is A,” where “A” is restricted either to a material thing or a mathematical function. Rather, I suspect that neither empiricism nor logic can avail a coherent explanation of either morality or consciousness ... free of regard for some notion of meta consciousness or spirituality.

How may existential ambiguity and angst relate to the evolution of cultures, economies, nations, and governance? What forms for societies and economies are most fit to evolve and flourish along the discernible part of the path that is unfolding before our world? Whatever the environment that may have sustained an era for the rise of industrial competition among free enterprising business concerns, unsullied by monopolies and governmental favoritism, that environment is defunct. Competition for buying political favors is irretrievably part of the new reality. The problem now is: How do we cope? Where do we go from here? Must pressures of increasing population and centralization of technology entail centralization of control over variously delegated lines of power? Must complex social organization entail detailed centralization and rationing? Must such pressures entail mind inculcation and control? Ought all individuals to consent to be programmed to think in ways needed to sustain the social organization? Must we lobotomize the human mind in order to save it? Should we accept or change this new reality? How, and towards what direction?

Morally, one may want that adult human beings should be able to be authentic and truthful with themselves in their own thinking. That is, that neither political nor economic pressures should be allowed to overtake a person's freedom of thought, speech, and communication. Practically, one needs to appreciate that complex technological societies necessitate hierarchical lines of communication, decision making, and control. So, how should a decent civilization promote various persons and classes to superintend positions along such hierarchies? Must society be filtered into classes of alphas, betas, and epsilons? Should such filtering be planned or random? To compete in the brave new reality, must the social form assert limits on the allowable power and range for each individual mind? Must citizens be made to identify with, and believe in, ideas that are self fulfilling to their assigned roles within a society? Who can/should be allowed to transcend? Must that transcending be denied to most? Who merits transcending to “real truth,” and how? Reasonably, how ought freedom to be taught or apportioned: Should freedom of mind be denied to all, reserved only to a few, denied to most, or availed to all? How, in a complex society? Has Big Capitalism closed the gate against free enterprise? Must Crony Corporatism continue to increase, as the next phase for Big Gov? Must Big Gov lead to Big Syndicate and Big Bro? In truth, what ought decent political philosophy (Objectivism?) to promote, in order to roll back Crony Corporatism, stifle Big Bro, restore individual freedom, promote decent civilization, avail worthwhile industrial and technological change at necessary levels of centralization, or defend against America's becoming absorbed into the kind of depotism that abounds in cultures it trades with? Why?

Preservation, Destruction, and Rebirth

CONSCIOUSNESS --- OF ACTIVE WILL AND PRESET INFORMATION:  REGARDING HEAVEN (OR THE UTOPIAN REPUBLIC OR COMMUNE OF INDEPENDENTS ----  Suppose all that we experience is derivative of a field or cloud, comprised of one essence:  Meta Consciousness, which alternates between giving expression to two different forms:   (1) active Will to appreciate, and (2) preset Information. In that case, to what purpose or meaning may such Meta Consciousness be seeking to accomplish, unfold, appreciate, or guide?


If Substance is but a derivative or a placeholding delusion of an identification with a particular perspective in the context of an encompassing field, then is "heaven" the eternal present, as the Field of Consciousness (active Will and stored Information) proceeds along its path of unfolding purposefulness? May reaching towards heaven be as much a matter of subjectivity (orientation, attitude, emotion, and psychology) ... as one of objectivity (technology, science, rationality, or understanding)?

If substance is merely derivative, then, the power of positive thoughts and self fulfilling prophecies becomes all the greater in apprehension. If the mortal coil of substance and body is mere placeholding, for communication among perspectives of but one holistic consciousness, then what may result among a civilization whose members all come to apprehend or believe as much?

May our perspectives and identies of consciousness be somehow meta attached to our earthly context and vicinity? Does consciousness, when it assumes and identifies with a placeholding perspective, necessarily and continuously reincarnate? Do we each have a continuing stake in how our civilization unfolds, even beyond the decay and death of individual bodies? What level of spirituality may a society reach, as its members come to so apprehend? Would we each, then, appreciate both our Individual perspectives of will (parameters of freedom) and our interconnection as constituting only variants of the same Common and essential field of consciousness?

May we thus come to reconcile individual freedom with civic responsibility? Thus, would individuals come to wish not to harm the whole, while acting to provide the whole with a sort of spectator entertainment? Should a system pursuing "heaven" thus organize itself to facilitate the rewarding of individuals only to the extent they are, at least in potential, entertaining, without being harmful?

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Preservation, Destruction, and Rebirth:

Are American Thinker and other conservative blogs merely managing a niche for an orderly retreat from American style freedom of expression and enterprise, towards an unstoppable new world order of interconnecting technologies and international monopolies, to be headed by chieftains of international corporations, in which there will remain only serfs who long to please their masters, with no vestige of any independent, free-thinking middle class? Guidelines for managing such an orderly retreat seem to be evolving: brook no calls to violence; stir no readers to actually undertake an active challenge against corporate powers that be; don't become a pest to Bilderbergers; be a mule for diverting attention to fantastical conspiracies, so real conspiracies against American freedom go unnoticed or discredited; string along the clueless with ambiguous and countermanding series of vain instructions.

Regardless, no NWO will long abide, because there will be backwash --- whether from underground hackers, EMP, Yellowstone eruption, or inter-tribal strife. Raw materials will continue to decay, break down, and be built back up again --- often from ever more complex cells. Sturm and drang seem to be essential parts of the circle of life and the empathetic pursuits of the field of consciousness. Thus, the field of consciousness assigns us, not to roost in comfort, but to engage in constant, creative destruction.

Perhaps, the field is not just about decency, but also about how to empower perspectives of consciousness to enter into closer communion with the holism. That entails technological progress: high powered, auxiliary brains and imaginations, with greater degrees and ranges of reason for asserting management over emotion. But, how is management to be kept of a meaningful circle of birth, rapture, joy, pleasure, boredom, indifference, pain, torment, death? How are body and mind to be expanded and made comfortable with the more extreme of expanding emotions?

Consider that a trinitarian field avails expression to some aspects that are consciously caring, creating, preserving, changing, and active and other aspects that are inactive, inanimate, indifferent, decaying, preset. The awake and active aspects may tend to prefer to build decent, sustainable civilizations, while the asleep and inactive aspects may be preset towards eventual decay, remix, and creative destruction. Thus, Vishnu (preserver) yields to cycle to Shiva (destroyer) to cycle to Brahma (creator, changer), as civilization is preserved, destroyed, reborn, changed --- cycling through purpose, meaning, challenge, torment, and rebirth. Alas, our civilization will eventually cycle out, but from its ashes, newly meaningful civilizations will arise. Meantime, all who care will strive to preserve enlightenment, i.e., decent civilization that avails individual freedom of mind and enterprise.  Thus, enlightenment and heaven on earth abide as worthy aspirations.

AYN RAND AND CRONY CAPITALISM

RAND AND CRONY CAPITALISM:  Yes, Rand illustrated the problem of crony capitalism. She wanted workers and producers alike to compete to sell what they had to offer. She did not want government getting involved in warping the marketplace. She illustrated the dire effects when so called elitists are humored to act as if they know best how to redistribute wealth through government in order to do good for society. Many of Rand's characters meant well, but, when it came to the best way to allocate resources and rewards, they could not be more competent than the marketplace. Indeed, something of hubris in rendered many of them pitifully incompetent. The main point I took was: Citizens --- don't vote to allow government to be used merely as some kind of forcing charity for the redistribution of wealth.

However, there is another side to that coin:  Find something more effective than the ballot box to cure crony elites from insinuating themselves in order to exploit government, as some kind of slush bank for crony capitalists to hold up (not for pretending to do good, but simply to steal more than their produce would be worth in any fair market).

So, I get Rand's point to the electorate:  That we ought not vote to force government to function as a redistributer of charity. What I don't get is how Rand is thought to have prescribed any effective means to stop robber cronies. Mere voting does not much impress legislators to forgo earmarks, or executives and czars to forgo rewarding the institutions and industries they pretend to regulate. That requires something more than mere general voting. It necessitates a Combined Attack, from (1) aroused and inspired citizens, (2) regulatory watchdogs, and (3) punitive taxes or fines.

Thus far, I have not been enough of a Rand devotee to have seen such a combined attack in her philosophy (no doubt, there are many devotees who should know).  Regardless, if her philosophy were effective, Ought We Not By Now To Have Seen Results Against Crony Capitalism?  Instead, I see international crony capitalism growing stronger every day, growing the gap in political influence and allowing cronies ever more to weaken the general economy and the middle class.  In short:  The middle class is not being churched, assimilated, or inspired to cherish or defend its freedom; cronies are given little reason to fear; and the wealth they apply to politics, i.e., the political marketplace, is rewarded rather than reduced.

HAS RAND'S INFLUENCE DONE ANYTHING TO SLOW CRONY CAPITALISM:  So, have you seen any evidence that crony capitalism is being reduced --- either by lawmakers or by Objectivists?  If not, what have Objectivists taken from Rand, to empower us to be any more effective against crony capitalists than Eddie Willers? To my lights, George Soros is a crony capitalist par excellence. Do Objectivists worry at all about his ilk, or do they see Soros as some new kind of John Galt, paving our road to serfdom under the NWO?

ENDING CORRUPTION BY REPLACING RELIGION WITH LAW:  Yes, Rand saw that organized religion, when it confused public welfare with charity, tends to abet corruption and decline. But did she ever credit how religion has often furthered respect for the value of each life and for individual dignity, to include individual freedom of expression and enterprise? Did she apprehend that no mountain of legalism can preserve the glue of family and social decency as well as an assimilated respect for a common religious tradition? Did she apprehend that the kind of freedom that burgeoned in America may never have occurred, but for an assimilating, religious heritage? Given America's beginning, who believes we can preserve industry against crony capitalists, merely with cold, bloodless law? Can mere law and regulation tame crony capitalism, to turn it into Randian ideal capitalism? Well, what sort of regulation does crony capitalism support? Hint: The kind that its staff of lawyers and accountants can survive, but that its small competitors cannot. Crony capitalists tend to own the law!  They eat it for breakfast.

OBVIOUS RANDIAN FALLACIES:  To say, in the light of experience, that man is primarily a rational creature is silly.  To say that man should be primarily a rational creature is ridiculous.  (How much of wine, dance, sex, or fun is rational?  Should man aspire to the existence of a programmed computer?)  To say that the morality of free markets is interchangeable with rational self interest is wrong.  As everyone sees, we do not get free markets when the wealthy engage their self-interest; rather, we get crony capitalism.  To say that one ought not apply different rules to others than to oneself may have a short and nice ring, but it is adverse to reality.  Who does not apply different rules to others, depending not only on abilities, but also depending on whether it can be gotten away with, and whether there abides a fleeting advantage of the moment?  To implicate that one's present ego is one's supreme guide contradicts Rand's own life.  Did not Rand work hard to ensure that her philosophy would continue to be taught, long after the demise of her mortal ego?  Was it consistent with ego and reason when Ellis Wyatt blew up his oilfield, rather than surrender to government control ---  or was it an emotional release?

FALLACY OF EITHER/OR, WHOLE OR PART:  Socialist societies try to fashion moral precepts primarily in respect of the collective; individualist societies primarily in respect of individuals.  Somewhat analogously, science often tries to explicate phenomena either in respect of fields or in respect of particles, while morality often relates to a melding of the qualitative with the quantitative.  Likewise, a society, to cohere, must attend both to the self interests of its members and to the collective interests of their group.  The balance will unfold with feedback ---  not very closely following any preplanned decree by elites who claim to know best.  The competitive interaction of individual members and their associations will play back and forth, and the society will survive only if it can keep its balance.

 CAPSTONE:  Mere secular law --- as by regulation and penalties --- will not save a decent civilization that respects competing expressions of freedom within a marketplace.  People who would be free must assimilate a spirit of intolerance and shared sacrifice, at a religious level, inculcated in civic clubs and churches across the land, to forgo the sort of corrupting earmarks and crony capitalism that are sickening to decent society.

HIGHER VALUES OF EGOISTS:  Ironically, atheist Rand's quest for an objectivist society is itself in the vein of a religious quest. Certainly, it is a quest that extends well beyond her ego. What Randian would deny that Rand intended for her ideas to continue to contribute to our society long after her death?  The missing half in Rand's philosophy consists in her failure to recognize that there do abide values worthy of religious inculcation, and that religion in itself is not necessarily good or bad, but depends on the qualities and thoughts that are brought to it.  Until then, crony oligarchs will continue to burn down the house of freedom, while we remain distracted by dirty water in the fishbowl.

RELIGION:  Religion advances by inspiring new believers.  Subjugation minded control freaks and fear mongers, such as Crony Capitalists and Islamists, advance by making people fear for their fortunes or their lives.  To allow one's beliefs to be dictated out of fear, not belief, is not in respect of religion.  To allow mind control freaks to infest and overrun a country is not to tolerate freedom of religion, but its opposite.

CONSCIOUSNESS:  Strictly speaking, one does not find that which one never lost.  Yes, consciousness does identify from time to time with variously fluxing, transitory, and recurrent forms of expression of bodies, which do pass on.  The general field of consciousness, however, neither lives nor dies, but simply abides.  It has no need of any permanent El Dorado in the Sky.

TAXING WEALTH:  When we begin to explore why so many billionaires prefer progressive taxes on income to taxes on wealth, then we may begin to apprehend how a transition to a progressive consumption tax could help, by deterring the grossly disproportionate buying and selling of political influence, and by helping to preserve "genuine" capitalism --- so that the middle class is not wiped out and so we are not returned to the feudal control of corporate oligarchs, in lieu of land titled aristocrats.  The billionaires advocating for higher income taxes tend to be crony capitalists, par excellence, fortifying their undemocratic control behind what they hope to establish as their unreachable wealth.

Enlightened Selfishness

In death, all particular perspectives of consciousness must eventually become collateral damage from the unfolding purposes of the field of consciousness. Our material world is not the best of all possible; we are only its gardeners, always pursuing communion, and perhaps eventual merger, with a happier state of being.


In a moral sense, can "enlightened selfishness" reasonably subsume or substitute for altrusim?  In what sense can it be meaningful or fulfilling to prescribe or relate that one's highest moral duty is only to will or pursue that which one happens to intuit, believe, emote, or identify to be consistent with one's selfish interests?  To have capacity to make consistent sense, would not one need some secure fulcrum against which to test and define one's terms?  What does or should one mean, by:  reason, indifference, caring, meaning, fulfill, relate, one, self, moral, duty, will, identify, interest, unselfish, charity, humane?  How does one rationalize or make sense of any consideraton of the dependency of the reality of fields and particles (holisms, relationships, and things) upon the perspective of the viewer?

WFB recalled how Rand's work was devoid of respect for charity. http://www.lewrockwell.com/blog/lewrw/archives/78291.html.  However, is it even possible to be charitable, without serving one's self interest?  Perhaps even more startling, is it possible to serve one's self interest without being charitable?

Unless some genius devises a way, here and now, notwithstanding the relativity of space and time, to measure the breadth of our universe in its number of ultimate particles (anyone found a Higgs boson lately?), there does not appear to abide to quantitative measure any such a thing as an independent thing-in-itself, much less any such a thing as a definable personal "self."  Rather, our "selfness" seems necessarily bound up with feedback and relationships (as with other selves).

If there is no ultimate, quantitative, material particle, perhaps there abides an ultimate qualitative aspect (holon?), i.e. --- consciousness.  (Voltaire considered, "It is perfectly evident to my mind that there exists a necessary, eternal, supreme, and intelligent being. This is no matter of faith, but of reason.")  Perhaps, the ultimate reconciler abides in a way that is beyond reconciliation, that allows IT to imagine stepping outside ITself, to avail fleeting illusions of wholes, parts, selves, relationships, perspectives, and unfolding interests.  In whatever way IT imbues or attaches ITself to any unfolding, measurable interest, that interest becomes ITs then and there moral pursuit.  In whatever way IT communicates and inspires other perspectives of ITself to join in such interest, that interest becomes a common pursuit of ITs thus joining perspectives.

At some meta level, such various perspectives of consciousness may intuit or empathize that they are each derivative of one and the same aspect, i.e., a quality of consciousness.  That meta capacity for empathetic appreciation (that we are each a perspective for pursuing the guiding, synchronizing, unfolding, changing interests of a common reconciler) would seem a basis for apprehending an innate and common purposefulness or morality, i.e.: --- "Be Empathetic."  If so, we have no choice but to make choices, just as we have no choice but to serve, in some capacity, a reconciling moral pursuit.

That said, there becomes availed to many of us a path for bringing such pursuit into a more consistent and coherent plane of conscious awareness.  For that, perhaps we are not more innately moral, but only more consciously participatory and aware of our moral path.  Thus, we sense more that is to be sought, and more that is to be avoided (or what we may deem "evil").  Those who arrive at such a plane, to give rein to their capacity to participate in moral decisions, intuit or feel a need to be availed with such degree of freedom and respect for reconciling purposefulness as to make such decisions their own voluntary, unforced, not artificially or governmentally required decisions.  Otherwise, the quality of human morality becomes reduced to the "morality" of a pre-programmed robot or zombie.

Bottom line:  Human morality necessitates (1) a degree of freedom, and (2) regard for a reconciling purposefulness.  It is in the second aspect that I consider Rand to have been deficient in appreciation.

Compare http://www.fsmitha.com/index.html.