The Lost People of America

I remember reading Ayn Rand and hearing lots of questions as to whether a person should find a Galt's Gulch or create one to live in. There were a series of questions of this type which are related to this line of inquiry: "Should one accept Social Security or should one go to a government school or accept money from the government in any way?" Later Rand was glad that Alan Greenspan, one of her proteges, had the opportunity to curb inflation and buy time by becoming the head of the Federal Reserve Bank.

She always advocated living in the world and achieving values in the world. And she always advocated living and advocating the values required of a moral man in full possession of his own life force for the purpose of maintaining his life for his own happiness. But, there was a line one must never cross: One must never advocate for the programs that the government offers nor in any way become captured by them or the government to the point where he advocates, actively or passively, the collective at the expense of the individual. That was the sealing of one's fate, the collapse of one's moral fire. At that point one loses himself and his right to exist as an individual human life. He becomes a vegetable in spirit - living, but not alive.

In the case of Alan Greenspan, we see that he did cross that line.

One of the shocking and disheartening results of this past horrendous year is to realize that many of those close to you or that you have known have crossed that line. They have submerged themselves into the great collective, the home of non-existence of the individual. The grand irony is that they expect you to take them, an individual, seriously and listen to them as if their individual opinion should count when they have given up that ground. If we are all to be folded into the collective, the reason for that is to erase individuality. If you notice, at bottom, that is the sum total of the thing that all of the people who advocate this socialization want to get rid of.

image by ukyo_freak

These traits and effects come with the territory of individual and individualism.

Happiness: There is no collective happiness. Happiness as a concept will have to go out of existence. This is too bad because for some of you, it will pass from the cultural conversation before you discovered what it was and that it was actually a wondrous possibility.
Pursuing one's dreams: There are no collective dreams/ambitions. Those are individual.
Merit: Bad. After all, everyone in the collective must have self-esteem as a right and it is not something one earns.
Motivation: There is no collective motivation. There is only the sum of individuals' motivations. The collective has to get rid of motivation and replace it with fear - the fear of not looking good which amounts to always looking like one is part of, at least in some way, the group.
Prosperity: There is no collective prosperity. You may be prosperous and your neighbor may not be prosperous. It depends on what you do and how you do it. The collective is always trying to stamp that out and redistribute the wealth so that those difference don't invite envy and hatred.
Differences: Differences always imply individuals and in the collective, those are bad. In the collective there is always pressure to belong and not stand out. One cannot excel or achieve lest someone else may want to do that and therefore threaten the cohesion of the collective.
Love: Love is always individual. Not important in the collective. Love gets replaced with duty. "Of course we love our country. We must."
Attraction: Attraction is always individual. Again, not important unless it is attraction to an abstract idea like the State or the greater good or feminism or diversity or anything group oriented.
Values: Values are the possession and the motivation of the individual. No good. Only the group's so-called values are the ones you can espouse - whether you give a damn about them or not.
Trade: This form of peaceful activity is something that comes when individuals are ends in themselves. That's no longer true under collectivism. Everyone is a means for the collective's ends. Peace has no meaning under collectivism which depends on the dynamics of drama and turmoil to generate sufficient fear to drive people wherever the leaders want them to be.
Capitalism: This is what freedom for the individual is insofar as a political/economic system is concerned. It is based on individual rights. This definitely is out, replaced by socialism, which operates by pro-collective, anti-individual rules which means by regulations, taxes, permissions of a zillion kinds and is the diametric opposite of freedom.

All of those kinds of things are what must be forever denigrated and diminished, sometimes even stamped out by force, if a society of people as a collective is to be maintained. In the collective there is a constant drumbeat against these values and attributes which arise only in the evil-by-nature individuals. Hmmmm, sounds like the biblical "original sin" idea.

A few days ago I highlighted one drum banger: US Representative John Lewis. Entitlement is the watchword of the collectivist. If you buy that, then you have submerged yourself into the collective - or as Neal Boortz calls it, "the great unwashed."

I see John Lewis as a profoundly evil man. He calls for every individual to become a dependent. "He is entitled to healthcare," he says. "It is his by right." Of course, now it is healthcare, but in principle, he is saying that every man is entitled to all that others produce. He is trying to drive the future slaves into the pen under the guise of it being morally justified for him to eat the flesh of his neighbor.

This is always the way. No one looks at the other side of the hand - the side that has to provide the benefits that the government and politicians plan to disburse or the diminished lives of those trapped by the dependency. The other side is the dark and ugly slave side of the hand.

Somebody has to go "pick that cotton and tote that bale" and guess what? It is going to be YOU. And it is not going to be you because of what YOU want. It is going to be YOU because of what THEY want. You might get a few scraps from the table, but that is just to keep you unable to rise up and speak. Whatever you would say has to look dumb and really beside the point. They keep a close eye on how much of what they disburse it takes to maintain this oppression.

History has taught us everything we need to know about how this works. The great result of the The Great Society was entrapment of those who became dependent on it. Generally, it literally ruined their lives. Once sucked in, they were stuck in the goo and their lives became about manipulating the goo. "You mean I can get more money if I don't have a husband? Jettison his ass. You mean I can get more money if I have more children? Let me get some more of them then."

This is the basic principle of socialism: "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need." Having viable needs becomes the name of the game.

It was never intended to work. It cannot work. It is against the laws of nature, specifically man's nature. And so, there has never been a more evil system devised to enslave men than socialism. And right now if you are a liberal, you are a backer and a believer in the principle that generates this horror.

This is the drumbeat that is being sounded by President Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Jesse Jackson (notice how he uses race, another collective, to drive men into the pen), Al Sharpton and many, many more.

But the sharpest pain of this whole great division of mankind which is going on right now is when you see the people you love urging you and all those around you to go on into the pen. You see them submerging themselves into the great unwashed, losing their identify and their value except as another body that can work for the collective. "It's what you deserve," the lost people of America say. How can something be any sadder than that?

How have we come to this horrendous state of affairs in the lives of men? Why is it that the descendants of slaves are now advocating slavery? What is going on? Why is slavery suddenly, in 2009, looking to some like a good thing?

Slavery is the good? I never thought I would see the day. Talk about a disconnect. This is the greatest disconnect of human history. How can it happen that a country of free men, the richest country to have ever existed and able to provide a higher standard of living for all its people including its poor, suddenly throws itself back in time and into an abyss where there is no freedom? How is it possible that suddenly freedom looks like slavery and slavery looks like freedom? What is the cause of this greatest of all flip-flops?

Until this question gets answered, a Glenn Beck on every street corner will not be able to save us. It's as though we are zombies unable to respond and must go on into the pen. Why? How did we become so frozen, so deadened? How is it possible that the siren's call into the slave pen actually holds some allure?

This question shall be taken up in a future post.

image by Cotter158

What is War?

With the al-Qaeda trials moved to New York City and the United States not dealing with these killers as a military matter, we find ourselves carrying out a purpose that is based in denial: denial of the nature of human being. A lot of questions are raised which you can read about here. Is this the ultimate exposure of the anti-life nature of the Obama presidency? It may be.

What happens to a human being that causes him to go to war against another human being? What is the change that occurs in his mind? Although we think of war as a social phenomenon, at root it isn't. We as individuals are at war with people and ideas all the time. It is part of living.

War occurs when a person comes to see another person not as 'human' in the sense that he has values, desires, feelings, defeats and triumphs and walks around in the neighborhood where you live. Rather he is seen as the embodiment of a purpose that is destructive of one's own life and the lives of those one loves. In other words, this other person or group's existence, as he/they are living it is a threat to one's life.

Since a man must possess at least some remnant of a purpose in order to have an 'alive' life - i.e., anything than other as a dependent on life-support provided by someone else - the issue is that he should not have a purpose but that it should be such that it is aligned with life and not objectively threatening to others' lives. (By being objectively threatening, I mean that an action is physically damaging or threatens to damage a human life. We are not talking "words, just words" here. We are talking about actions which deprive one of the freedom to live - things which physically take or damage a life or that life's property, the material things in the world that possesses and uses to live.)

War is the recognition that one sees a person's or group of persons' purpose, and his/their actions as evidence of such a purpose, as life-threatening and as a consequence needs to take action to stop those actions. It requires a declaration that one has placed them into that status in relation to himself. (If one does not declare the state change of the other person, group or country, then to fight them is to engage in the behavior of the terrorist -a person at war without a declaration of war. I do think it is possible to do this so long as one is conscious of the state change in his own mind. And, in fact in a state of war, it may be valuable to operate underground. But I believe these are strategic questions.) Once war has been declared, the rules for dealing with that person are completely different, night and day different. Reason and persuasion are no longer the tools one can use. One must use force to stop the initiated or potential initiated force.

The focus no longer becomes acting in a way that works for getting along with other people. In war, the focus becomes about acting in a way that destroys the other person or group's ability to carry out its anti-life, specifically anti-my-life, purpose.

It is said that war dehumanizes people. That depends. It depends on where one is standing. If one approaches war as an action treating people not as the embodiment of a purpose but as ordinary human beings living in some non-threatening way, then yes, it would be senseless and dehumanizing. If one approaches war for what it is - fighting an enemy's ability to carry out its life-destroying activities, then it is not dehumanizing. Rather it is life-enhancing and life-ennobling. It is the ultimate stand for life - putting one's own life on the line in favor of life.

People who are pacifists and display signs "War is not the Answer" in their front yards, without specifying the question, are people who act against the nature of human life itself. They pave the streets with gold for the arrival of the evil person by removing their resistance to him. It's my experience that the only thing they really get mad about is if you challenge their view regarding peace. "War is not always bad" is usually sufficient.

I notice Obama speaks like ministers speak. Ministers do not understand the distinction of war and the valid, life-enhancing purpose of war. They seem to always be trying to get people to deal with each other as regular folks in a socially and ideologically non-challenging world, whether that is appropriate or not. They try to make us feel guilty because there is no peace all the while unable to grasp the validity of war. Thus they are forever unable to be a cause for peace.

The thing they all deny is greatness. They treat life as a "boy next door" phenomenon. Humility, turning the other cheek, always being nice, engaging in socially non-challenging activities like gardening, dusting and discussing arcane philosophical ideas.

Greatness in the full sense of the word is a function of purpose. Because a minister likely does not understand purpose (And without reading the Purpose-driven Life, I suspect he doesn't understand it either.) and its requirements, he more often than not undermines the concept of purpose and thus undermines robust, healthy human life. Rather than talk people out of having a purpose and creating a guilt-trip every time they exhibit one, a minister and a lot of other people in the humanities need to get a grip on human nature. A man cannot reach his full potential as a man without a purpose. And yes, he is capable of choosing an anti-life purpose.

It's ironic that Obama who denies man his nature so morally justifies himself in the name of human life. (This contradiction is another topic entirely.) America, at least in its remnant, is a nation of people with strong and powerful purposes. We have been reared in the bosom of freedom where it is up to every man to forge his purpose and go forth in the world. Thus every time Obama says anything, he goes against the grain of who we are. I hear fingernails dragged across my black board.

Obama and his band of anti-life men attract all those who think that being in favor of life is to be nice, not say anything that is not PC, stand up for the little guy and the traditional victims, and strive to fit in rather than have a purpose which some people may oppose. It is because one buys that view of life at some level rather than the true, life-rousing one of purpose that they gravitate toward Obama. He, after all, is going to provide everything that a man without purpose, a man who has given up on the cardinal characteristic of life, self-generation, needs in order to be on life-support. He (and the likes of John Lewis) urges them to become dependent. To be such is a right one is entitled to, they say.

Obama hopes that his band of resuscitated bodies will have just enough energy to vote.

(PS: I am watching the public reaction and the way of reacting to the rise of Sarah Palin. It's my hypothesis that a person's response to Obama and to Palin are polar opposites and that they key on one's sense of life. Is one a prime mover in his life or not. Depending on one's deepest conviction, he will respond to either Palin or Obama, but not both.

These two are opposites: Palin is a woman of the frontier embodied with the spirit of one who isn't waiting for someone else to do the job. If the government is corrupt, clean it up. If we need energy, "drill, baby, drill." If someone besides who you say gets to decide whether you get medical treatment, they are your "death panel." If someone is a part of the al Qaeda gang who plotted 9/11, "hang 'em high." She has shot the moose and dressed him for dinner. She has fished the waters for winter's bounty at the table. She knows who she is. Her political power comes not from the power gods, but from the people's recognition, from that bubbling spring within of which they cannot speak, of who she is. Thus she is powerful.

Obama on the other hand is a man who has been pissed off and slighted from birth. He wears those slights as badges of honor. Every one is a sore which he picks and uses to gets someone to do what he wants. He had "smarts" and people saw this so they supported him, groomed him and lifted him up as their offering to the gods of political power. The power gods liked their offering and so they granted them power. But being a product of those who did his work for him, he is unable to lead. He cannot take a position, he cannot vote, he cannot fashion a rule which keep people from fighting. The gods of power speak too loudly into his ear and he knows that they can remove him from power whenever it looks good to do so. Thus he is powerless.

To John Lewis - for the 2nd day in a row.

To The Honorable Representative from Georgia, John Lewis:

NO. Above all, vote NO, on the health care bill.
Will John Lewis vote for MANDATES and thus, slavery? We will see.
Freedom is the answer. Force and slavery is not the answer.
I will not vote for anyone who votes for this bill. That is my final answer.


Sunday, 11-8-09: Last evening I saw a clip of John Lewis, my representative, before the House of Representatives.

I know John Lewis. When his book Walking with the Wind was published, I went to Barnes & Noble in Buckhead to buy his book and he could sign it. I have it in my library. That evening I was so moved being in his presence that I had to turn away lest I dissolve in tears. In the context of what he did for civil rights, he was great.

But the context has changed and he is no longer great. Never - never - have a I seen a representative who is so out of touch with the requirements of human life that he is a demand that people be made dependent upon the government. Further, he has the temerity to call it the right thing to do. He has acted counter to what he says his life is about - freedom - and instead came down four-square to enslave all of us forever.

No man can possess an economic right - the right to health care - without also creating a slave to provide it. Any man who, at the point of a gun, will force a man to become something less than human in order to do good is an evil man.

Forcing a man to support his neighbor takes the entire action out of the realm of the potential good. A man forced is unable to be good or bad. John Lewis denies that men should possess choice. He cannot trust that men will do what they see as the good. Further he thinks that what he thinks is the good is The Good, as if he has some claim on that knowledge and that it exists in some context which does not depend upon individual people and their lives. Thus he places himself and will now find himself in the same realm as all tyrants. If he had not pulled his gun on us, we could consider what he thinks is good and we might even come to think so ourselves. But not now. John Lewis has sunk as low as a man can sink and whatever good he may have done, he has now transformed himself into a menace to a civil and humane society.

Since these people cast their lot with the wrong side of what a human being is, I bet my life that the people who advocate this are on the wrong side of history. The consequences of this, should it become law, are vast. Slavery does not work. Never did. Never will. The costs are devastating.

Our biggest problem is to see the transformation of the human spirit that follows from enslavement. We have plenty of evidence in this country of those effects. Slavery instills a self-hatred, sprung from powerlessness, that takes generations to erase and then only if it is understood as to how it can be erased. At root it is a transformation in one's relation to power regarding the self. John Lewis has never understood any of this. Thus he seeks to spread the poison of his own spirit over the entire society - hoping that if we are all that way, it will become reality and because it will be the water we swim in, invisible.

By his actions, he is a mighty force to entrap and keep stuck all people who learn to depend on someone else for what they need rather than learn that they can create value, offer it in the world and make it on their own - really they can. And, consequently he makes all our plights worse by his existence. He loves being the victim, playing to the victim and creating ever more victims. This is who John Lewis is, the source of the spirit of John Lewis that enrolls his victims. I'm not impressed.

Freedom is one thing - freedom. One cannot make up for slavery except to free the man enslaved. All attempts to enslave the free for the purpose of reparations for the cost of slavery are beyond possibility. No material good can cause the transformation that must occur in a man's mind. In fact, to distract from this task only causes the effects of slavery to last longer. No transformation can occur until the nature of the free human being is grasped.

And, this is possible. It is possible to experience what freedom in one's spirit is and to know that it exists. But it is not possible until one understands himself as his own and only valid motive power. So long as his behavior is bottom-line caused by his reaction to someone or some thing outside himself, whether it happened yesterday or thirty years ago, rather than he seeking or keeping his own values, he is an enslaved, spiritually impoverished man.

There is a great misunderstanding athwart the country. It's generally believed that nurturing is good while standards and calling to account are bad and should be upended. Consequently we keep everyone a baby so that they can be nurtured within the popular paradigm. What we have not understood is that nurturing applied at the wrong time kills and destroys just as much as lack of nurturing when needed kills and destroys during those times. And this error about how life works has completely infected politics. John Lewis along with many others are flat wrong in their understanding of this principle. We suffer accordingly.

Down with all those who advocate babyhood and slavery - Lewis, Pelosi, Reid, Obama, Michelle and millions of others. They portend a dark, sad world indeed.

Up with freedom - all of those who see what people need, create it, produce it and offer it in free trade. There's the future. There's the incredible lightness of being. There's where the love is. This is the light that America is known for - not John Lewis's horrendous, demoralized, slave-bedecked worldview.