Here We Go Again

[This written in 1943.]

“It is generally recognized that mankind has achieved, since its rise from savagery, a miraculous progress in the realm of its material culture – and none whatever in the realm of its ethics. Our homes are superior to the cave of the Neanderthal man, but our morals are no better than his – worse, if anything, for we do not have his excuse for ignorance. There is no act of inhumanity which he perpetrated and which we do not perpetrate, except that he did not possess our exquisite means of perpetrating it and he could never equal our present scale. In a recently published book (The Spirit of Enterprise by Edgard M. Queeny), the author – intent upon a hymn to human progress – spends five pages describing man’s material triumphs. Then he adds: “Our morals have come a long way too. The mere thought of a feast on a loose piece of human flesh, which to the Bushmen brings mouth-watering longing, is to us horrid and nauseating.” This is all he can offers, without equivocation, for ten thousand years of man’s spiritual growth. And even this claim is open to question, because cannibalism occurred in Soviet Russia in the famines of 1921 and 1933, and God only knows or can bear the sight of what is occurring in Europe now.

“Why has man displayed such magnificent capacity for progress in the material realm and yet remained stagnant on the level of savagery in his spiritual stature? This discrepancy has been recognized, decried, deplored denounced by everyone. It has never been explained. Countless explanations of evil and remedies for it have been offered through the centuries. None of them worked. None of them cured or explained anything.

“Yet that which mankind holds as its moral ideal has been known and accepted for centuries. The basic principle of men’s morality has not changed since the beginning of recorded history. Under their superficial differences of symbolism, ritual and metaphysical justification, all great ethical systems from the Orient up, all religions, all human schools of thought have held a single moral axiom; the idea of selflessness. That which proceeds from love of self is evil; that which proceeds from love of others is good. Self-sacrifice, self-denial and self-renunciation have ever been considered the essence of virtue. In no other matter has mankind held to such total unity, so completely and for so long. Altruism is the doctrine which holds that man must live for others and place others above self. Humanity has proclaimed its moral ideal unanimously. It has never been questioned. It has always been the ideal of altruism. [Later in this chapter, AR notes that the cultures of ancient Greece and capitalist America were at least partial exceptions to this rule. ed.]

“This ideal has never been reached. In spite of its statement and restatement, in every land, in every age, in every language, in spite of its professed acceptance by all, mankind’s history has not been a growing record of benevolence, justice and brother-love, but an accelerating progression of horror, cruelty, and shame. Baffled, men have accepted the explanation that man is essentially evil; man is weak and imperfect; he doesn’t want to do good. The noble ideal of altruism is never quite to be achieved, only approximated; man is immoral by nature.

“But look back at mankind’s record. Every major horror of history was perpetrated – not by reason of and in the name of that which men held as evil, that is , selfishness – but through, by, for and in the name of an altruistic purpose. The Inquisition. Religious wars. Civil wars. The French Revolution. The German Revolution. The Russian Revolution. No act of selfishness has ever equaled the carnages perpetrated by disciples of altruism. Nor has any egoist ever roused masses of fanatical followers by enjoining them to go out to fight for his personal gain. Every leader gathered men through the slogans of a selfless purpose, through the plea for this self-sacrifice to a high altruistic goal: the salvation of others’ souls, the spread of enlightenment, the common good of their state.

“It is said that self-seeking hypocrites used these virtuous sentiments to delude their followers and achieve personal ends. Doubtless, there have been such and a great many of them. But they never caused the bloody terrors caused by the purest 'idealists.' The worst butchers were the most sincere. Robespierre asked and wished nothing for himself. Lenin asked and wished nothing for himself. But the record of Attila is that of an amateur compared to theirs. At the apex of every great tragedy of mankind there stands the figure of an incorruptible altruist. Yet, after every disaster men have said: 'The ideal was right, but Robespierre was the wrong man to put it into practice,' (of Torquemada, or Cromwell, or Lenin, or Hitler, or Stalin) and have gone on to try it again. [Watch The Triumph of the Will and notice how sincere Hitler is when he expresses his ideal for all the German people. SCB]

“But what is one to think of creatures who are willing, century after century, to bear every form of agony, every kind of martyrdom, for the sake of that which they consider their moral ideal? Are they creatures devoid of moral instinct? Is not the determination to act according to one’s conception of right, no matter what the price, precisely the attribute of a high moral sense? Men have been robbed, enslaved, tortured, slaughtered in the name of altruism. They have accepted, forgiven, and borne it, because their ideal demanded it of them. The price they have paid in unspeakable suffering should have granted them, at least, a badge of virtue.

“But the nature of their ideal has robbed them even of this earned honor.

“A true premise, once accepted, leads to a greater truth and a clearer knowledge with each subsequent step deduced from it. A false premise leads to a greater falsehood and a blacker evil, until, followed to its ultimate conclusion, it brings total destruction, as it must. The spiritual tragedy of mankind has now reached this last step. The spectacle of horror which the world presents at this moment has never been equaled and cannot be surpassed. This is the end of the blind alley of men’s thinking. And there is no way out – save all the way back, to the beginning, to the first principle which permitted men to be led into this.

“The ideal of altruism has now taken its ultimate toll. We are the witnesses of its climax. We see mankind destroying itself before our eyes. We see the price it is paying. We glance back at its history and we see the prince it has paid. But we look on and say: 'This noble ideal is beyond human nature, because men are imperfect and evil.'

“Isn’t it time to stop and to question that noble ideal instead?”

[This was written by Ayn Rand, September 4, 1943, in the middle of WWII. The source for this excerpt is Journals of Ayn Rand. This writing was never published in this form during her lifetime. It became the basis of Atlas Shrugged and the final form of her philosophy. After the publishing of Atlas Shrugged, she worked to present her philosophy in non-fiction form and published many books and articles to that effect. Fifty two years after Atlas Shrugged published in 1957, people are looking for a new philosophical basis for human action and the organization of society. Many can see that the United States is now poised to be the last great country to topple into this same abyss.

Ayn Rand's ideas are no less true today. We are in the grip of a major call to this same destructive ideal carried out by his dictatorship in the form of Barack Obama. Socialism and dictatorship fail wherever tried. But it is not socialism per se that has his words live for people. It is this horrible, stinking moral ideal which has been spread through every institution and church. The attempt to achieve it will not achieve it.

But I don't think that Obama cares to achieve it. His actions belie his rhetoric. He does care to use what you erroneously consider the best within you to mold you to his power. This is how he keeps his motives invisible to the unquestioning masses.

It is the moral ideal that is false as an ideal. People are not inherently evil. They possess free will and choose whether to be right or wrong, good or evil.

A person who is called to make a difference for other people as his primary motivation for living in the world is called by this error. It is not the proper call to goodness. No.

You do that which you want your life to be comprised of, present the results of your work, and when someone wants what you have to offer, he will buy it and accept it – of his own free will. He doesn't have to accept YOU. You've done that already if your moral base is correct. But this motivation depends on what Rand later calls the Virtue of Selfishness.

America has a fairly strong grasp of rational self-interest, rational egoism. Dont' let that go.

To hell, I say, with the sonorous siren song of Barack Obama. SCB]

The Man Who Led Our Olympic Team

Los Angeles Times, August 9, 2008

This article is from TIA Daily • August 10, 2008 • If you choose, subscribe here.

Thanks, Mr. Tracinski, for this inspiring article. I recommend following the links he included as they flesh out the story. The ones about Mr. Lomong are all inspiring.


Who We Are
Lopez Lomong Represents America
by Robert Tracinski


Amid the gargantuan spectacle of Friday's opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics, there was a much smaller detail that really caught my attention: the story of the man whom the US delegation chose as its flag-bearer for the Parade of Nations.

I don't begrudge the Chinese their desire to put on a spectacular display. China has achieved a remarkable transformation in the past 30 years, raising itself up from the abject poverty of a nation brutalized by its Communist dictators, to become one of the world's fastest-growing economies with an increasingly vibrant culture.

And I was particularly encouraged by the way in which China chose to celebrate its moment at the center of the world's attention. Like most Olympic opening ceremonies, it was a sprawling event without much in the way of a connected narrative, but it seemed to be mostly built around two themes. The first theme was the Four Great Inventions of Ancient China: paper, moveable type, gunpowder (represented by fireworks, of course), and the compass. The second theme was China's openness to the rest of the world, a theme emphasized when the ceremony's pantomimed overview of Chinese history skipped forward from the silk road and the 15th-century sea voyages of explorer Zheng He to the opening up of China to the global economy in 1978—skipping pretty much everything in between, including Mao Tse Tung and Communism. This is perhaps no surprise, when you consider the background of the ceremony's director, filmmaker Zhang Yimou, who as a young man suffered through the lost decade of Mao's Cultural Revolution.

My impression is that the people of China are not eager to remember the horrors of Mao's rule, because they are looking forward to the better life they are beginning to enjoy. And China's rulers are not eager to remind their subjects of that history, because it does not reflect well on the moral legitimacy of the Communist Party.

So the upshot of the opening ceremony could be boiled down to: China wants to be a thriving part of the world again. It was as good a message as you could expect.

Yet there is a contradiction behind that message, and America sent its own messenger to remind the world of this fact.

The Chinese people as a whole are no doubt sincere in the aspirations they projected at the opening ceremonies. But the relationship of China's rulers to the world is not nearly as benevolent. China's government has maintained what one analyst calls a Zombie Empire of failed and dying dictatorships. Like the zombies of folklore, these states are kept in a state of artificial animation by Chinese support—in exchange for doing China's bidding. And one of the zombies in China's empire is Sudan, which has been shunned by every other civilized nation for its complicity in mass murder and war crimes in its province of Darfur.

That is why the US Olympic team made such a profound statement by choosing as its flag-bearer the middle-distance runner Lopez Lomong. China made its statement to the world last Friday with masses of people—2,008 drummers, 2,008 Tai Chi masters, and so on—while America answered it, quietly, with a single individual.

Lomong's story is a both heartbreaking and inspirational. He was one of the famous "Lost Boys of Sudan." Stolen from his family by Sudanese Muslims as part of their war against Christians and animists in Southern Sudan, he was taken to what was basically a death camp for children—if you can imagine such a thing, which I hope you can't. With the help of some older boys from his village, he escaped and ran for many miles to a refugee camp in Kenya, where he lived in squalor for ten years until he was brought to the US by an American charity.

This is the bare outline of a story that is told movingly in Lomong's own words and in many other reports in the past few weeks (see here and here especially).

It is a story full of details no one would dare to make up in a Hollywood movie—like this one, from a Washington Post report: Once, in Kenya, he was given five shillings for watering cows. It was his only money but he never spent it, keeping it for the right moment. He heard others talking about the 2000 Olympics in Sydney and how, on the only TV set in the area, five miles away, they might watch it. So Lomong and friends walked five miles to the black-and-white TV only to find out that, for each event you watched, you had to pay—five shillings.

That day, Lopez Lomong saw sprinter Michael Johnson run and win, stand on the podium in a US uniform and cry as his anthem was played. "I want to run as fast as that guy," Lomong says he thought. "And I want to wear that same uniform."

What stands out most from the story is Lomong's gratitude to and love for America. Lomong became a US citizen last year and told reporters, "Now I'm not just one of the 'Lost Boys.' I'm an American." The Lost Boy has been found. "Before, I ran from danger and death," he says. "Now, I run for sport. It would be an honor to represent the country that saved me and showed me the way." And describing what it means to him to carry his new country's flag, Lomong says, "The American flag means everything in my life—everything that describes me, coming from another country and going through all the stages that I have to become a US citizen. This is another amazing step for me in celebrating being an American."

If you want to know why Lomong loves America so much, check out a terrific interview with his foster parents, Robert and Barbara Rogers.

There has been some discussion about whether athletes at the Olympics should try to make some kind of political statement about causes like Darfur or Tibet or China's record on individual rights. But Lomong makes the most effective statement of all. He makes a statement just by being who he is—and by what he implies about who we are as Americans.

An estimated four billion people watched the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics, and in every broadcast in every country around the world, the broadcasters would have had to explain, as Lomong led the American delegation into the stadium, who this person was, why America is represented by a young black man from Sudan, and how it is that in America a lost and penniless refugee can become an elite athlete who is chosen by his peers to represent, as one athlete put it, "the epitome of the American dream."

It is a story that says everything about the freedom and opportunity we enjoy in America, and about the benevolence and generosity that follow from it. And one could not imagine a more pointed or effective contrast to the policies of China's rulers.

Vitus

Vitus, a Swiss movie, hit the big screen in 2007. It won a Swiss film award that year.

I'd never heard of it. One website said upon release, its box office was $28,092; another said its US box office was $186,492.

It is about an intelligent child prodigy, Vitus, who is controlled when she realizes she has a real wunderkind on her hands. Her control goes too far and he decides he wants to be an ordinary kid. He uses his intelligence "being ordinary" to find his way to autonomy.

Spiritually, this is one of the best movies, among a very, very few, I have ever seen.

It is a heart warmer, but it goes far beyond that. A heart warmer may produce warm fuzzy feelings, but it doesn't produce the feeling of sheer joy and vitality that we all seek although we may have given up on it. A worked-for achievement does that. My spirit soared seeing this movie. In fact, I thought I would burst. My soul heard the music of its possibility. My mind was spinning.

Vitus is the healthy ego. He may go through rough times, but his spirit and intelligence is unable to bend to the dictates of society around him.

In Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, she describes this feeling. "She sat listening to the music. It was a symphony of triumph. The notes flowed up, they spoke of rising and they were the rising itself, they were the essence and the form of upward motion, they seemed to embody every human act and thought that had ascent as its motive. It was a sunburst of sound, breaking out of hiding and spreading open. It had the freedom of release and the tension of purpose. It swept space clean, and left nothing but the joy of an unobstructed effort. Only a faint echo within the sounds spoke of that from which the music had escaped, but spoke in laughing astonishment at the discovery that there was no ugliness or pain, and there never had had to be. It was the song of an immense deliverance."

Yes, deliverance. I got it.

The Role of Spirituality in Politics

(This speech delivered to the Fellowship of Reason, July 6, 2008 http://www.fellowshipofreason.com/)

This year we are seeing a phenomenon in politics that I have not seen in my lifetime.

In the 60s, John and Jackie Kennedy added an esthetic level to politics with their youth, style and grace. They captured the imagination of the country and even though the election was close and the politics not especially noteworthy, they still are remembered by many as the high point for defining American presidential style.

This year we have the candidacy of Barack Obama. Although some people try to compare Barack and Michelle to the Kennedys, I don’t buy it and think it is a stretch. It is true, they are working on a classy presentation, but it doesn’t come off natural to them, at least for Michelle, in the way it was for the Kennedys.

But there is something natural to Obama: The spiritual.

He speaks in the measured cadence and repeated phrases of a practiced preacher. He is charismatic and eloquent. Girls swoon and faint when they get near him. The cheering and screaming in his presence goes beyond the meaning of what he is saying. Obama is the apotheosis of a rock star.

His candidacy is a spiritual quest. He promises hope and change. Don’t all spiritual quests imply hope for change? When one is filled with despair and life is meaningless, is not a spiritual quest needed? “Surely there must be something greater than, more exultant than my little life. I hope so. Obama says there is. Let me follow him.”

Obama has arrogated to himself the role of the person who is going to lead the way and heal the rancor of our divided, angry nation. Obama is going to have us rise above our pettiness and even suggests correcting our wrong-from-the-start actions. Follow him and we will transform this entire mess we find ourselves victim of.

When I go to Obama’s website, I find a beautiful website. Unlike the others, the graphics are extremely well done and consistent. For a political website, it is an extraordinary esthetic, i.e. spiritual, experience.

The colors are red, white and blue except they are not the navy blue and the robust red that we know as our country’s colors. Obama’s blue is a lighter, a medium blue with shading suggesting a sky. His red is a toned-down, slightly-grayed red such that it isn’t so definite nor bold. It is quieter, doesn’t excite too much, and let’s you be with it all without feeling threatened.

McCain’s site, on the other hand has a picture of him in front of furling flags of a deep blue background with white stars and gold fringe and is associated with the pomp and grandeur of the elected office. (This is not an endorsement of McCain - just a comparison of websites and what in us to which they appeal.)

Obama’s website’s header has Obama’s symbol of a rising sun over a red and white striped landscape placed over the right shoulder of a picture of Obama dressed in a white shirt and a silvery grey tie. A halo effect of a lighter sky surrounds his shoulders such that his white shirt and the whitened sky merge as one at some places of this image. To the right of this image are the words: “I’m asking you to believe. Not just in my ability to bring about real change in Washington . . . I’m asking you to believe in yours.” At the bottom of the page is the statement: “This website is powered by Hope.”

Clearly Obama is appealing to spiritual aspirations of a different order than whatever McCain is appealing to. I don’t deny that the office of President of the United States has a spiritual component to it. My question is: What spiritually can our President provide? Asking that, maybe we can know whether Obama is on the right track in his spiritual appeal to America?

The United States has the clearest principled founding document in the world. In the Declaration of Independence, we declare that “all men are created equal with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness – that to secure these Rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, - “

This agreement by which we live and true ourselves to in the course of our political life sets the standard for the spiritual nourishment that we need from the government. When our government is upholding this agreement and clearly acting in accordance with it, our spirit is buoyed and we feel confident to live our lives in the freedom that is ours by right. We are free to pursue our happiness. We are happy that our government is doing the job it was designed to do.

Witness the reaction to the Supreme Court’s recent decision upholding the Second Amendment Right to keep and bear Arms. Many people got goosebumps when they heard this decision. This is the most life affirming court decision that I remember other than Roe vs. Wade, the decision affirming a woman’s right to her body. The United States may be the only country where the citizens may keep and bear Arms for the reason of keeping their politicians and government in check. With government running amok untethered by its duty to provide for our liberty, its about time we put these guys on notice.

When it does not uphold these principles and the lines of proper action are unclear, we become spiritually diminished and threatened. Upset, irritation and anger result.

There can be plenty of disagreement as to how to carry out the simple principles set forth in the Declaration of Independence and in fact, we all know that it is the nature of government to encroach on the rights of the people, infringe their liberty and impede their pursuit of happiness.

I assert that America’s spiritual health coincides with the government hewing itself to the principles for which it was founded.

Obama, however, is not presenting himself as a person committed to carrying out our founding principles stated. He nowhere refers to them and when asked about his view of one or more of them, he equivocates, coming down on both sides of the issue – as he did with the Second Amendment. He is committed to Change and Hope, two amorphous meaningless words nowhere in our defining documents. Change to what? Hope for what?

Because Obama is not grounded in the principles of our founding documents and there is a good bit of evidence to say that he simply doesn’t agree with them, believing instead in class warfare and the divisions among men, he must find an alternate spirituality with some attraction in order to attract voters. I say he is fashioning himself as The Savior – the one who will provide the change and the hope that those attracted to this kind of spirituality can go for. They’ve bought it many times before. Why wouldn’t they buy it now.

He is fashioning himself, not as a proponent of ideas, but as the personality that is going to take us to the Promised Land, that heaven beyond our ordinary lives. This is why I think his website graphics and preacher-ly cadences evoke these otherworldly associations.

As an aside, many of the emblems that designate constituencies he hopes to attract are basically a circle in a blue background. Each one is elaborated to designate that particular constituency. The circle in a blue field is reminiscent of the UN flag, a world organization, not a national organization. Again, “heaven” is beyond our ordinary lives and ordinary boundaries.
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My conclusion is that his appeal to the kind of spirituality he seeks to evoke is fundamentally inappropriate to a political campaign in the United States of America.
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The constant polling of people gives us data that he is winning. I don’t really believe them at this point primarily because the main stream media has been so wrong in its predictions of past elections. But, then again, they could be right.

There are two things that worry me most about this election. First, have the practical, logical, reasonable people who are responsible for their own lives and that constitute the bulk of this country slipped into the minority; and have those who think they can profit by punishing the rich corporations and individuals or feel guilty for the success they have achieved or think it is time for a man with a different skin color regardless of his ideas to run the country become the majority?

Second, will Obama as he confidently embraces contradiction upon contradiction and eschews being governed by reality take on the status of a God? When he embraced Bush’s faith based program and said he will make that program the moral center of his administration, I fell silent. This was a daringly bold move. He blew off all his past condemnations of Bush and any likenesses of Bush as even remotely viable in this election. He risked his Hate Bush constituency. With this action he no longer gave heed to foe or contradictory stands or anything by which we measure a man. He is in the process of extricating himself from the realm of ordinary man. Either he will find himself licking his wounds at the curb because we judge him absurd or we will be drawn to him because of our fascination. Maybe he will become an uberman. Will we raise Obama on high to lead us wherever HIS heart desires in any moment of OUR future?

Why do I NOT think that ANYONE’s spiritual future lies there?