I don't pay attention to candidates until May or June of an election year. In 2008 I paid attention to Obama in May and by June, I knew he was a narcissist who would divide and trash our country. By June of 2016, when I first paid attention to Trump, I knew I would vote for him because he understood not just that the government had become unreal but that the government had become more unreal than it had to be because of evil people riding the process forward even as they suppressed work that would have improved governmental systems so that those revised systems could handle greater complexity and load.
That ad spoke to me as someone in the know, someone who truly understood that our government had become unreal not entirely but mostly because evil people acting with intent for over a century had made it so. That's why I picked up on the Q posts in early November of 2017. At last, someone (Trump and his backers) were taking on the evil. That is specifically what I heard in that ad.
It is not an accident that Trump has spent so much time forcing the courts to create many precedents designed to defang the evil influence, make the government more transparent, expose the capture of our electoral procedures, and otherwise seek to return to early principles but this time with modern methods.
I would say 20% of the electorate in 2016 knew that Trump was talking about the evil influences that had forced our government and society much farther along toward unreality than the normal process of increasing societal complexity would have led us. You needed a fourth type of reading for this ad, Martin. As a lived experience, I am adding it. Right from the start, 20% of us knew, and for the very first time in decades, we felt hope.
fascinating piece, Martin. And I see you have posted another taking a software debug analysis type approach - can 't wait to read that!.
Just a couple of comments:
the deeper conflict revealed is good versus evil - both populism and liberalism can be formed for, or attached to, both good and evil -society's institutions can be taken over by evil even when they began as fair and honest operating functions .( hope i haven't mangled your terminology here too much!) .
Yes Donald Trump cannot correct, reset the misaligned institutions, drain the swamp globally all by himself. So people had to become aware and be given the hope that there were good people to align with who understood where and why institutions and roles had gone awry and were fighting back (lawfully). Hence too, the drive and encouragement for 'local action' to people everywhere to be those people- or support those people -attempting the corrections and attempting to drain the swamps and stop corruption.
You've decided to take up ethics as a direct science. You are not the first. Notwithstanding the institutional references, these "congregations" of human activity are only populated by individuals. Individuals whom have, likely, never had an objective philosophical construct in their lives, of which they can source attribution. I took five years testing the following under "load". Enjoy!
The Objectivist Ethics
by Ayn Rand, From The Virtue of Selfishness
Based on a lecture delivered in February 1961 at the University of Wisconsin, this essay was first published in The Virtue of Selfishness (1964). Rand also delivered a version on radio and, in a separate radio program, answered questions on the subject. The radio address lasts 56 minutes and the Q&A lasts 36 minutes.
Since I am to speak on the Objectivist Ethics, I shall begin by quoting its best representative — John Galt, in Atlas Shrugged:
“Through centuries of scourges and disasters, brought about by your code of morality, you have cried that your code had been broken, that the scourges were punishment for breaking it, that men were too weak and too selfish to spill all the blood it required. You damned man, you damned existence, you damned this earth, but never dared to question your code. . . . You went on crying that your code was noble, but human nature was not good enough to practice it. And no one rose to ask the question: Good? — by what standard?
“You wanted to know John Galt’s identity. I am the man who has asked that question.
“Yes, this is an age of moral crisis. . . . Your moral code has reached its climax, the blind alley at the end of its course. And if you wish to go on living, what you now need is not to return to morality . . . but to discover it.”
What is morality, or ethics? It is a code of values to guide man’s choices and actions — the choices and actions that determine the purpose and the course of his life. Ethics, as a science, deals with discovering and defining such a code.
The first question that has to be answered, as a precondition of any attempt to define, to judge or to accept any specific system of ethics, is: Why does man need a code of values?
Let me stress this. The first question is not: What particular code of values should man accept? The first question is: Does man need values at all — and why?
Is the concept of value, of “good or evil” an arbitrary human invention, unrelated to, underived from and unsupported by any facts of reality — or is it based on a metaphysical fact, on an unalterable condition of man’s existence? (I use the word “metaphysical” to mean: that which pertains to reality, to the nature of things, to existence.) Does an arbitrary human convention, a mere custom, decree that man must guide his actions by a set of principles — or is there a fact of reality that demands it? Is ethics the province of whims: of personal emotions, social edicts and mystic revelations — or is it the province of reason? Is ethics a subjective luxury — or an objective necessity?
In the sorry record of the history of mankind’s ethics — with a few rare, and unsuccessful, exceptions — moralists have regarded ethics as the province of whims, that is: of the irrational. Some of them did so explicitly, by intention — others implicitly, by default. A “whim” is a desire experienced by a person who does not know and does not care to discover its cause.
No philosopher has given a rational, objectively demonstrable, scientific answer to the question of why man needs a code of values. So long as that question remained unanswered, no rational, scientific, objective code of ethics could be discovered or defined. The greatest of all philosophers, Aristotle, did not regard ethics as an exact science; he based his ethical system on observations of what the noble and wise men of his time chose to do, leaving unanswered the questions of: why they chose to do it and why he evaluated them as noble and wise.
Most philosophers took the existence of ethics for granted, as the given, as a historical fact, and were not concerned with discovering its metaphysical cause or objective validation. Many of them attempted to break the traditional monopoly of mysticism in the field of ethics and, allegedly, to define a rational, scientific, nonreligious morality. But their attempts consisted of trying to justify them on social grounds, merely substituting society for God.
The avowed mystics held the arbitrary, unaccountable “will of God” as the standard of the good and as the validation of their ethics. The neomystics replaced it with “the good of society,” thus collapsing into the circularity of a definition such as “the standard of the good is that which is good for society.” This meant, in logic — and, today, in worldwide practice — that “society” stands above any principles of ethics, since it is the source, standard and criterion of ethics, since “the good” is whatever it wills, whatever it happens to assert as its own welfare and pleasure. This meant that “society” may do anything it pleases, since “the good” is whatever it chooses to do because it chooses to do it. And — since there is no such entity as “society,” since society is only a number of individual men — this meant that some men (the majority or any gang that claims to be its spokesman) are ethically entitled to pursue any whims (or any atrocities) they desire to pursue, while other men are ethically obliged to spend their lives in the service of that gang’s desires.
This could hardly be called rational, yet most philosophers have now decided to declare that reason has failed, that ethics is outside the power of reason, that no rational ethics can ever be defined, and that in the field of ethics — in the choice of his values, of his actions, of his pursuits, of his life’s goals — man must be guided by something other than reason. By what? Faith — instinct — intuition — revelation — feeling — taste — urge — wish — whim. Today, as in the past, most philosophers agree that the ultimate standard of ethics is whim (they call it “arbitrary postulate” or “subjective choice” or “emotional commitment”) — and the battle is only over the question of whose whim: one’s own or society’s or the dictator’s or God’s. Whatever else they may disagree about, today’s moralists agree that ethics is a subjective issue and that the three things barred from its field are: reason — mind — reality.
If you wonder why the world is now collapsing to a lower and ever lower rung of hell, this is the reason.
If you want to save civilization, it is this premise of modern ethics — and of all ethical history — that you must challenge.
To challenge the basic premise of any discipline, one must begin at the beginning. In ethics, one must begin by asking: What are values? Why does man need them?
“Value” is that which one acts to gain and/or keep. The concept “value” is not a primary; it presupposes an answer to the question: of value to whom and for what? It presupposes an entity capable of acting to achieve a goal in the face of an alternative. Where no alternative exists, no goals and no values are possible.
I quote from Galt’s speech: “There is only one fundamental alternative in the universe: existence or nonexistence — and it pertains to a single class of entities: to living organisms. The existence of inanimate matter is unconditional, the existence of life is not: it depends on a specific course of action. Matter is indestructible, it changes its forms, but it cannot cease to exist. It is only a living organism that faces a constant alternative: the issue of life or death. Life is a process of self-sustaining and self-generated action. If an organism fails in that action, it dies; its chemical elements remain, but its life goes out of existence. It is only the concept of ‘Life’ that makes the concept of ‘Value’ possible. It is only to a living entity that things can be good or evil.”
Institutions are not living, yet create a buffer for those living entities that populate them. Immunity .... in good faith. At the same time the vast population of humanity has decided, amidst all their creature comforts, to arrest the development (DEVELOPE-MENT) of mind. The substitution of a quasi-hedonistic lifestyle of comfort precludes the awareness, and therefore effort, to rise to the challenge of intrusion of daily/lifetime endeavors.
The root of these problems is philosophical.
The root of these problems is personal.
Any organism that gets to comfortable within it's environment; and then subjected to great change/upheaval is prone to personal harm/death or species extinction.
Were it not for consistent, patterned analogies I might fall into a reader category of 'confused' but as it is am curious, intrigued and mostly learning. Your glossary here are not disconnected from previous posts, but brought forward so that terms like SGO almost smile as recognizable when dumped from parent process (Ad). I should comment on content over pattern, and that'll take more than one reading. Debugging is always an art. Thank you
( commenting on this article, and especially the one that follows )
I don't pay attention to candidates until May or June of an election year. In 2008 I paid attention to Obama in May and by June, I knew he was a narcissist who would divide and trash our country. By June of 2016, when I first paid attention to Trump, I knew I would vote for him because he understood not just that the government had become unreal but that the government had become more unreal than it had to be because of evil people riding the process forward even as they suppressed work that would have improved governmental systems so that those revised systems could handle greater complexity and load.
That ad spoke to me as someone in the know, someone who truly understood that our government had become unreal not entirely but mostly because evil people acting with intent for over a century had made it so. That's why I picked up on the Q posts in early November of 2017. At last, someone (Trump and his backers) were taking on the evil. That is specifically what I heard in that ad.
It is not an accident that Trump has spent so much time forcing the courts to create many precedents designed to defang the evil influence, make the government more transparent, expose the capture of our electoral procedures, and otherwise seek to return to early principles but this time with modern methods.
I would say 20% of the electorate in 2016 knew that Trump was talking about the evil influences that had forced our government and society much farther along toward unreality than the normal process of increasing societal complexity would have led us. You needed a fourth type of reading for this ad, Martin. As a lived experience, I am adding it. Right from the start, 20% of us knew, and for the very first time in decades, we felt hope.
fascinating piece, Martin. And I see you have posted another taking a software debug analysis type approach - can 't wait to read that!.
Just a couple of comments:
the deeper conflict revealed is good versus evil - both populism and liberalism can be formed for, or attached to, both good and evil -society's institutions can be taken over by evil even when they began as fair and honest operating functions .( hope i haven't mangled your terminology here too much!) .
Yes Donald Trump cannot correct, reset the misaligned institutions, drain the swamp globally all by himself. So people had to become aware and be given the hope that there were good people to align with who understood where and why institutions and roles had gone awry and were fighting back (lawfully). Hence too, the drive and encouragement for 'local action' to people everywhere to be those people- or support those people -attempting the corrections and attempting to drain the swamps and stop corruption.
You've decided to take up ethics as a direct science. You are not the first. Notwithstanding the institutional references, these "congregations" of human activity are only populated by individuals. Individuals whom have, likely, never had an objective philosophical construct in their lives, of which they can source attribution. I took five years testing the following under "load". Enjoy!
The Objectivist Ethics
by Ayn Rand, From The Virtue of Selfishness
Based on a lecture delivered in February 1961 at the University of Wisconsin, this essay was first published in The Virtue of Selfishness (1964). Rand also delivered a version on radio and, in a separate radio program, answered questions on the subject. The radio address lasts 56 minutes and the Q&A lasts 36 minutes.
Since I am to speak on the Objectivist Ethics, I shall begin by quoting its best representative — John Galt, in Atlas Shrugged:
“Through centuries of scourges and disasters, brought about by your code of morality, you have cried that your code had been broken, that the scourges were punishment for breaking it, that men were too weak and too selfish to spill all the blood it required. You damned man, you damned existence, you damned this earth, but never dared to question your code. . . . You went on crying that your code was noble, but human nature was not good enough to practice it. And no one rose to ask the question: Good? — by what standard?
“You wanted to know John Galt’s identity. I am the man who has asked that question.
“Yes, this is an age of moral crisis. . . . Your moral code has reached its climax, the blind alley at the end of its course. And if you wish to go on living, what you now need is not to return to morality . . . but to discover it.”
What is morality, or ethics? It is a code of values to guide man’s choices and actions — the choices and actions that determine the purpose and the course of his life. Ethics, as a science, deals with discovering and defining such a code.
The first question that has to be answered, as a precondition of any attempt to define, to judge or to accept any specific system of ethics, is: Why does man need a code of values?
Let me stress this. The first question is not: What particular code of values should man accept? The first question is: Does man need values at all — and why?
Is the concept of value, of “good or evil” an arbitrary human invention, unrelated to, underived from and unsupported by any facts of reality — or is it based on a metaphysical fact, on an unalterable condition of man’s existence? (I use the word “metaphysical” to mean: that which pertains to reality, to the nature of things, to existence.) Does an arbitrary human convention, a mere custom, decree that man must guide his actions by a set of principles — or is there a fact of reality that demands it? Is ethics the province of whims: of personal emotions, social edicts and mystic revelations — or is it the province of reason? Is ethics a subjective luxury — or an objective necessity?
In the sorry record of the history of mankind’s ethics — with a few rare, and unsuccessful, exceptions — moralists have regarded ethics as the province of whims, that is: of the irrational. Some of them did so explicitly, by intention — others implicitly, by default. A “whim” is a desire experienced by a person who does not know and does not care to discover its cause.
No philosopher has given a rational, objectively demonstrable, scientific answer to the question of why man needs a code of values. So long as that question remained unanswered, no rational, scientific, objective code of ethics could be discovered or defined. The greatest of all philosophers, Aristotle, did not regard ethics as an exact science; he based his ethical system on observations of what the noble and wise men of his time chose to do, leaving unanswered the questions of: why they chose to do it and why he evaluated them as noble and wise.
Most philosophers took the existence of ethics for granted, as the given, as a historical fact, and were not concerned with discovering its metaphysical cause or objective validation. Many of them attempted to break the traditional monopoly of mysticism in the field of ethics and, allegedly, to define a rational, scientific, nonreligious morality. But their attempts consisted of trying to justify them on social grounds, merely substituting society for God.
The avowed mystics held the arbitrary, unaccountable “will of God” as the standard of the good and as the validation of their ethics. The neomystics replaced it with “the good of society,” thus collapsing into the circularity of a definition such as “the standard of the good is that which is good for society.” This meant, in logic — and, today, in worldwide practice — that “society” stands above any principles of ethics, since it is the source, standard and criterion of ethics, since “the good” is whatever it wills, whatever it happens to assert as its own welfare and pleasure. This meant that “society” may do anything it pleases, since “the good” is whatever it chooses to do because it chooses to do it. And — since there is no such entity as “society,” since society is only a number of individual men — this meant that some men (the majority or any gang that claims to be its spokesman) are ethically entitled to pursue any whims (or any atrocities) they desire to pursue, while other men are ethically obliged to spend their lives in the service of that gang’s desires.
This could hardly be called rational, yet most philosophers have now decided to declare that reason has failed, that ethics is outside the power of reason, that no rational ethics can ever be defined, and that in the field of ethics — in the choice of his values, of his actions, of his pursuits, of his life’s goals — man must be guided by something other than reason. By what? Faith — instinct — intuition — revelation — feeling — taste — urge — wish — whim. Today, as in the past, most philosophers agree that the ultimate standard of ethics is whim (they call it “arbitrary postulate” or “subjective choice” or “emotional commitment”) — and the battle is only over the question of whose whim: one’s own or society’s or the dictator’s or God’s. Whatever else they may disagree about, today’s moralists agree that ethics is a subjective issue and that the three things barred from its field are: reason — mind — reality.
If you wonder why the world is now collapsing to a lower and ever lower rung of hell, this is the reason.
If you want to save civilization, it is this premise of modern ethics — and of all ethical history — that you must challenge.
To challenge the basic premise of any discipline, one must begin at the beginning. In ethics, one must begin by asking: What are values? Why does man need them?
“Value” is that which one acts to gain and/or keep. The concept “value” is not a primary; it presupposes an answer to the question: of value to whom and for what? It presupposes an entity capable of acting to achieve a goal in the face of an alternative. Where no alternative exists, no goals and no values are possible.
I quote from Galt’s speech: “There is only one fundamental alternative in the universe: existence or nonexistence — and it pertains to a single class of entities: to living organisms. The existence of inanimate matter is unconditional, the existence of life is not: it depends on a specific course of action. Matter is indestructible, it changes its forms, but it cannot cease to exist. It is only a living organism that faces a constant alternative: the issue of life or death. Life is a process of self-sustaining and self-generated action. If an organism fails in that action, it dies; its chemical elements remain, but its life goes out of existence. It is only the concept of ‘Life’ that makes the concept of ‘Value’ possible. It is only to a living entity that things can be good or evil.”
Institutions are not living, yet create a buffer for those living entities that populate them. Immunity .... in good faith. At the same time the vast population of humanity has decided, amidst all their creature comforts, to arrest the development (DEVELOPE-MENT) of mind. The substitution of a quasi-hedonistic lifestyle of comfort precludes the awareness, and therefore effort, to rise to the challenge of intrusion of daily/lifetime endeavors.
The root of these problems is philosophical.
The root of these problems is personal.
Any organism that gets to comfortable within it's environment; and then subjected to great change/upheaval is prone to personal harm/death or species extinction.
Were it not for consistent, patterned analogies I might fall into a reader category of 'confused' but as it is am curious, intrigued and mostly learning. Your glossary here are not disconnected from previous posts, but brought forward so that terms like SGO almost smile as recognizable when dumped from parent process (Ad). I should comment on content over pattern, and that'll take more than one reading. Debugging is always an art. Thank you
( commenting on this article, and especially the one that follows )