Since the emergence of Plato on western thought the west has been consistently dissolving into an abysmal state of human consciousness. The renaissance period almost swept this thinking away and came very close to being the fire in the mind of man that should, in all practical regards, be burning inside of us as we reach the outer planets and nearby stars. Why is the fire of the human soul dying and why have we failed to reach the stars and the greatest potential in every individual soul?
The answer is: Philosophy
A diabolically tragic error was made when Rene Descartes made a deal with the Roman Catholic Church to place the minds of men and their consciousness under the power of the church and their bodies, and the physical world, to the sciences.
Man had already been split in two by Plato’s metaphysics, leaving man: A soulless Body and a Bodiless Mind that the God’s impressed forms of reality on. To which man was capable of some action but not much more than a robot body running autonomously or a Dictaphone receiving orders from the nuomenal world to steer the body’s course. Descartes resigned himself helplessly to the irrational bromides of the church: “That only God holds the knowledge of absolute reality and the universe.”
The work of Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas and Rene Descartes brought the beginnings of a rational metaphysics that integrated mind and body throughout the renaissance period. The church rallied for control of the soul against a growingly enlightened people. It was beginning to lose its grasp during the emergence of the modern age. Then Immanual Kant emerged on the intellectual and scholarly scene in Germany in the mid 1700’s. Immanual Kant was brought up under a strict religious piety and had a deep hatred for the mind and the material world. He hated the mind and reason and desperately sought to restore the Platonistic metaphysics of the nuomenal world of forms, and a God-inspired epistemology back to the minds of men. His life’s work was to fan the dying embers of faith for the Roman Catholic Church and the intellectuals of his day.
His work and teachings were widely embraced by European Intellectuals and the intellectual youths in early American Aristocracy whose parents could afford a proper European education. His role in the history of philosophy was monumental to the intellectual elitists prattling ‘superior knowledge of reality’ while simultaneously destroying the minds of productive individuals. He worked to continue and reinforce Plato’s Mind / Body dichotomy, restore God as the ultimate Metaphysical source of reality, thereby reducing the men of this world into self-sacrificing cattle -waiting desperately for heaven at the jail-break of the grave.
Much of his work has leaked into the modern Protestant and Catholic Church sects for its philosophical appeal of dissolving reality and the mind and replacing each with the mysticism of God. Yet, there is no scholar that has lived (or ever will live) that can decipher the rambling circularities, the logical dead ends, the unfolding floating abstractions that support Kant’s irrational metaphysics, epistemology and politics. Any such attempt of thinking individuals to bring any rationality to Immanual Kant’s work, finds them in a foggy abyss of uncertainty. Some would say this is “superior knowledge”. I reject this for the folly it is and will prove it latter in this essay.
However, Immanual Kant’s work would not come to rest and is continuing to this day as a direct result of John Dewey’s “Pragmatism”. This philosophical view states, in its essence, that nothing can be known with any certainty unless some number of persons agrees upon the abstract principle. This is essentially begging reality to change its causality and identity on the wishes and whims of a group. This metaphysics states that an Elephant does not possess a unique causality on reality, or that ‘A’ is not necessarily ‘A’. If enough people agree and its “pragmatic” then an elephant is a chair, automobile or drop of rain and ‘A’ is whatever one wishes on any given spur-of-the-moment whim.
Pragmatism is the unofficial doctrine of the United States and Europe. It assumes there are no absolutes and reality is simply a theoretical construct of words used for social caprice. It allows all material and actions do be buried in an amorphous fog of indeterminacy, subjectivism and relativistic subjugation. It is the root and cause of “political correctness”, fear of knowledge, fear of action and fear of the absolute. It is the cause and reason for the continuing mind / body split and the darkening blank out of the modern mind.
The error of the mind-body dichotomy exists to this day because these philosophies are entrenched in the world’s educational systems: Science largely does not deal with the mind, while modern medicine provides for the body; there is very little research into the field of consciousness and psychology, while the field of psycho-pharmacology is on the rise commensurate with the rise in religion. We continue to be split into two warring factions: Minds out of control requiring more religion and psychological medications, while bodies are running amok like savages (increasing crime) without minds.
These are the problems that are preventing us from solving global hunger, economic and energy problems and preventing us from reaching the stars. The fault lies squarely and primarily on the shoulders of Plato, Jesus Christ, Immanual Kant and John Dewey as well as the Ivy League Universities, Lesser Colleges, all world religions, Politicians and the Media Elitists, as they have continued to promulgate the crime of mind-body disintegration.
There is a diabolic code that is inherent in these philosophies:
1. Do not ask, “Why?” There is no knowledge possible.
2. Do not ask, “How?” There are no actions and no means.
3. Do not ask, “What is Moral?” Morality is a matter of social caprice.
Why? Why would a philosophical system like this be so entrenched in our modern society? The answer is: They wish to have their cake and eat it too.
Who? The answer is: Non value producers: Religions, Politicians, Mystics, Moochers and looters seeking “the common good.” These are people that generally produce no tangible values: Goods, Art, Information or life-enhancing services.
How? The answer is: By draining your life energy, your money, your property, your time, and your creativity for their ends.
Moral? The answer is ABSOLUTELY NOT! They do not wish you to know that in their code, it is immoral for you and your family to enjoy a cake but moral for the cake to be in their mouths. Their code is altruism: self-sacrifice and self-suicide for a mystical reward in heaven or a magically granted reward on earth, that never comes.
In their code the only way to achieve moral perfection is to first become the parasite, after your life has been drained by their code, and then finally die. This is what they desperately do not wish you to know and name. They desperately blank out and hide the truth of this from themselves because they wish that no one would name it for the horror it is.
This is the reason that the jungle-mind of savages is creeping back into our cities. The mind is dying and being replaced with emotions as virtues and mysticism of all kinds as absolutes. We are denying the consequences of actions, providing moral blank checks so people won’t feel bad. Observe the recent phenomenon of many graduating High School Students who are all Magnum Cum Laude so the unproductive poor students won’t “feel bad”.
We have all bought into this to some degree or another. It is pounded into us by the educational system, not by conspiracy, but by the orthodoxy of non-questioning educators relying second hand on other’s minds rather than their own judgment: On the value of “Who says so?” This would have been inconceivable to Aristotle but has been made possible by the control of knowledge by religions and the establishment of modern Universities. The majority of Ivy League schools are religiously founded and it stands to reason that they were not without Platonistic, Jesuit and Kantian influences.
It is very difficult to see the world around you when you are looking through a tube of conformity and social controls that have been entrenched into us as children. These social controls, and conventions have become taboos:
1. You must think of others more than yourself? (Why?)
2. Don’t question authority, and respect your elders. (Why?)
3. Be patriotic and sacrifice. (Why?)
4. Money isn’t everything-Don’t be greedy! (Why?)
…Etc. etc. etc.
We do not question these taboos because we have been taught to be completely self-sacrificing. We have adopted by parcel and piece-meal a philosophy of unreality, subjectivity and altruism. We were not given a choice.
You will now have the means for the choice.
All human beings use philosophy. It is inescapable except by means of slamming one’s mind shut expressing no ideas and dying. The very act of reading this invokes the use of your philosophy. Philosophy is composed of four primary branches of logic and scientific discipline:
1. Metaphysics- The field of Philosophy that deals with reality.
2. Epistemology- The field of Philosophy that deals with Knowledge.
3. Ethics- The Field of philosophy that deals with Morality.
4. Politics- The field of Philosophy that deals with Economics and Government.
5. Aesthetics- The field of Philosophy that deals with Art and Creativity.
For a philosophy to be logically consistent and integrate all aspects of man’s mind, body and reality it must reconcile the above five points without contradictions. There are NO other philosophical systems that have accomplished this other than Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand.
You must decide if these words exist as a concrete of objective reality: Metaphysics. Then you must decide if your mind is capable of acquiring knowledge or whether it is impotent to do so: Epistemology.
From these two premises one is led concretely to the field of ethics: Moral Judgments and actions. Then we are led to the field of economics and government: Politics. Finally all these premises lead us to the field of art and creative expression: Aesthetics.
Philosophy is not a bobble of the mind reserved for Ivory-Tower elitists. It is an axiomatic process of the human mind. Even the act of refusing to accept philosophy as a concept and slamming your mind shut is an act of philosophizing.
It is extraordinarily rare in our western culture or any other society that a coherent, integrated philosophical system, which integrates cognitively all of the disciplines, mentioned above, are actually integrated into an individual’s mind by conscious choice and effort. We have accepted a kind of philosophical hash of random ideas, floating abstractions and incoherent postulates. This happens as a slow process of indoctrination from Kindergarten through University level education and exposure to television, film, radio, church, family and social exposure.
Every taboo or accepted act we perform is a result of the philosophy that we have been indoctrinated with. For example: “Man is a sinner”, “Judge not lest Ye be Judged”, or for instance this classic line from Macbeth:
“Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.”
There are thousands of such philosophical tidbits ranging from the classics to the most insipid, spur of the moment, pop song or television advertisement.
It is as if we are walking through life and a waiter passes by with an hors d’oeuvres tray of tasty philosophical tidbits, we pluck one from the tray, and then another, and so on throughout the years. We pick them for the most appetizing appearance but not necessarily for the healthiest. Then we discuss the tasty tidbits with our friends, family and colleagues and ostracize those who don’t share our tastes. Hence war breaks out among the clashes of interests among men and nations of the world.
However, reality has no contradictions and no clashes. One day apples do not fall off of tree limbs and soar into space while other days they fall to the ground. In one moment the atmosphere is not a toxic gas and the next safe to breathe and support life. As such with interests among men, there are no contradictions among men who practice reason, and logic and pursue values to trade with others.
This has been proven time and again throughout history. In the ancient city of Babylon, men traded not by force, graft or pull but by a free exchange of ideas. They traded their values with other men fairly and honestly. An enormous wall was erected around the city to protect them from the looting hoarders and irrational warring factions seeking to take values without exchange. In action they were defying reality. Many slaves of Babylon actually capitalistically prospered and purchased their freedom from their master. Many also began prosperous business enterprises with their previous masters!
The question now becomes why do looters and parasites exist among rational men? The reason for this always stems from an irrational metaphysics, a view of reality where one ‘wishes’ the physical world to bend its laws to one’s whims. Why do men seek to enslave other men either by whips, guns or taxation backed by whips and guns? The reason is always that epistemologically they believe that no knowledge is possible to man and it is only reserved for a mystical God or other force outside of nature. They then, as Plato pointed out, assume that those who are in power have favor with the Gods. They are given carte blanche by the Gods to control men as they see fit. The abstraction for this premise turned into action is Altruism: the belief that the greatest moral good comes from the sacrifice of one man to another.
In this logic, it would be as if one killed the men that had the minds and means to produce a crop of wheat. Not by means of murdering him but by convincing him that his life was worthless, and that he should drag himself to the sacrificial alter. Then further asking that he plunge the knife into his chest by his own hand. Then they would consume his wheat, drain the granaries and stores and then demanded that reality give them bread from heaven to eat.
They deny that the product -the wheat crop- is the total moral sum of the men that produced it brought into physical existence. Without the wheat people will die of starvation. They believe that any man with muscles can produce the wheat that he is a machine that will magically be compelled by the Gods to produce. In this, he is faking reality.
Men’s only means of action is thinking -Plato and Kant deny this- he has no automatic instincts on how to grow a crop of wheat. The technique is passed from man to man with each new generation improving on and making the process more efficient. Furthermore, if a man is on a deserted island he has no automatic knowledge to acquire food or shelter-he must think, reason and obey the laws of reality before he can control reality, gather food and build his world. Reality will not bend to his wish without thinking and then physical action.
Modern philosophers like Immanual Kant, John Dewey and many, many others are teaching us, through the culture systems I spoke of earlier, that reality is not knowable that it is subjective and relative to one’s opinion or personal feeling about something. In a modern society this is a very compelling idea. We have made it hard to think and have made work a heavily taxed burden of psuedo-enslavement. It is no surprise that people wish to have a cake and eat it too.
But reality will not bend to a wish. Food will not fall from the sky into one’s mouth. And regardless of the logical dead-ends, circularities and mind-numbing abstractions of the Platonistic moderns and religions, a man will always have to think and act. If he does not he will die. The only alternative is that his brother becomes his keeper by force rather than benevolence, where self-sacrifice his held as a virtue rather than profitable production. The only end to this type of socio-political and economic system is total destruction. It is impossible for men to think, create and produce values at the point of a gun. Thus, communist Russia has decayed into ruins and slaughter and is now clawing its way back to civilization, while most of Europe is teetering on survival with an average 60% income tax on its citizens.
The USA is not far behind with an average 50% tax on income, wages and private properties. These percentages are directly represented by one’s life work, production and time. These taxes are an assault on any rational, and moral man.
It is impossible for any socialistic, brother-love, or communal system to work. They defy reality because they defy logic and the means and roots of value and production. Every country that has tried is falling back into the dark ages with poor medical care, lower food rations, disease, poor living conditions and other life-choking problems.
The United States is well on its way to ruins and slaughter in our current system of mixed economy and growing mysticism. We are demanding equal rights to material goods, health care and financial support. Our politicians and educators continuously ride and promulgate the egalitarianism bandwagon. They propose by some mystical abstract that people are all-equal and infer that the products of their minds are fodder to be divided among others.
People are not all equal. They are not equally intelligent; they are not equally creative; they are not equally productive; they are not equally beautiful and they are not equally talented. Egalitarianism defies the law of causality: it demands equal results from unequal consequences-or equal rewards from unequal production or performance.
Egalitarianism is obscenely unjust. In John Rawls “New Theory of Justice” It proposes that men counteract the “injustice” of nature by depriving those “favored by nature” i.e. the talented, the productive, the creative of the right to their property and intellectual rewards that they produced (their right to life)- and grant to the incompetent, the stupid, and the lazy a right to the effortless enjoyment of the goods and rewards that they could not produce, could not imagine and would not know what to do with.
To accept the doctrine of egalitarianism and distribute a producer’s goods (always by force or mystical coercion) one must first totally and blindly embrace the irrationality of altruism and brother-love. But where do the goods come from? Who produces the health care? What is the root of money and production? Where is the tree that infinitely bears this fruit that the fakers of reality wish to pick these goods, values and services from? The answer is You who produce them!
But before they can do this you must accept their code that your life is wicked and sinful and not worthy of your own selfish desire to put food in your mouth, produce goods and services for you and your families ends, rather than your nebulous brother residing somewhere in the fog of the “common good”. They can only do this if you slam your mind shut, refuse to think and accept their creed of altruism and mystical ideal that only muscles-not minds- produce values. If you do you accept the role of a common farm animal waiting to be led to the slaughterhouse.
Philosophy: You need it
You need philosophy to prevent this. You must know that reality is knowable and your mind is capable of understanding it and integrating the universe around you. Reality is an objective absolute and can only be wiped out by your volitional choice.
Reality begins with perception. There are no errors in perception. Perception is axiomatic (it can not be broken down and swept from existence by argument) and is neither valid nor invalid: Perception is Perception. To deny the validity of perception is like saying that a tree, a dog, rainfall, or gravity is invalid. This is in essence the work of Plato, Kant and Dewey; to hold a world-view that objective reality is “impressed upon the mind” through divine inspiration, the ‘Forms’, the phenomenal world or group consensus. They are wrong!
Objective reality is not invalid and neither are your senses. They have evolved to very accurately integrate the world around you to facilitate your survival. The only errors in perception are errors in cognition: a reasoned, self-aware, identification of an abstract idea (such as a tree) compared to what it is NOT (the fall of rain) across a span of time.
Our ability to observe and integrate reality is absolutely valid, and the proof begins with the following, ground-breaking philosophical statement of Ayn Rand:
“Existence exists.”
“Existence exists. And the act of grasping that statement implies two corollary axioms: That something exists which one perceives, and that one possesses consciousness, consciousness being the faculty of perceiving, that which exists.
One cannot read the above statement or observe any direct or indirect abstract in reality without acknowledging perception and consciousness. Further, the statement validates reality as an objective absolute independent of the observer viewing the statement or any phenomenon. If one wishes to invalidate the statement by some convoluted philosophical argument, they must acknowledge its existence first. Therefore the statement, including perception, consciousness and objective reality is axiomatic. These facts cannot be altered without a volitional choice to slam one’s mind shut, express no ideas and die.
As such one is faced with life: his or her life as an absolute fact of reality. He can make an immoral choice to blank out that statement and the universe and release the control over his life to others -which is a monstrous ethical depravity. Or he can choose the only moral course of action: acknowledge the facts, integrate them and choose to live as a man on this earth, in this universe. Therefore, morality is derived as an absolute fact of reality: One takes actions either for or against one’s life. Virtue is derived as a continuous course of action towards fully integrating reality to one’ productive and creative achievement.
This course of philosophical action leads one to self-esteem: Knowing one is right for reality- not a pawn of the universe or for other men. This course of action leads to happiness on this earth: an individual’s greatest moral achievement.
Because man, the individual person, who is the highest ideal and is inherently good (because he is alive and naturally wishes to live), there is only one political system possible for him: Laissez Faire Capitalism.
A man must be free to trade among other men’s individual, rational judgment without government coercion. He must be free to own property-the result of his life’s moral energy made into material goods on this earth- without it being seized or expropriated for any use other than the individual’s own choice.
This includes an individual that develops a cure for cancer or any product that others “need”. No individual, group, ocean of tears, sores or infirmity give that man or group any claim on an individual’s life. There is no creed that can allow this other than altruism and to accept that code one cannot accept their right to their own life. The only rights any man has in a non-contradictory universe are:
1. His Life
2. His Productive Effort
3. His Property Physical and Intellectual
For this reason, a government’s only purpose is to provide a judicial system based on rational law (not mystical laws based in altruism, religion and the foggy ‘common good’) a police force and military to protect individual rights. For this reason a government, and an individual must never initiate the use of force unless it is to protect the rights of THE individual, NOT the group, NOT the children, NOT the environment, NOT the future, NOT the unearned, nor any leper’s bell that happens to be rang at any particular spur of the moment for a “greater good”.
For an individual or a nation of individuals to exist on this earth he must start asking “why?” and “By what right, what absolute, what concrete of reality and whose values” are draining or supporting his life. He must start integrating the metaphysics of an objective reality. He must start integrating the epistemology and concretes of an intransigent mind that knows his entire being is good for this earth and that the world is knowable, NOT subjective or relative to any given wish, whim or feeling of the moment. He must learn that production and values are the manifestation of the moral principle of one’s life on this earth and that money is the highest representation of that virtue and honor among men -that money is NOT evil. He must learn that the art he accepts from others is a moral principle of one’s production and either lifts man’s spirits or neutralizes and eventually crushes him into a dark, hopeless abyss.
Finally he must learn that there is no Mind / Body Dichotomy as the modern mystics preach. You are a fully integrated entity of matter and consciousness. Evade your consciousness and you become a savage. Deny your body and you become a faker of reality. Renounce the material world and you will surrender it to the evil of slaughter among men and ruins of the goods they produced.
A person that seeks diligently to integrate their life and the universe will reject the soul / body dichotomy. He will discard irrational conflicts and contradictions, such as: mind versus heart, thought versus action, realityversus desire, the practical versus the moral. He will be an integrated individual, a whole unit, that is: a thinker who is a man of action. He will know that ideas divorced from consequent action are fraudulent, and that action divorced from ideas is suicidal. He will know that the conceptual level of psycho-epistemology-the volitional level of reason and thought- is the basic necessity of man’s survival and his greatest moral virtue. He will know that he needs an integrated, rational philosophy for living on earth.
Today for most people life is something to be ‘gotten through’. They go to their churches, chant their mantras, take drugs, and seek random physical thrills and sexual exploits, they go to work with brains still soggy with alcohol and scream that life is unfair and reality has no meaning. Did the alcohol the night before, or the random sex acts give reality no meaning? Or did reality respond accordingly and appropriately to the man who corrupted his philosophy?
We stand on the precipice of human destruction because we have failed to adopt Aristotelian logic and carry the work of Descartes and Aquinas to the level that Ayn Rand did philosophically. We became enlightened and then slid back into the ghostly, cloudy dark ages, like a fun house ride with leering demons and skeletons jumping out at us with every sharp turn while the warning buzzer in our mind screamed. The buzzer is warning us that we are seriously off course. Most of the people on this earth live in some form of a haunted house ride. They have never learned or refused to integrate the world. Rather they second, handedly relied on the authority of the church, of others, of the PhDs or anyone “who said so”. It is time to start asking, “What is the evidence?”
We must teach our children to think in terms of the philosophic principles I have outlined. We must stop forcing them to regurgitate facts and punish them for failing to restore a tidbit of knowledge like a dog performing a trick. We must instead teach them that facts are integration to the whole of reality, the abstractions that they are associated with and that they have a connectedness with the human mind. We must teach our children to think. We must teach our children to say “No!” when anyone demands one second of their life as a sacrifice to another.
If you the reader will choose to think and not slam your mind shut out of the emotional fear of taking complete and total responsibility for your life, you and I will have a prosperous world, less hunger, less illness and disease, more life and leisure time and ultimately happiness.
It is now your responsibility:
