Excerpts:
* * * * *
"Man's mind is his basic tool of survival. Life is given to him, survival is not. his body is given to him, its sustenance is not. His mind is given to him, its content is not. To remain alive, he must act, and before he can act he must know the nature and purpose of his action. He cannot obtain his food without a knowledge of food and of the way to obtain it. He cannot dig a ditch - or build a cyclotron - without a knowledge of his aim and the means to achieve it. To remain alive, he must think.
But to think is an act of choice...............reason does not work automatically; thinking is not a mechanical process; the connections of logic are not made by instinct."
* * * * *
"If there are degrees of evil, it is hard to say who is the more contemptible: the brute who assumes the right to force the mind of others, or the moral degenerate who grants to others the right to force his mind. That is the moral absolute one does not leave open to debate.
I do not grant the terms of reason to men who propose to deprive me of reason.
I do not enter discussions with neighbors who think they can forbid me to think.
I do not place my moral sanction upon a murderer's wish to kill me. When a man attempts to deal with me by force, I answer him - by force. "
* * * * *
"The restriction they [the immoral, the irrational, the socialists, the new philosophers and mystics] seek to escape is the law of identity. The freedom they seek is freedom from the fact that A will remain an A, no matter what their tears or tantrums - that a river will not bring them milk, no matter what their hunger - that water will not run uphill, no matter what comforts they could gain if it did, and if they want to lift it to the roof of a skyscraper, they must do it by a process of thought and labor, in which the nature of an inch of pipe line counts, but their feelings *do not* - that their feelings are *impotent* to alter the course of a single speck of dust in space, or the nature of any actions they have committed.
Those who tell you that man is unable to perceive a reality undistorted by his senses, mean that they are unwilling to perceive a reality undistorted by their *feelings*. 'Things ar they are' are things as perceived by your mind; divorce them from reason, and they become 'things as perceived by your wishes.' "
"They proclaim that every man born is entitled to exist without labor and, the laws of reality to the contrary notwithstanding, is entitled to receive his 'minimum sustenance' - his food, his clothes, his shelter - with no effort on his part, as his due and his birthright.
To receive it - from whom? Blank-out.
Every man, they announce, owns an equal share of the technological benefits created in the world.
Created - by whom? Blank-out.
Frantic cowards who posture as defenders of industrialists now define the purpose of economics as 'an adjustment between the unlimited desires of men and the goods supplied in limited quantity.'
Supplied - by whom? Blank-out.
Intellectual hoodlums who pose as professors, shrug away the thinkers of the past by declaring that their social theories were based on the impractical assumption that man was a rational being - but since men are not rational, they declare, there ought to be established a system that will make it possible for them to exist while being irrational, which means: while defying reality.
Who will make it possible? Blank-out.
Any stray mediocrity rushes into print with plans to control the production of mankind - and whoever agrees or disagrees with his statistics, no one questions his right to enforce his plans by means of a gun.
Enforce - on whom? Blank-out.
Random females [now celebritards] with causeless incomes flitter on trips around the globe and return to deliver the message that the backwards people of the world demand a higher standard of living.
Demand - of whom? Blank-out."
* * * * *
"The man who refuses to judge, who neither agrees nor disagrees, who declares that there are no absolutes and believes that he escapes responsibility, is the man responsible for all the blood that is now spilled in the world. Reality is an absolute, existence is an absolute, a speck of dust is an absolute, and so is a human life. Whether you live or die is an absolute. Whether you have a piece of bread or not, is an absolute. Whether you eat your bread or see it vanish into a looter's stomach, is an absolute.
There are two sides to every issue: one side is right, and the other is wrong, but the middle is always evil. The man who is wrong still retains some respect for truth, if only by accepting a responsibility of choice. But the man in the middle is the knave who blanks out the truth in order to pretend that no choice or values exist, who is willing to sit out the course of any battle, willing to cash in on the blood of the innocent or to crawl on his belly to the guilty, who dispenses justice by condemning both the robber and the robbed to jail, who solves conflicts by ordering the thinker and the fool to meet each other halfway. In any compromise between food and poison, it is only death that can win. In any compromise between good and evil, it is only evil that can profit. In that transfusion of blood which drains the good to feed the evil, the compromiser is the transmitting rubber tube."
* * * * *
"As a basic step of self-esteem, learn to treat as the mark of a cannibal any man's demand for your help. To demand it is to claim that your life is his property - and loathsome as such a claim might be, there's something still more loathsome: your agreement. Do you ask if it's ever proper to help another man? No-if he claims it as his right or moral duty that you owe him. Yes - if such is your own desire based on your ownselfish pleasure in the value of his person and his struggle.
Suffering as such is not a value; only man's fight against suffering, is. If you choose to help a man who suffers, do it only on the ground of his virtues, of his fight to recover, of his rational record, or of the fact that he suffers unjustly; then your action is still a trade and his virtue is the payment for your help. But to help a man who has no virtues, to help him on the ground of his suffering as such, to accept his faults, his need, as a claim - is to accept the mortgage of a zero on your values."
* * * * *
"When you work in a modern factory, you are paid, not only for your labor, but for all the productive genius which has made the factory possible: for the work of the industrialist who built it, for the work of the investor who saved the money to risk on the untried and the new, for the work of the engineer who designed the machines of which you are pushing the levers, for the work of the inventor who created the product which you spend your time on making, for the work of the scientist who discovered the laws that went into the making of that product, for the work of the philosopher who taught men how to think and whom you spend your time denouncing.
...
Every man is free to rise as far as he's able or willing, but it's only the degree to which he thinks that determines the degree to which he'll rise.
Physical labor as such can extend no further than the range of the moment. The man who does no more than physical labor, consumes the material value-equivalent of his own contribution to the process of production, and leaves no further value, neither for himself nor others.
But the man who produces an idea in any field of rational endeavor - the man who discovers new knolwedge - is the permanent benefactor of humanity. Material products can't be shared, they belong to some ultimate consumer; it is only the value of an idea that can be shared with unlimited numbers of men, making all sharers richer at no one's sacrifice or loss, raising the productive capacity of whatever labor they perform.
It is the value of his own time that the strong of the intellect transfers to the weak, letting them work on the jobs he discovered, while devoting his time to further discoveries. This is mutual trade to mutual advantage; the interests of the mind are one, no matter what the degree of intelligence, among men who desire to work and don't seek or expect the unearned.
In proportion to the mental energy he spent, the man who creates a new invention recieves but a small percentage of his value in terms of material payment, no matter what fortune he makes, no matter what millions he earns.
But the man who works as a janitor in the factory producing that invention, recieves an enormous payment in proportion to the mental effort that his job requires of him. And the same is true of all men between, on all levels of ambition and ability.
The man at the top of the intellectual pyramid contributes the most to all those below him, but gets nothing except his material payment, receiving no intellectual bonus from others to add to the value of his time.
The man at the bottom who, left to himself, would starve in hopeless ineptitude, contributes nothing to those above him, but receives the bonus of all of their brains.
Such is the nature of the 'competition' between the strong and the wak of the intellect. Such is the pattern of 'exploitation' for which you have damned the strong.
...
You decided to call it unfair that we, who had dragged you out of your hovels and provided you with modern apartments, with radios, movies and cars, should own our own palaces and yachts - you decided that YOU had a right to your wages, but that WE had no right to our profits. that YOU did not want us to deal with your mind, but to deal, instead, with your gun. Our answer to that was: 'May you be damned!' Our answer cdame true. You are."
* * * * *
I only wish the BSG phrase could now resound: "So say we all."
Good night, and sleep well with dreams of rational thinkers surviving somewhere underground as the looters and new mystics of the "social" take over.
--
The Old Fool
“If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.” -George Orwell.
Blog - Musings of an Old Fool by Juan Lopez is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at lopezj4141.blogspot.com.
-
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment