Life, Love, and Liberty

In reading this, I ask that people please understand the horror of what I went through. I was literally locked up, and at the mercy of doctors complicit in a psycharistic-state alliance. All I wanted was to go home, and I had to spend nearly all of a day waiting for them to approve my transfer to the hospital that my psycharistist is connected to. If I had not been working with him, then they may have held me for a longer period of time.

I’ve prefaced it with two quotes.

“The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities.”

~ Ayn Rand

“Of all social theories Anarchism alone steadfastly proclaims that society exists for man, not man for society. The sole legitimate purpose of society is to serve the needs and advance the aspiration of the individual. Only by doing so can it justify its existence and be an aid to progress and culture.

The political parties and men savagely scrambling for power will scorn me as hopelessly out of tune with our time. I cheerfully admit the charge. I find comfort in the assurance that their hysteria lacks enduring quality. Their hosanna is but of the hour.

Man’s yearning for liberation from all authority and power will never be soothed by their cracked song. Man’s quest for freedom from every shackle is eternal. It must and will go on.”

~ Emma Goldman

I now know the meaning of confinement much more acutely. I now know the state’s destructive power much more personally. And I have had my convictions against coercion and anti-individualist ethics strengthened.

There is no justification for a therapy based on guns — metaphorically, of course — and bondage. In the future, I refuse to deal with any therapist or social worker who refuses to renounce their monstrous “right” to have me civilly committed. Whether they know it or not, they are my enemies. They are the people who accept the fundamental ideas that are destroying America and other parts of the world. They prop up the legitimacy of the creeds of morally mandatory self-sacrifice, the nationalization of human beings, and the exercise of coercive domination in the name of benevolence and charity.

Don’t you see the connection between the mentality that can justify the military draft, and the mentality that can justify coercive commitment? Both of them are based on the fundamental conceptual premise that man does not belong to him or herself, but to the society that he or she happens to live in. And it doesn’t change a damn thing when you dress it up in the language of helping the person being coerced. There is no equal power balance between the psycharistist and the person on the receiving end, so the talk of consent is all a sham. Most likely designed to help monsters sleep at night.

And they are monsters. Never forget it, and don’t let a Christian sense of “love thy neighbor” make you feel guilt for being profoundly angry at them.

In light of what they help make possible, they have earned it. And the path forward for the world is away from their anti-individualist ethics. The world needs an intellectual revolution in favor of the supremacy of individual rights and individual thought. The friend of liberty and individual rights is simultaneously the foe of the racially motivated lynch mob, the tyrannical employer who mandates intrusive drug testing, and the vice cop who helps destroy the life of a sex worker. And this promotion of individual self-determination should make no distinctions between private or public tyranny.

When the peoples of the world become consistent friends of liberty, then I will dance and make merry, until I can do so no more. Please consider joining us today! Not for my sake, but for your own.

(I threw in that point about opposing both private and public tyranny, because I want the libertarians to see that the oppression of employees by private employers should be met by us with a demand for social justice. In other words: the libertarian philosophy should be connected to a wider philosophical totality concerned with individual self-realization, rather than just starting from the premise that the state must be opposed)

I shall be submitting a proposal to Chris Matthew Sciabarra for a piece critiquing Ayn Rand’s conception of the ethics and politics of warfare soon. It’ll also cover the statements that other Objectivists have made about the warfare state.

My more lefty leaning readers might wonder why I am spending time reading the works of a proud capitalist who once said that big business was a persecuted minority. This is not one of Rand’s better statements, but she had some insights that I appreciate.

I’ll write more on that later.

“I feel John Mackey is advising we listen to everything *wrong* with the left- the Puritanical moralism characteristic of the original Progressives, while simultaneously slamming the door in the face of the liberatory impulses that represent the left at its best. While I do think libertarians should learn more empathy and compassion, that is a far cry from absorbing the notion that moral idealism equates with transcending selfishness. In my opinion versions of idealism which tell people to subordinate their interest to a greater good are the problem- ultimately because I think they destroy and torment the best passions in individuals. It is worth noting that Mackey makes no arguments for unselfishness but merely appeals to popularity and ‘common sense’.”

~ Lady Aster

I swear, by my life and my love of it, that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.

~ Ayn Rand

I was lucky enough to pick up a copy of The Early Ayn Rand during a recent visit to Lady Aster of San Francisco. If she is reading this than a hearty public thanks to her for the tour of Berkeley that landed us in the Other Change of Hobbit bookstore where I was able to get my hands on it.

Anyway, I found a passage in the collection that I really wanted to share:

“What do you dream of?” Kay Gonda, the actress, asks one of the characters, in the play’s thematic statement.
“Nothing,” he answers. “Of what account are dreams?”
“Of what account is life?”
“None. But who made it so?”
“Those who cannot dream.”
“No. Those who can only dream”

-Pg. 242 from The Early Ayn Rand: Revised Edition with a 2005 copyright attributed to The Estate of Ayn Rand.

Reminds me of something Emma Goldman said…

“When we can’t dream any longer, we die”
-Emma Goldman

Follow your dreams!

Ramblings on Rand and Randians from Lady Aster’s salon.

“My own thoughts on Rand and Randians:

Ayn Rand is a figure I came too because of Arthur Silber and Chris Sciabarra. Both of whom I consider very brilliant intellectuals.

It was an interesting change of outlook for me to even consider her because I started in radical politics and philosophy with anarchism of the socialist variety. I can recall telling a friend who had been inspired by her fiction that she was just another evil capitalist LOL.

After having a more open mind and actually exploring her writings; I discovered that there were things of value in them. Basically, I share Lady Aster’s appreciation for her ethical egoism put forth in her statement that “man is an end unto himself” (not that this idea is unique to Rand) though it may be better stated as “every individual is an end unto themselves” for purposes of gender neutrality. Coupled with the portrayal of figures aspiring to realize their individuality; she provides a rather colorful view of life.

At the same time, Rand’s application of ethical egoism to the wider context of politics and economics fails. Her formulation of ethical egoism is much better suited to an anti-corporatist mentality and mutualist conception of property rights. Corporate structures and absentee landlordism strike me as treating individuals more like means to your own ends. Landlords extracting rent on property are profiting at the expense of others. Likewise, in large hierarchical corporations, individuals end up being the means for the CEOs to realize their profits.

For example, the apologia for plutocrats represented by Galt’s Gulch in Atlas Shrugged. Not that demonstrating the importance of the mind in human existence was a bad thing but the notion that all of the businesses would completely collapse constituted an apologetics for plutocracy.

Aside from that, my biggest beef with Rand is less with her and more so with her disciples. The Objectivist figures who basically preach mass murder or nuclear genocide as “acceptable” in dealing with the threat of radical Islamic terrorism. I am completely disgusted by these figures beyond adequate words.

In fact, I hope to write a response of sorts to these figures for submission to Chris Sciabarra’s Journal of Ayn Rand Studies. Touching on the application of ethical egoism to questions of warfare is a part of this too. Notions that all concern for civilian deaths should be abandoned in the name of “egoism” strikes me as ridiculous. The only lives being treated as ends unto themselves in this situation are those of the individuals doing the slaughtering.

Finally, her character’s negative attitude towards emotions troubles me. I can recall reading a passage here or there in her fiction that had persons seemingly going out of their way to not feel.”

“Just to clarify, I meant to say I denounced Rand as just another evil
capitialist, not my friend.”

Not much of a general movie review but a discussion on a particular comment made in the film. For a good general review, check out this one by James Garfield.

AK Press has done a great service in reissuing this documentary for our viewing pleasure. Its strongest suit is the immense variety of footage from protests to interviews with famous radical figures. Particularly interesting are the multiple scenes with late anarchist Karl Hess. The parallels he makes between political figures or factions seen as separate are intriguing. In discussing his post-Republican study of the American anarchists, he makes two provocative comparisons involving Emma Goldman. She is said to embody what Hess thought the Republicans always stood for and the best of Ayn Rand with a better appreciation of the social aspects of existence. On the surface, this connection between socialist Goldman and capitalist Rand seems off yet is actually quite sensible upon deeper examination. Both were controversial female writers who display individualist themes in their work. Rand portrays independent heroines in both We the Living and Atlas Shrugged. In We the Living, the female protagonist Kira defies the norms of her family by vowing to become an engineer.

“But Kira! What will you do?” Maria Petrovona gasped.
“I’ll be an engineer.”
“Frankly,” said Victor, annoyed, “I do not believe that engineering is a profession for women.”
Pg.33, Signet edition 1959

This theme of a woman wanting to do what’s traditionally considered a man’s job reappears in Atlas Shrugged with railroad titan Dagny Taggert. Goldman’s individualist streak was evident in her attraction to Friedrich Nietzsche and Max Stirner. Her pamphlet The Individual, Society, and the State contains tributes to individualism like the following.

The individual is the true reality in life. A cosmos in himself, he does not exist for the State, nor for that abstraction called “society,” or the “nation,” which is only a collection of individuals. Man, the individual, has always been and, necessarily is the sole source and motive power of evolution and progress. Civilization has been a continuous struggle of the individual or of groups of individuals against the State and even against “society,” that is, against the majority subdued and hypnotized by the State and State worship.

One of her contributions to treating women as free individuals included promotion of birth control despite legal restrictions.