Bullshit

The world has long believed in its ideals, carved into the stone of its institutions, the Authorities of Man. Empiricists must recognize that a desire to obey authority is an inherent flaw of Man, but inherent nonetheless. Insecurity and fear are convincingly powerful instruments of the herd instinct and in exchange, the herd asks simply to be safe and self important. Either she wants to be right with God or she desires moral superiority in some other way ( politically, socially, religiously, or economically). Status, Security, Self-Importance, Self-Righteousness, and Unquestioned Wealth: These motivate all the world: and all the world submits to those who would provide a sanction to such designations.

Here is the truth: Man gets away with nothing. We can't steal security, status, importance, or wealth. We have to earn it. The stolen is impossible to keep. The lie never lasts. The charade always becomes the scandal. We put up with it, but that's why we burn our heroes after we discover that they were what we always thought they were, what we asked them to be, what we demanded of them for our sake - Criminals, Liars, Fools. We gift those who are willing to wear the stamp of righteousness with the stamp itself. We pay no mind to prerequisites. Preachers and Presidents hold the highest esteem, until we find out that their image is predicated upon reprehensible bullshit.

My Fellow Humans: Bullshit reigns supreme. If there was a universal Hall of Fame, we'd have filled it with the greatest "Bullshitters" the world ever had to offer. What is politics, if not lying to the public? What is romance, if not lying to the opposite sex? What is righteousness, if not pretension? We establish ideals that we expect to be broken and we sacrifice our heroes with impunity. The lie... That's the game my friends. Stay ahead of the herd. Stay ahead of the truth. It's fucked up, but it's the truth. You can't wait for the public to find out that your president is using the Justice Department and Internal Revenue Service to attack enemies, or to discover that your priests are raping little boys. Stay ahead of the bullshit. The faster that you revise your bullshit, the further ahead of the "unintended consequences" you'll be. Good for you. Leaders of sheep. Shepherds. Fuckers.

An Except from my essay on Reason

What is the priority of the human mind? Is it to reason well? Or, is it to act on behalf of our lust for security, on behalf of the fulfillment of psychological needs; or, perhaps, on behalf of our social security (conformity)? Truth and justice are objective motivations, utterly independent of what we might feel we need in order to feel good about ourselves and our position. If truth is painful, human beings often prefer to believe anything but the truth. If justice doesn't make them feel more secure, then they aren't interested in justice anymore. The primary motivator of Man is not to know the truth and to act rightly, but to protect their own self-esteem and security.

Insecurity and fear act as negative motivators. Escape, not truth or justice, is our purpose. Feeling loved and important act as positive motivators. These four motivators are Mans primary germ for all their rationalizations. What is true or right fail to indoor us to action in the face of these four emotional motivators, which are independent, arbitrary, and fluid - leading us into all manners of inner conflict and contradiction. This is the source of our hypocrisies. We take such short-sighted concepts of what it means to be happy and secure, that we sacrifice long term happiness and security. We are constantly struggling to battle the unintended consequences of our lives, dealing with frustration, guilt, and resentment, all because we place our fears and desires before truth and justice.

What is real cannot be escaped and will be faced one way or another. What is right, too, cannot be escaped, and the objective consequences of our actions will have actual effects with which we must contend and reckon with in time. Oddly, it is not our actions in response to insecurity and fear, or our need to feel loved and important, that we question and doubt, but rather the unintended consequences that plague us. It's the unintended consequences in our lives that convince us that the world is not a rational place and that life is unjust. All our ideals and arbitrary worldviews serve to perpetuate this way of life. Only the materialist, the objectivist, the empiricist seems to stand in the way of a universal acceptance of this way of living.

What is true? What is right? The value we place on these two questions will determine the quality of our philosophies, ethics, and lives. It is those folks that tell you that there is no objective truth, no rightness, that keep you locked in a perpetual state of emotional and intellectual chaos. What they offer as alternatives never fail to burden you with confusion, unhappiness, and doubt.

Philosophy 101

Philosophy must begin with a provable epistemological statement regarding the nature of reality and our ability to perceive it. Without a sound epistemological foundation, philosophy necessarily grows from an ideological germ, into circular, self-supporting systems that depend primarily upon subsequently premeditated motives. This means that "the end" is already conceived and that the practice of philosophy is intended to merely prove a preconceived conclusion. This is the reason why human beings refuse to take philosophy seriously. They know all that thought is intended to "prove" an ideology. The world is littered with ideologies for sale, for free. Our modern philosophy is arbitrary, subjective, and empty; manufactured to support the powers that be - as opposed to being derived from reality and a consistent logical system of thought.

Only an objective philosophy is capable of improving human life. Only a true philosophy is capable of improving our ability to deal with reality, to improve the efficacy and efficiency of our actions, to form productive and practical ethics, and empower Man. So, when the majority of philosophies begin with the idea that the universe is unknowable, that correct action depends upon subjective, arbitrary perspectives, and that truth is relative; it if utterly unsurprising that Man does not find Himself in a more successful state. Our intellectuals haven't failed to notice this; and have proceeded to tell you that Man is essentially doomed, and that our nature makes our doom inevitable. Genius.

The result is a bunch of talk about love, equality, and selflessness, as substitute for knowledge, truth, and rightness. Ideals war with one another for prominence; and the battlefield is wide open, since humanity seems to have no capacity for gaging reality. We choose ideals the way we choose sports teams to cheer. People invest themselves in Ideals, not because they are committed to truth or justice, but because they "like" that particular ideology better than other ideologies. It does not occur to them that reality is incapable of respecting their likes, wishes, or good intentions. Genius.

Reality is the only just material for philosophical reflection. Every other motive is dishonest.

Change

Republicans and Democrats, Communists and Islamists; they all share the same fundamental belief that the global economy and our personal lives ought to be regulated by the State. How much regulation and legislation differs from terrible to horrible, but the fundamental precept is the same. People talk about Democracy as if Democracy protects people or ensures our rights. The opposite is true. Democracy is the least likely form of government to protect the rights of minorities (i.e. Jews, Millionaires, Homosexuals). Only principles can protect our rights; and principles come from philosophy, not social-interest groups. Our Constitution never had a chance, but it was intended to provide a philosophical framework for the self-government of the new American nation.

Regardless of your political dispositions, regardless of what nation you live in, if you are tired of debt, regulation, inequitable taxation, and an arbitrary rule of law, then you’ll have to stop supporting your political parties. 

I’m just as guilty. I’ve voted for Republicans and Democrats in the past, searching for the lesser evil. I’ve tried to find hope where no hope exists, which is irrational, irresponsible, and insane. I’ve done this because I found it difficult to believe that any government or majority could possibly desire self-destruction. I believed in the selfishness of Man. Sadly, our political, religious, and social leaders have succeeded in convincing the world to be selfless; and as a result, have pushed the world to the brink of economic and political collapse. 

Fear-Monger! 

I know, it sounds like a total overreaction. It’s not. 

Is there a chance that Western Civilization and “Liberal” governments will pull themselves out of this economic funk we’re all in? Yes. I’d say it’s 50/50. But that’s not the point. The point is that we got ourselves into this mess for a myriad of reasons. We have four serious problems in the world. 

1.        And this is the biggest problem: The Rise of Theological Socialism. Religions should never be allowed to govern men. Not EVER!

2.       Arbitrary Rule of Law – Defined as: The enacting of laws that affect some citizens differently than others. This includes Tax Codes, Marriage Law, Social Programs, etc. 

3.       Prohibitions: Prostitution, Drugs, and Guns. Nothing should be prohibited from people. People should be held accountable for their actions. Acts of force and fraud should be punished harshly. Irresponsible Behavior that causes harm should be punished harshly. 

4.       Debt. Federal Debt should be illegal and considered an act of fraud against the citizens of the nation. 

If we get away from these four failures of society, we’ll all be better off. A political party predicated on eradicating these four disasters could usher in an era of unimaginable prosperity.

My Five Sins

Self-assessment is hard, given that the evaluation of internal and external causes are clouded by our proclivity to assume that our behavior is motived by a good quality of character, and that external perception and the biases involved simply misunderstand the correctness of our particular expressions. I have identified five behavioral expressions which have not served me well in the past, each serving as an impetus to perceptions of me that I am not very fond of. 

Therefore, there are five behaviors I’m committed to avoiding for the rest of my life. The first is difficult to define. I could call it unhappiness. I could call it negativity. I could call it cynicism. Communicating negative perspectives, complaining, whining, bitching… Whatever it is, communicating unhappiness brings people down, even when you are communicating objectively unhappy things. People feel that you are either asking them for help, asking them to change something about themselves, or asking them to indulge your own discontentment. In any case, no one enjoys listening to the objective woes of others. 

The second behavior is defensiveness. No matter how unjust I’ve found the perspectives of others to be, and regardless how well I can argue against that perspective, defending myself against the subjective impressions and judgments of others has never, not one time, served me well in relationships, at work, or in any other area of life. Most of the time we don’t really understand why people are drawing the conclusions they have drawn, and so our defensive posturing communicates that how we are perceived is more important than the feelings and perspective of the person perceiving us. If your wife’s feelings are hurt by something you’ve done or said, does it matter what you meant, why your said it, etc? The fact is, what you did upset her. If your boss doesn’t like something you’ve done, does it matter what your reasoning was? 

In every case that I’ve been defensive, I’ve been in a submissive role. Every husband submits to the happiness or unhappiness of their wife. Every employee submits to the happiness or unhappiness of their boss. Even our closest friends, the ones we value most, we have to submit to the validity and reality of their feelings. This is objectively difficult, because we think that reality is all that matters and that if someone is perceiving something different than what is real, then the fault lies with them. While reality is objective, perception is not; and because no one is free of their own perception, perception is what we humans go off of. It is therefore better to acknowledge the reality of other peoples’ perception, to empathize with it, address it, take responsibility for it, then it is to reject it, argue against it, or deny it. 

The third behavior that I never want to commit again, is any behavior that is derived from my own insecurity. First, it is incredibly stupid to inform other people of the areas about ourselves in which we lack confidence. If we communicate a lack of confidence about ourselves in any area, the people around us will find it damn near impossible to place any confidence in us, in those areas, at all. If you love to play baseball, but all you talk about is, “I can’t catch. I can’t catch”, then no one is going to want you on their team. Instead, say, “I’m not the best fielder, but I can hit”, or “I can run”, or “I can throw”.  Everyone has insecurities and fears. No one needs you to add yours to the list of things they have to worry about. 

The fourth behavior that I now banish, is the habit of telling people what I think all the time. Do I think I’m smarter than the average bear? Yep. Does everyone need to be reminded of that fact? Hell no. People don’t share information, beliefs, and opinions in order to find out what other people think. They merely wish to express their own information, beliefs, and opinions. Adding my experience, beliefs, and opinions isn’t going to help, unless I actually agree and can support what I’m hearing. My thoughts are not so valuable that other people need to hear them all the time. Even the smartest people on the planet seem to keep their mouths shut, especially around people they know don’t really care what they think. 

The fifth behavior that I need to utterly destroy from my life is worry. Everything that has gone wrong, every horrible event, frightening catastrophe and calamity, has been something I’ve recovered from. We’re not weak. Losing a job, getting divorced, illness, or loss – we recover from all these things. There is nothing worth worrying about; and if we do worry, there is absolutely no reason to share those concerns with others. Everyone has stress, concern, fear, insecurity, and anger. Why pile on? What good comes from worrying about things? Sharing our anxieties is like sharing our own personal diseases. 

At first, I figured that worry/anxiety and insecurity was basically the same thing. Upon further reflection I realized that insecurity is personally specific. Worry is general. We can worry about global warming, tax increases, work, and paying the bills. Insecurity is more personal, more private. People can relate to our anxiety that we might be laid off. It is harder for them to relate to our insecurity that our wife might find another man to be more interesting or exciting. Worry is external. Insecurity is internal. Neither of them is worth acting on or communicating in public. There might be a time when our anxiety and our insecurity are worth discussing with those closest to us, but those are moments of great vulnerability and they should only arise during peaceful, non-stressful, non-contentious moments. 

Behaviors that don’t inspire excitement and intimacy with other people aren’t generally worth expressing in front of other people. The following will sound terribly cynical and negative, but in reference to the current topic, it is of the utmost importance. People don’t care to hear about our problems, our negativity, our anxiety, our insecurities, fears, or troubles. The people that are interested in these things are interested in them because they love human misery, sacrifice, desperation, and frustration; they are not actually interested in us. Happiness, Confidence, Enjoyment, and Excitement are what people want to be around, not their opposites. That is what I’ve learned and I mean to act on that knowledge.

An Evil God. An Evil World.

My experience with pagan religion has taught me a great deal that Christian Theology never could. First, that God is not in opposition to the universe. Reality does not contradict God and we are not opposite in nature from our Lord the Creator. It has taught me that our nature is not evil. It has taught me that we all search for God in the real world. It has taught me that Man is Great and worthy of Gods’ Love. It has taught me that symbolism is powerful and useful and generic. It has taught me that religion is personal, powerful and joyful; and that religious practices ought to be personally moving.
 

Paganism, however, never gave me a God I couldn’t’ find on a reality tv show, or a character in movie or book, or a in a comic. The mythologies are sociological and anthropological, not theological or philosophical. Their ethics are usually more honest and more relevant than Buddhism, Islam, Judaism, Christianity, or Catholicism. Everyone is searching for the Personal God, the Objective God, the God of THIS WORLD – not some other world, not some ideal world, not some fantastic, perfect, contrived world. 

You know what Evil is? It’s reality without prejudice. It’s a world of anarchy and a God who prefers it, demands it, and wills it. You know what anarchy is? It’s lawlessness. It’s free will. It’s choice. I believe all animals have free will and that we all live in a state of anarchy. I believe sin is an easy escape of fear, insecurity, and mortality associated with Gods’ Anarchy. I think there are Satanists with a more Christ-like perspective than most Christians - Atheists with a deeper love of God than most God-Fearing men. A Christian in opposition to reality and a Satanist in opposition to reality are brothers. A Christian in pursuit of reality, A Muslim in pursuit of truth, a Satanist chasing down the real world are brothers. God cannot contradict himself. Our Religious Leaders can and do and will.

God doesn’t want slaves and sacrifice. God wants masters of will and self-reliance;  Men of deep personal integrity, Women of enormous courage, and people of conviction. Read the Bible - God chose powerful men, willful men, dangerous men, faithful and faithless men, but always men who sought after truth. The Lord looks for a Man whose yes is a yes and whose no is a no. Men who see what they see. Men who don’t pretend, don’t act, don’t play.  Western Civilization, however, has taught us to prefer our emotions to our thoughts, our reputations to our honor, our status to our conscience, and how we are perceived, rather than who we are. In a world where perception is reality, truth is constantly sacrificed for a path of least resistance. None of us are immune from evils evil: The desire to remake a world made in Gods' Image, in our own.

In a world where God is evil and his Creation unreal, what possible religion can prevail? I suggest a new religion. A religion that loves God, His creation, and His reality. A Religion of Non-Contradiction.

Essay Concerning the Benefits of Government

There are eight methods of influencing people toward efficient government and none of them are preaching to them about the evils or dangers of Communism. For better or, most likely for worse, in a Democracy people vote their immediate self-interest. With little information or understanding, the American people make electoral decisions on the basis of perception. Every political strategist will tell you that perception, in politics, is reality; but that’s’ just the elections. As President Obama has said, “elections have consequences”, and those consequences have very real effects in our day to day lives. War, debt, liberty, morality, security, privacy, property, and efficacy are the eight primary concerns of the average voter.

Each voter will identify one or two of these eight as the most important, and others as not being that important at all; but if you are going to argue for something, you’ll need to be able to argue the point from each of these eight perspectives. If you can’t, you’ll have trouble gathering enough support. If you are arguing for how war is going to make people more secure against their immoral enemies who wish to establish a Brave New communist World, you’ll still lose many Americans when the media starts quoting the multi-trillion dollar price tag. You better be really convincing when it comes to waging war (declared or not), especially now that America is utterly war-weary.

The first argument for efficiency, relative to national security (war), regards the cost-benefit ratio derived from our investments and actions in other nations. Right now, our selling of F14s and tanks to Egypt is quite the controversy. Is such a sale an efficient (read effective) transaction for America? Will we be safer with Egypt having better planes and tanks? Who will benefit economically from this sale of weapons? Is there any conceivable chance these weapons could be used to take American lives? If these weapons are used to start a war, as opposed to national defense, how much capital would we have to spend trying to stop the confrontation?

Obviously these questions shouldn’t only be asked of Egypt. We should ask ourselves these questions when we sell weapons to Israel, India, or Canada. We armed Bin Laden and we armed Hussein, at what cost? We throw money around the world and for what reward? We’ve long since stopped thinking of government as an agent of rational activity, and so we’ve become accustomed to waste. Why? Every dollar our government spends abroad should have a real return. If it doesn’t, it shouldn’t be spent. If a federal agency can’t justify a significant rate of return on the investment of the funds they request from Congress, then their request should be denied. Period.

Why is money so important? Debt. A nation’s debt can make it a powerhouse or a pauper, a juggernaut or a cripple. Don’t try to imagine the intricacies of international finance. When your credit is good, what does your purchasing power look like? When your credit is bad, what does your purchasing power look like? If you pay for something with your own cash, you own it. If you pay for it with someone else’s cash, then they own it until you pay them back. Ownership is always preferable to debt, and yet we’ve become a debtor nation. Every few months we argue with one another about raising our debt limit. Why? Why should we accept a policy of debt in the first place? If your family owes someone money, paying off that debt should be your number one priority. That which increases debt and that which stands in the way of us repaying our debts is a terrible idea. No one, Democrat or Republican or Socialist should be comfortable with debt. Debt is weakness.

Liberty is precious to us all. Democrats as well as Republicans and Socialists. Socialists in Europe think Americans aren’t really that free because we incarcerate more people than any nation on earth, for non-violent crimes no-less. So freedom isn’t about party-affiliation. Democrats believe in the liberty of homosexuals to marry, Republicans believe in the liberty for children to be born. What makes America so odd is that there is no consistency amongst our citizens. The people that have no problem killing babies have a big problem with killing criminals, and the people that have a big problem killing babies are anxiously supporting the government-sanctioned murder of criminals. Who is pro-life and who is pro-death? In this country, I don’t have the slightest damn idea!

Our laws should either promote our liberty or protect our liberty. If our laws are doing something else, we should probably begin inquiring as to what the hell is going on. Who doesn’t care about our liberty? Big Business, for one. They benefit from the expense of competition. The more regulation that exists, the fewer “start-ups” will threaten them. And if a startup does threaten them, it’ll be cheaper for the start-up to sell out, than for them to compete. And of course the government, which writes the legislation governing regulation, gets to decide who the winners and losers are; making each bureaucrat and politician ripe for bribery and corruption. My apologies, in America we call those transactions “campaign contributions”.

Right and wrong always seem to have a place in our political debates. “It’s just not right to deport 18 million people”! “It’s just not right that people who’ve invaded our country illegally should get access to tax-payer dollars”! Both of these arguments are “spin”, not morality. Morality is a system of principles guided by a central thesis. I would argue that efficiency is moral and inefficiency is immoral. When children refuse to finish their dinner, despite the starving kids in Whereverstan, we call that waste. When people pay too much for something, we call it getting “ripped off”. When we buy something that doesn’t work, it’s a “lemon”. If we invest $500,000 in a company, and after five years cash out at $502,000, then we call that an “insignificant rate of return”.

Why do we look at waste as wrong? Why do we look at people who don’t give us back our money’s worth as “cheating us”? What is the central thesis at the heart of this obsession Man has with efficiency? The thesis is called mutual benefit. An efficient government is a government that cares for the effort that went into the work that created the wealth used to operate the government. An inefficient government is a government that doesn’t care for the effort that went into the work that created the wealth used to operate the government. A government that takes your money, but doesn’t take care in how that money is spent is not a friendly government, it’s not a responsible government, and it’s not a good government. You do not receive just compensation for the taxes that you pay. If you make $200,000 a year, smoke cigarettes, drive automobiles, purchase food from restaurants, drink alcohol regularly, purchase goods made in foreign countries, or own property, then you are paying a significant amount of money in taxes. What do you get in return? Are you getting your moneys’ worth? If you aren’t paying much into the system, how much are you getting?

Assuming the purpose of government is to provide for the Welfare of its citizens, one would imagine that the laws, regulations, and taxes would effectively make people more secure. Security is the most difficult vantage point from which to discuss efficiency. If the government tries to ban guns in order to make sure that Americans aren’t killed with guns, then we’d all be more secure. Of course, if we can’t own guns to protect ourselves from people illegally carrying weapons, then we’re less secure. If the government takes a significant amount of our annual income, then we are less economically secure. But if the government provides us with free services, then we are more economically secure. So how do we look at these issues? The unarmed person being robbed by a man with an AK47 isn’t going to feel too happy about our “right to bare arms”. The armed person being robbed by a man with a sharp knife is going to feel really good about our “right to bare arms”. The mother of five whose good-for-nothing baby’s-daddy was killed in a bar-fight after hours of meth and cocaine use, is going to feel really good about food stamps, medicare, and welfare. The person that worked sixty hours a week for twenty years, whose income is reduced by the government to pay for food stamps, medicare, and welfare programs isn’t going to feel so great about it.

So how should we look at security? Can we do a cost-analysis that will make all Americans happy? No. I’m a libertarian and I completely dislike taxes, especially considering all the incarnations, foreign aid, and waste our tax money is poured into. However, we don’t live in a “constitutional republic”, as it were. We live in a Democracy. In a Democracy, the wealthy have to pay for the security of the poor. However, if the poor take too much, the number of wealthy people dwindles and the poor run out of wealthy people to support them. If generating exorbitant amounts of wealth isn’t financially worth the effort, fewer people will be willing to put in the hours. Therefore, while the security of the poor is provided by the rich, the opportunity for riches is provided by the opportunity allowed by the State. Thus a balance, ever shifting, must be struck for the mutual benefit of all.

This is not a principle I believe in, but it is the way things are. I hope that distinction makes sense.

I’ve often wondered about the idea of a “right to privacy”. It’s not in the Constitution, but neither are drones, wire-tapping, identity fraud, or hackers. However, it is undeniable that privacy is extremely important to the majority of Americans; and so, if you want to argue for an efficient government, you better address the issue of privacy. There are two schools of thought when it comes to privacy: the first school of thought is, the more information the government has about its citizens, the better job it will make of protecting and regulating those citizens. The second school of thought is, the more privacy the citizens have, the more independent of influence, manipulation, and corruption they’ll be, creating an efficiency of will. Meaning, people will be free to do what they want with their own wealth, creating a Democratic marketplace and society (capitalism). If people have no privacy and their information is used against them, people feel that they’ll have fewer choices and fewer opportunities. Thus, while the potential for “evil” may decrease, so does the potential for good.

Under the same line of reasoning, the use of property in a country is thought of as being best used by government or by citizens. If a government, through, say, eminent domain, can access property whenever it chooses, it will be able to more efficiently execute its plans. Of course, if property rights were expanded, wouldn’t we see a more democratic use of property? With each property owner expressing their own verdict on what is good by virtue of how they choose to use that land?

In the end, it is efficacy that best measures the efficiency of government. Does a law do what it intends to do? How much do we spend on preventing illegal immigration? Does it effectively stop illegal immigration? How much do we spend on preventing drug use? Does it effectively stop drug use? How much do we spend on preventing prostitution? Does it effectively stop prostitution? How much do we spend on our education system? Are Americans well educated? How much do we spend on Health and Human Services? Are Americans increasingly healthy and secure? How much do we spend on our government? Are we well governed? How much do we spend on national defense? Are we well defended? How much do we spend on Foreign Aid? Are we increasingly peaceful with the countries we give aid too?

This is how we need to argue out these debates, because everything else, everything else we’ve been doing these last eighty years is futile, beneficial only to the powerful, to the elite, to special interests and lobbying groups, to the people running our government and to foreign governments and rebellions of dubious intentions toward us as Americans, but which have purchased our support. Efficiency should be the measuring stick that Democrats, Socialists, Communists, Republicans, Libertarians, and Moderates use to measure the quality of their government.

If you study it, you’ll find that the most efficient governments don’t include the United States. They include the nations of Singapore, Australia, New Zealand, Switzerland, Chili, Canada, Denmark, and (sort of) Hong Kong. Many of these countries are more “liberal” than America. So what? Other efficient governments include Sweden, Denmark, and Finland. (Quite Socialistic politically, but unlike American Socialists, seem unwilling to bankrupt their country with debt and waste). Finland is efficient (Socialist). Iceland is inefficient (Socialist). It has nothing to do with Democracy or Socialism, Capitalism or Monarchy. It has everything to do with efficiency!