The political media have only one vital role to play in any nation: protect individual rights.
That's it. Nothing else they do is absolutely necessary. Every single important story they report should explicitly or implicitly be connected to individual rights -- the protection of those rights. Any report on global warming or racism or trade or regulations or taxes or anything else should have individual rights as its foundation, its cohesion, its starting point and endpoint.
That is never the case.
Ironically, the media have absolutely no idea what individual rights are. It's like a baker not understanding baking, or a seamstress who's never worked with thread, or a composer who is clueless about what a chord or melody is. The media enjoy mentioning "civil rights" but not individual rights.
As Ayn Rand correctly identified, "rights" are the link between individuals and groups, between one's own life and life in a crowd (society), between morality and action among others.
A right, she said, is "a moral principle defining and sanctioning a man's freedom of action in society". She clarified this concept further: "It means freedom from physical compulsion, coercion or interference by other men".
Rights are the only proper reason for governments to have any existence at all. Without rights, there could be no good reason for government. Government's only job is to protect individual rights -- to one's body, property and freedom of pursuit, to prevent compulsion and coercion.
Properly speaking, governments are granted the conditional privilege to protect individual rights. The "condition" is that if they don't do their job, then they are rightly overthrown or run out of office by the very people they were allowed to protect with physical force, if necessary.
While governments are granted the privilege to use physical force to protect their citizens from those wishing to violate their rights, there is one private institution that should also have as its raison d'être the protection of rights, as I said in my opening paragraph: the political media.
While government has the power of the sword to protect us citizens, the media have the power of the pen, the power of information -- which is, as they say, mightier than the sword. It is information that moves people and governments to do great good or to commit horrible deeds (rights violations).
The media should find and use political information for only one end: to protect rights. "Political information" relates to human action in relation to potential government oversight, such as whether pollution rises to the level of violating property rights or whether racism rises to the level of coercive action against others.
When the media are in the process of protecting rights and are assessing the actions of citizens and governments, they should have in their minds a singular standard: "does this action violate individual rights?"
If they don't have this very clear and objective standard integrated and prominent in their minds, then foul play will be boundless -- resulting in the enormity of rights violations that we now see in modern America and around the world.
Not only does government violate rights openly and egregiously in modern society, but the media are complicit in the violations, often stoking the violations or complaining that the violations are not severe enough (regulations, taxes, minimum wages, entitlements, speech restrictions, gun restrictions, passive diplomacy, redistribution of income, taking of property, etc.).
The pen swings the sword.
The media have become the scribbling predators of individual rights.
They do not understand rights, as is shown in all of their articles in which human action is potentially under the purview of government action. They simply don't understand the rights standard. They are anti-conceptual, anti-objectivity, anti-rights.
They turn private racism (not baking cakes, biased company hiring, screaming obscenities, "hate groups") into an alleged political action under government purview, thereby violating the rights of property and speech. Instead of simply and properly condemning such private action as immoral, the media raise it to coercive action and repeatedly pens material to get the sword swinging, in violation of rights.
They state that CO2 emissions by businesses, ipso facto, are primarily a violation of "the Earth" and secondarily a violation of "civil rights", instead of recognizing that any alleged emissions pertain only to property rights, if at all. If a property owner in America believes his property rights are being violated by alleged "climate change" or pollution, then that property owner already has recourse in a court of law to make his case (which, of course, he cannot, on "climate change").
For the media, poverty is not self-induced. It is caused by capitalism, allegedly making the impoverished qualified to receive "give-backs" by the "privileged" and "greedy" and "one-percent" -- thereby violating the right to property (money) of millions of hard-working Americans.
The media are tinpot intellectual dictators.
They are, of course, people. They are people with a lot of education and very little conceptual integration of objective reality. To call them "intellectuals" is like calling beatniks "responsible". The media are anti-intellectuals, the dilettantes of whimsy and irrationality. What they learned in secondary schooling was how to rationalize their irrationality, their elitism, their desire to control.
They laugh when you tell them that the smallest minority is the individual. They don't recognize individuals. There is only the "social" in their social engineering. There's no room for individual rights; there are only "social rights", what's allegedly the "greater good" -- which means no rights at all.
So instead of being vaunted protectors of individual rights, they have become predators of individual rights, scribbling their diatribes against capitalists and gun owners and constitutionalists. They are Plato's philosopher kings run amuck. They won't leave you alone -- because YOU don't exist. You're just part of the social, of the "greater".
And, as they like to say, there is no "I" in "we".
Friday, March 03, 2017
Monday, February 27, 2017
There's fake news and FAKE news (SubNews)
There are two distinct types of fake people in life: the consciously fake and the subconsciously fake, though the former has the latter as well.
The former purposely (consciously) deceives others. They're outright liars.
The latter deceives himself -- and then others, unwittingly -- making of his life a lie.
They are both dishonest, either willfully or unwittingly. One knows the damage he's doing, and the other doesn't really, but has cowardly accepted ideas that are wrong in his mind and then acts on the misconceptions, creating deceptions he's not even aware of.
The former are people like Bernie Madoff and Hitler and Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama and lying salespeople, using verbal legerdemain (outright lying) to achieve their ends. These people are eventually discovered and "outed", because their violation of reality is a house of unreal cards blown over by fact-checkers down the road.
The latter are intellectual bullies, abusive parents who rationalize physical punishment, people who use white lies to avoid confrontation and judgment, and media personalities who justify stories that execute their subconscious rage against the machine.
The latter are much more difficult to "out". Their deception is more fundamental, more philosophical, more rationalized, more habitual. The facts surrounding their personal deception go deep, go way back into childhood, go way back into history.
They number the vast majority of human beings. Here are some of their fake beliefs:
1) Religion
2) Altruism
3) Victimhood
4) Racial supremacy
5) "Sparing the rod"
6) Anthropomorphic global warming
7) Pacifism
8) Drug and alcohol "addictions"
9) Redistribution of wealth
10) Obedience to authority (parents, government, gods)
11) Awarding participation instead of excellence
12) Not judging others
13) "White lies"
I say "fake" on these beliefs because they are not connected to the facts of reality; they are irrational beliefs. They lead to irrational actions and thoughts.
1) Living by "faith" instead of reason, wrecking the rational faculty
2) Living for others, wrecking egoism and personal happiness and proper government
3) Seeing victims in life instead of solutions in life
4) Primitively assessing others by body features instead of (im)moral actions
5) Advocating violence against others to achieve a desired end in actions and thoughts
6) Punishing and controlling capitalism instead of honoring individual rights
7) Believing nonjudgmental inaction achieves peace
8) Focusing on physicality instead of irrationality on substance abuse
9) Believing wealth is achieved via devious or "privileged" means and must be "given back"
10) A skeptical perception of human efficacy, and therefore a need to obey to be good
11) A failure to acknowledge greatness in human action
12) The skepticism of human efficacy in making objective assessments
13) It's OK to be dishonest; in fact it can be good
The list is endless.
Interestingly, the outright fake people (the conscious ones like Obama) are perhaps more dastardly in their open flouting of propriety, fairness and humanity, but it is the second kind of fake people (the subconscious ones) who can be more pernicious and are more pervasive -- comprising the vast majority of humanity.
And it is the extremists of this second kind of fake who have taken over academia and the Mainstream News Media (MSM). They are the ones who've drunk the entire sink of Kool-Aid on bad philosophy, bad thinking -- ideas devoid of their relationship with reality. They are the worst kind of human beings -- bent, subconsciously, on the destruction of individuality, just as they've destroyed their own mental well-being.
They are run entirely by their subconscious conceptions on the "horrible" nature of humans and the world. Their MSM news is subconscious news -- SubNews. It is almost entirely FAKE news, whose propagation is fundamentally subconsciously activated, to satisfy irrational misconceptions instead of perceiving, explicating and broadcasting objective reality -- real news.
They believe, like Thomas Hobbes, that humans are nasty and brutish, incapable of governing themselves, and in need of a dominant overlord (Leviathan government) that is itself aggrandized and monitored by the true overlords -- the eminence gris, the "thinkers", the media, who believe themselves to be entirely immune from their own skeptical assessment of humanity's alleged "fall".
These people are "well-educated", which means, in truth, that they are well-indoctrinated. They exit high school as nearly full-blown SJWs (Social Justice Warriors), and then seek further "education" to intellectually rationalize their subconscious misconceptions of the world.
While billions of other people leave basic schooling to "get on with their lives" and get jobs and have families or actually seek "hard" secondary education to get a real job in the marketplace, these SJWs are learning where their spot will be in the modern-day Inquisition of the MSM and academia.
The most adept at dishonesty among them rise to the "top", at places like the NYT and Washington Post and the major broadcast networks. This is the creme (scum) of the intellectual cesspool that is the modern liberal mind. They are dug in. They are the Torquemadas. They are revered.
They have never given a single thought, most of them, to what individual rights are. They deride absolutes, while dishonestly denying their own Leftist absolutes. They are contemptuous of the masses (hoi polloi). They are stridently anti-greatness, which makes them stridently anti-capitalism. ("You didn't build that.").
And so their "news" does not revolve around individual rights, glorious capitalism, freedom of speech/guns/property, greatness of individual endeavor, and government limitations -- real news.
Instead they spout subconscious-driven "news", SubNews -- FAKE news. Red-herring news (global warming), subconsciously yanking viewers and readers away from the fundamental aspects of any subject (in this case, the individual right to production). No news, subconsciously avoiding real news (ObamaCare's grotesque violation of the right to make health decisions).
SubNews is ubiquitous, insidious and nearly invisible (to anti-conceptual mentalities), like the subconscious monster in The Forbidden Planet. It runs thousands of "invisible" fake stories each year -- stories that would not exist if the media were objective and reality-based. SubNews pretends these are relevant stories, real news:
1) Ominous talk of leaving the terrorist-ridden United Nations, which shouldn't exist
2) Black Live Matter being a legitimate "movement" instead of a terrorist organization
3) Campus tantrums being called "protests" instead of threats aimed at stopping free speech
4) Endlessly discussing fake "climate change" instead of dismissing it for what it is -- an attempt by Marxists to destroy capitalism and not honor property rights (the real news)
5) Endlessly discussing "violent crime" (with a conscious and subconscious attempt to eradicate the right to own weapons)
6) Assuming "welfare" is moral and an absolute entitlement of "victims" of "cold" capitalism
7) Blathering about "unequal pay for women" instead of honestly addressing the real news -- that no such thing exists
8) Droning on about "transgenders" and other "outcasts" and their "rights" instead of honoring a business's right to their own property and bathrooms
9) Concocting hundreds of stories about so-called "privileged" and "underprivileged" to accentuate fake class divisions and capitalism's alleged unfairness
10) Giving airtime and press space to SJWs around the world to further the SubNew's own agenda, instead of mocking and ridiculing the SJWs
11) Running puff pieces, pretending that Islam and other religions have something to offer the West, which the SubNews despises but can't explain rationally
12) Offering daily updates and graphics on drug crime, instead of thoughtful expositions on how humans have a right to their bodies and how drug laws violate that right (which would eventually end their fake stories)
13) Glossing over, ad infinitum, Obama's claims of hope and change, without demanding details from him and holding his feet to the fire of individual rights
There are thousands upon thousands of these types of fake SubNews stories, begun and extended by bad subconscious philosophy, by media scoundrels who never did what most of us decided to do -- Get a life. Think through assumptions. Get a job. Get happy.
Most of us "regular" people don't carry Stalin-statue-size chips on our shoulders. We want to be left alone, but the SJWs won't let that happen. They will insist on calling their SubNews real news, instead of fake news, red-herring news. They insist that we must be controlled -- by them, by the very people who dishonestly absorbed bad philosophy and didn't have the courage to re-assess it.
I worked within the SubNews for 13 years after college (yes, I was a "light" version of one of them), and saw first-hand the subconscious brandishers of nihilism and skepticism. Unlike "regular" people out in the world, they are entirely incapable of discussing ideas civilly. They are thoroughly suffused in their irrationality, having not only committed to it at a young age, but also taken the extra step to "validate" their malevolent worldview in college.
They're on a mission. They will acknowledge that openly. What they can't acknowledge is the dishonesty in their childhood and early adulthood that kept them from re-evaluating their mistaken and assumed beliefs, which now run them and their endless SubNews perorations.
This is the real fake news -- not the silly, transparent attempts by online nut-jobs.
The real fake news begins in the addled subconscious of the lifelong, intellectual miscreants.
The real battle begins with understanding and outing the real fake news -- the SubNews.
The former purposely (consciously) deceives others. They're outright liars.
The latter deceives himself -- and then others, unwittingly -- making of his life a lie.
They are both dishonest, either willfully or unwittingly. One knows the damage he's doing, and the other doesn't really, but has cowardly accepted ideas that are wrong in his mind and then acts on the misconceptions, creating deceptions he's not even aware of.
The former are people like Bernie Madoff and Hitler and Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama and lying salespeople, using verbal legerdemain (outright lying) to achieve their ends. These people are eventually discovered and "outed", because their violation of reality is a house of unreal cards blown over by fact-checkers down the road.
The latter are intellectual bullies, abusive parents who rationalize physical punishment, people who use white lies to avoid confrontation and judgment, and media personalities who justify stories that execute their subconscious rage against the machine.
The latter are much more difficult to "out". Their deception is more fundamental, more philosophical, more rationalized, more habitual. The facts surrounding their personal deception go deep, go way back into childhood, go way back into history.
They number the vast majority of human beings. Here are some of their fake beliefs:
1) Religion
2) Altruism
3) Victimhood
4) Racial supremacy
5) "Sparing the rod"
6) Anthropomorphic global warming
7) Pacifism
8) Drug and alcohol "addictions"
9) Redistribution of wealth
10) Obedience to authority (parents, government, gods)
11) Awarding participation instead of excellence
12) Not judging others
13) "White lies"
I say "fake" on these beliefs because they are not connected to the facts of reality; they are irrational beliefs. They lead to irrational actions and thoughts.
1) Living by "faith" instead of reason, wrecking the rational faculty
2) Living for others, wrecking egoism and personal happiness and proper government
3) Seeing victims in life instead of solutions in life
4) Primitively assessing others by body features instead of (im)moral actions
5) Advocating violence against others to achieve a desired end in actions and thoughts
6) Punishing and controlling capitalism instead of honoring individual rights
7) Believing nonjudgmental inaction achieves peace
8) Focusing on physicality instead of irrationality on substance abuse
9) Believing wealth is achieved via devious or "privileged" means and must be "given back"
10) A skeptical perception of human efficacy, and therefore a need to obey to be good
11) A failure to acknowledge greatness in human action
12) The skepticism of human efficacy in making objective assessments
13) It's OK to be dishonest; in fact it can be good
The list is endless.
Interestingly, the outright fake people (the conscious ones like Obama) are perhaps more dastardly in their open flouting of propriety, fairness and humanity, but it is the second kind of fake people (the subconscious ones) who can be more pernicious and are more pervasive -- comprising the vast majority of humanity.
And it is the extremists of this second kind of fake who have taken over academia and the Mainstream News Media (MSM). They are the ones who've drunk the entire sink of Kool-Aid on bad philosophy, bad thinking -- ideas devoid of their relationship with reality. They are the worst kind of human beings -- bent, subconsciously, on the destruction of individuality, just as they've destroyed their own mental well-being.
They are run entirely by their subconscious conceptions on the "horrible" nature of humans and the world. Their MSM news is subconscious news -- SubNews. It is almost entirely FAKE news, whose propagation is fundamentally subconsciously activated, to satisfy irrational misconceptions instead of perceiving, explicating and broadcasting objective reality -- real news.
They believe, like Thomas Hobbes, that humans are nasty and brutish, incapable of governing themselves, and in need of a dominant overlord (Leviathan government) that is itself aggrandized and monitored by the true overlords -- the eminence gris, the "thinkers", the media, who believe themselves to be entirely immune from their own skeptical assessment of humanity's alleged "fall".
These people are "well-educated", which means, in truth, that they are well-indoctrinated. They exit high school as nearly full-blown SJWs (Social Justice Warriors), and then seek further "education" to intellectually rationalize their subconscious misconceptions of the world.
While billions of other people leave basic schooling to "get on with their lives" and get jobs and have families or actually seek "hard" secondary education to get a real job in the marketplace, these SJWs are learning where their spot will be in the modern-day Inquisition of the MSM and academia.
The most adept at dishonesty among them rise to the "top", at places like the NYT and Washington Post and the major broadcast networks. This is the creme (scum) of the intellectual cesspool that is the modern liberal mind. They are dug in. They are the Torquemadas. They are revered.
They have never given a single thought, most of them, to what individual rights are. They deride absolutes, while dishonestly denying their own Leftist absolutes. They are contemptuous of the masses (hoi polloi). They are stridently anti-greatness, which makes them stridently anti-capitalism. ("You didn't build that.").
And so their "news" does not revolve around individual rights, glorious capitalism, freedom of speech/guns/property, greatness of individual endeavor, and government limitations -- real news.
Instead they spout subconscious-driven "news", SubNews -- FAKE news. Red-herring news (global warming), subconsciously yanking viewers and readers away from the fundamental aspects of any subject (in this case, the individual right to production). No news, subconsciously avoiding real news (ObamaCare's grotesque violation of the right to make health decisions).
SubNews is ubiquitous, insidious and nearly invisible (to anti-conceptual mentalities), like the subconscious monster in The Forbidden Planet. It runs thousands of "invisible" fake stories each year -- stories that would not exist if the media were objective and reality-based. SubNews pretends these are relevant stories, real news:
1) Ominous talk of leaving the terrorist-ridden United Nations, which shouldn't exist
2) Black Live Matter being a legitimate "movement" instead of a terrorist organization
3) Campus tantrums being called "protests" instead of threats aimed at stopping free speech
4) Endlessly discussing fake "climate change" instead of dismissing it for what it is -- an attempt by Marxists to destroy capitalism and not honor property rights (the real news)
5) Endlessly discussing "violent crime" (with a conscious and subconscious attempt to eradicate the right to own weapons)
6) Assuming "welfare" is moral and an absolute entitlement of "victims" of "cold" capitalism
7) Blathering about "unequal pay for women" instead of honestly addressing the real news -- that no such thing exists
8) Droning on about "transgenders" and other "outcasts" and their "rights" instead of honoring a business's right to their own property and bathrooms
9) Concocting hundreds of stories about so-called "privileged" and "underprivileged" to accentuate fake class divisions and capitalism's alleged unfairness
10) Giving airtime and press space to SJWs around the world to further the SubNew's own agenda, instead of mocking and ridiculing the SJWs
11) Running puff pieces, pretending that Islam and other religions have something to offer the West, which the SubNews despises but can't explain rationally
12) Offering daily updates and graphics on drug crime, instead of thoughtful expositions on how humans have a right to their bodies and how drug laws violate that right (which would eventually end their fake stories)
13) Glossing over, ad infinitum, Obama's claims of hope and change, without demanding details from him and holding his feet to the fire of individual rights
There are thousands upon thousands of these types of fake SubNews stories, begun and extended by bad subconscious philosophy, by media scoundrels who never did what most of us decided to do -- Get a life. Think through assumptions. Get a job. Get happy.
Most of us "regular" people don't carry Stalin-statue-size chips on our shoulders. We want to be left alone, but the SJWs won't let that happen. They will insist on calling their SubNews real news, instead of fake news, red-herring news. They insist that we must be controlled -- by them, by the very people who dishonestly absorbed bad philosophy and didn't have the courage to re-assess it.
I worked within the SubNews for 13 years after college (yes, I was a "light" version of one of them), and saw first-hand the subconscious brandishers of nihilism and skepticism. Unlike "regular" people out in the world, they are entirely incapable of discussing ideas civilly. They are thoroughly suffused in their irrationality, having not only committed to it at a young age, but also taken the extra step to "validate" their malevolent worldview in college.
They're on a mission. They will acknowledge that openly. What they can't acknowledge is the dishonesty in their childhood and early adulthood that kept them from re-evaluating their mistaken and assumed beliefs, which now run them and their endless SubNews perorations.
This is the real fake news -- not the silly, transparent attempts by online nut-jobs.
The real fake news begins in the addled subconscious of the lifelong, intellectual miscreants.
The real battle begins with understanding and outing the real fake news -- the SubNews.
Saturday, February 25, 2017
"Work" and "privilege"
The 1940s Nazis had a deceptive phrase plastered above the entrances to their human-extermination camps for all the poor souls to read as they marched inside to their inevitable death and misery: arbeit macht frei.
"Work sets you free".
As gruesomely cynical was this usage in those abysmal, wretched circumstances, the phrase itself is entirely true -- for free people. Work DOES set us free, so to speak.
It frees our spirit, making it unencumbered by the guilt of parasites and the apathetic. It makes us proud of who we are, confidently circumspective about ourselves and our lives. It connects us and grounds us to reality. It makes the moments away from work more "free-spirited", allowing us to enjoy art and music and friendship and romance more fully.
It gives us identity. Work IS identity. It is who we are. It is our primary relationship with reality, our primary creativity, our primary challenge. It solidifies our being, occupies our thoughts, bolsters our confidence, giving us an emotional euphoria.
The immense satisfaction of good, hard, creative work does, indeed, set us "free" -- in spirit. There is no personal reproach over what we should be doing, or for mooching off of others, or for being lazy, or for not pursuing happiness, or for not being productive and responsible. We have purpose, and we are fulfilling our purpose.
In a free or semi-free marketplace, like most industrialized countries, there are thousands of different jobs available -- a veritable smorgasbord -- from which we can choose to actualize our own identity, our own preference in fulfilling work.
We can start our own business for these jobs, or we can even create a whole new line of jobs, as happened with hundreds of industries in our industrial/tech/capitalism era -- automotive, computers, programming, fashion design, movies, music, space, science, chemistry, planes, yoga, fitness trainers, nutrition specialists, writers, pharmacists. The list is endless.
The poorest child in the most abusive household can pursue his favorite job and become a billionaire, if he wishes (Starbucks' Howard Schultz; TV icon Oprah Winfrey). The richest child in a constructive household can do the same -- though he may already be a billionaire (Sam Walton scion).
In a free society, rags and riches are determined by only one thing: determination -- except for a very few who start out at or near the top of the money pile.
But the terms "rags" and "riches" refer to money -- not work, and not happiness.
The one thing that all people, rich and poor, have in common is that they have to actually figure out what kind of work will fulfill their identity -- what kind of work will "complete them". No amount of money supplants this personal discovery, and money does not buy happiness. Only good, creative work "buys" happiness.
The poor girl and the billionaire boy start out with exactly the same psychological potential. Each has to decide what their creative work will be. Ironically, this discovery can actually be easier on the girl starting from nothing because there is no peer pressure or family pressure for her to go into the rich family business. The up-and-coming Oprah specifically chose broadcasting work because it excited her.
It is work's soul-completion and the determination it takes to find the right job that belies the liberal propaganda about and obsession with "privilege". Privilege cannot help you choose your best job. It can perhaps help you get that job in some cases, but it can't help you with your soul-searching, with your career choice of optimum satisfaction.
There is no such thing as two people born with the exact same abilities and exact same economic status. Doesn't exist. Never has. Somebody somewhere always has some advantage (privilege) over us, even among twins born in the same home.
Phil Donahue allegedly had immensely more privilege than Oprah, but she ended up smoking him in the ratings, becoming 10 times more successful.
Small-town Southern boy Sam Walton was up against retail giant K-Mart and others with "privilege", but he smoked them eventually with determination and ingenuity.
There are millions of other untold stories of less "privileged" kids beating out their "superiors" in millions of jobs and college entrances throughout the world each year.
Privilege may gain you better and/or quicker access to higher education or higher jobs or higher connections in the beginning of your young adulthood, but it doesn't eliminate the primary aspect of the identity-filled life: finding the job that completes you as a person -- and going after it.
History is, unfortunately, littered with the corpses of rich kids who committed suicide or ultimately lived in abject poverty because of poor life-desicions and squandering, or became addicted to drugs and apathy -- because they never did the hard discovery of finding out who they are, finding out specifically which job completed them.
Privilege doesn't help one to think.
Have a lot of money or being a certain race or gender may, on occasion, help you or hinder you, once you've figured out what you want to do with your life. But none of these things can make you successful if you are not being rational -- or stop you, if you are being rational.
There is NO job that any person cannot attain, if they are determined -- whether they have privileges or not. Abraham Lincoln rose from the poorest conditions in a log cabin to the presidency of the United States, and Frederick Douglass rose from slavery in a racist society to be an esteemed writer, abolitionist leader, women's rights leader -- and to confer regularly with Lincoln himself.
Leftists and others who propagandize about "privilege" fail to understand this. They resent privilege and capitalism, and so they see only victims and disadvantages, instead of heroes and hard work. They are skeptics of human ability and industry. They pretend to want to help their victims, and their victims are often blind to the condescension of such help.
And they blank out the fact that privilege is most often the result of previous hard work by previous generations of determined people -- who deserved their "privilege".
The Left use "privilege" as a means to aggrandize government to "help" so-called victims, so-called "underprivileged". They willfully refuse to see that self-fulfillment in work is not a matter of where you start or how you're helped. It is about self-discovery and self-determination.
Human beings who take pride in their own minds, in themselves, don't care about where they start. They don't care about who's rich and who isn't. They wouldn't think of demanding that the government "even the playing field". Freedom evens the playing field, for the privileged and the underprivileged.
With freedom, we have the privilege, so to speak, to undertake any endeavor, any job, any discovery. With freedom, there are no victims of the marketplace. We are the captain and commander of our own destiny, just like Oprah and Walton and Schultz and millions of others. We find the work that completes us and gives us pride.
And sets us free.
"Work sets you free".
As gruesomely cynical was this usage in those abysmal, wretched circumstances, the phrase itself is entirely true -- for free people. Work DOES set us free, so to speak.
It frees our spirit, making it unencumbered by the guilt of parasites and the apathetic. It makes us proud of who we are, confidently circumspective about ourselves and our lives. It connects us and grounds us to reality. It makes the moments away from work more "free-spirited", allowing us to enjoy art and music and friendship and romance more fully.
It gives us identity. Work IS identity. It is who we are. It is our primary relationship with reality, our primary creativity, our primary challenge. It solidifies our being, occupies our thoughts, bolsters our confidence, giving us an emotional euphoria.
The immense satisfaction of good, hard, creative work does, indeed, set us "free" -- in spirit. There is no personal reproach over what we should be doing, or for mooching off of others, or for being lazy, or for not pursuing happiness, or for not being productive and responsible. We have purpose, and we are fulfilling our purpose.
In a free or semi-free marketplace, like most industrialized countries, there are thousands of different jobs available -- a veritable smorgasbord -- from which we can choose to actualize our own identity, our own preference in fulfilling work.
We can start our own business for these jobs, or we can even create a whole new line of jobs, as happened with hundreds of industries in our industrial/tech/capitalism era -- automotive, computers, programming, fashion design, movies, music, space, science, chemistry, planes, yoga, fitness trainers, nutrition specialists, writers, pharmacists. The list is endless.
The poorest child in the most abusive household can pursue his favorite job and become a billionaire, if he wishes (Starbucks' Howard Schultz; TV icon Oprah Winfrey). The richest child in a constructive household can do the same -- though he may already be a billionaire (Sam Walton scion).
In a free society, rags and riches are determined by only one thing: determination -- except for a very few who start out at or near the top of the money pile.
But the terms "rags" and "riches" refer to money -- not work, and not happiness.
The one thing that all people, rich and poor, have in common is that they have to actually figure out what kind of work will fulfill their identity -- what kind of work will "complete them". No amount of money supplants this personal discovery, and money does not buy happiness. Only good, creative work "buys" happiness.
The poor girl and the billionaire boy start out with exactly the same psychological potential. Each has to decide what their creative work will be. Ironically, this discovery can actually be easier on the girl starting from nothing because there is no peer pressure or family pressure for her to go into the rich family business. The up-and-coming Oprah specifically chose broadcasting work because it excited her.
It is work's soul-completion and the determination it takes to find the right job that belies the liberal propaganda about and obsession with "privilege". Privilege cannot help you choose your best job. It can perhaps help you get that job in some cases, but it can't help you with your soul-searching, with your career choice of optimum satisfaction.
There is no such thing as two people born with the exact same abilities and exact same economic status. Doesn't exist. Never has. Somebody somewhere always has some advantage (privilege) over us, even among twins born in the same home.
Phil Donahue allegedly had immensely more privilege than Oprah, but she ended up smoking him in the ratings, becoming 10 times more successful.
Small-town Southern boy Sam Walton was up against retail giant K-Mart and others with "privilege", but he smoked them eventually with determination and ingenuity.
There are millions of other untold stories of less "privileged" kids beating out their "superiors" in millions of jobs and college entrances throughout the world each year.
Privilege may gain you better and/or quicker access to higher education or higher jobs or higher connections in the beginning of your young adulthood, but it doesn't eliminate the primary aspect of the identity-filled life: finding the job that completes you as a person -- and going after it.
History is, unfortunately, littered with the corpses of rich kids who committed suicide or ultimately lived in abject poverty because of poor life-desicions and squandering, or became addicted to drugs and apathy -- because they never did the hard discovery of finding out who they are, finding out specifically which job completed them.
Privilege doesn't help one to think.
Have a lot of money or being a certain race or gender may, on occasion, help you or hinder you, once you've figured out what you want to do with your life. But none of these things can make you successful if you are not being rational -- or stop you, if you are being rational.
There is NO job that any person cannot attain, if they are determined -- whether they have privileges or not. Abraham Lincoln rose from the poorest conditions in a log cabin to the presidency of the United States, and Frederick Douglass rose from slavery in a racist society to be an esteemed writer, abolitionist leader, women's rights leader -- and to confer regularly with Lincoln himself.
Leftists and others who propagandize about "privilege" fail to understand this. They resent privilege and capitalism, and so they see only victims and disadvantages, instead of heroes and hard work. They are skeptics of human ability and industry. They pretend to want to help their victims, and their victims are often blind to the condescension of such help.
And they blank out the fact that privilege is most often the result of previous hard work by previous generations of determined people -- who deserved their "privilege".
The Left use "privilege" as a means to aggrandize government to "help" so-called victims, so-called "underprivileged". They willfully refuse to see that self-fulfillment in work is not a matter of where you start or how you're helped. It is about self-discovery and self-determination.
Human beings who take pride in their own minds, in themselves, don't care about where they start. They don't care about who's rich and who isn't. They wouldn't think of demanding that the government "even the playing field". Freedom evens the playing field, for the privileged and the underprivileged.
With freedom, we have the privilege, so to speak, to undertake any endeavor, any job, any discovery. With freedom, there are no victims of the marketplace. We are the captain and commander of our own destiny, just like Oprah and Walton and Schultz and millions of others. We find the work that completes us and gives us pride.
And sets us free.
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