The superstitious mind and individual rights

Priests refer to their parishioners as "my flock."

Rightly so. They are sheep -- to be herded, to be fed mysticism, to be intellectually and morally slaughtered.

The flock must bend to religion's make-believe metaphysics, to religion's insistence on epistemological retreat (faith), to religion's demands of immorality, to religion's self-sacrificing politics.

Religion is the ideal training camp for fascism, socialism, communism, liberalism, conservatism, progressivism, despotism -- any political "ism" that demands self-sacrifice and obedience. The sheep believe they rebel, but even when the sheep enjoy their tea parties, they demand sacrifice from fellow sheep via taxation, regulation, subsidies, welfare. Sure, these sheep say they want less authority and less obedience, but they simply ask for smaller knives at the throats of their fellow citizens. They can't help it. They are sheep.

The non-religious are sheep, too, though they like to think they are rebels and hippies and anti-establishment and trend-setters and intellectual. They are better sheep than the religious sheep. They lambast "greed" and wealth on par with Jesus, unlike their conservative brethren, who ignore the hypocrisy.

The god of the non-religious is Immanuel Kant, who proclaimed that duty is what rightly drives human beings and that we are born with "categorical imperatives" in our mind that guide duty and "good will." In other words, we ain't in control; we should obey some intrinsic things in our minds, and we should sacrifice ourselves and happiness to others and duties to others. (Kant was the King of circular reasoning)

There have been many Kant disciples through the last two centuries, but it is ultimately Kant that the atheistic sheep worship -- ironically, because Kant himself was a theist, whose main purpose was to give alleged vindication of a god's presence and authority over morality: god is necessary for the "ideal of the supreme good."

And so we have the superstitious left and right in this country, who've abandoned their minds to their gods of the heavens and universities. The sheep have surrendered their rationality for obedience and irrational doctrines and concomitant self-sacrifice. They have disdain for themselves and, therefore, for all individuals. Their self-loathing projects itself up the rest of us, insisting that we be punished physically for their intellectual misery.

They cannot believe that individuals have efficacy, the ability to understand reality and the ability to be independently happy. They cannot believe that individuals must be left alone. Individuals must be commanded, and individuals must obey. They must serve. They must, ironically, try to make others happy but not themselves.

And, so, they cannot understand individual rights. They cannot understand rights. They do not want rights and they insist that others do not have them either. We are all sheep, after all -- unworthy of rights, waiting for our next commands, waiting to be rightfully slaughtered. Bound sheep do not like unbound sheep.

As long as the vast majority of humanity allows superstition to grip it by the throat and cut off oxygen to the brain, we will not have individual rights. We cannot even discuss it seriously until great gobs of individuals take ideas and themselves and reality seriously. We will continue to live in the Dark Ages as our "modern" brethren and sisters flock to their particular brand of mysticism.

I sometimes wish I could live 300 years hence, when Objectivism has won and young children's mouths gape open as they hear of a time in the 21st century when people, even adults, actually BELIEVED IN GODS!

At least the very thought of such a time and such children makes me smile. And I've seen that gaping mouth on the face of my own lovely daughter. And, oh, how I smile!

Rights don't obligate you to DO anything

Ayn Rand once noted that a definition of individual rights can often effectively be put in the negative: to be free from coercion (the initiation of force) by other men (including the men of government).

That means other people must always keep their hands off of you, your money and your property, as long as you do the same. It is a big "don't." Don't interfere with someone else's right to be let alone, to fully govern their own lives and well-being.

Conversely, a right does not obligate you to DO anything. You do not have to be productive, you do not have to be moral, you do not have to help others. You are free to run your life toward happiness or run your life into the ground.

But if you decide upon the latter (or former, for that matter), you cannot demand that others take care of you. They have the same right to "don't": to do nothing for you, to stand by as you self-destruct or fall into abject poverty or poor health. They don't have any obligations to you that they haven't signed in a contract to do for you. Your immorality does not obligate them to surrender their rights to self-determination. They can morally say, "I have a life to live. I care more about me, my friends and my family than I do you. So, good luck and get lost."

Rand gave a perfect definition to rights:

A “right” is a moral principle defining and sanctioning a man’s freedom of action in a social context. There is only one fundamental right (all the others are its consequences or corollaries): a man’s right to his own life. Life is a process of self-sustaining and self-generated action; the right to life means the right to engage in self-sustaining and self-generated action—which means: the freedom to take all the actions required by the nature of a rational being for the support, the furtherance, the fulfillment and the enjoyment of his own life. (Such is the meaning of the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.)

With all of the above in mind, the American welfare state is an immoral travesty. It assumes that individuals have an obligation to DO something for other Americans -- be it for housing, food, medicine, old age, health, etc. -- to surrender their individual rights.

The modern politician and 99% of Americans have bought into this philosophy of altruism -- and its stepson: political altruism -- instead of the philosophy of rational self-interest that recognizes each human's fundamental right to pursue his values for his own happiness and sustenance.

Once the sacrificial philosophy of altruism is embedded in the human mind, that mind then demands that humans sacrifice their self to other selves, that they must surrender their goals for others' goals, that they DO something for others, whether they like it or not. (What irony is it that these altruists think it is OK for us to make others happy but not ourselves?)

This is, fundamentally, the philosophy of skepticism: the belief that humans are not fully rational, not efficacious, not capable of being fully happy by themselves, not nice. Once this belief in the "fallen" human (usually via religion or neo-Marxism) is swallowed and ingrained, the mental house of cards falls, and the landscape of liberty is littered with the wreckage of coercive altruists, who seek some redemption for their mental confusion by pretending to overly care about others. It's the Jesus syndrome. "I've come here to save you." It's the heady "savior" mentality to compensate for their own lost identity.

The fix is singular: Recognize that reality is real (not supernatural). Recognize that humans are rational and capable of understanding reality. Recognize that humans can guide their own lives and develop a rational morality to be that guide. Recognize that governments have only one job to do: to protect rational beings from being interfered with on their free paths to wherever they wish to go.

In other words, the fix is the philosophy of Ayn Rand. You don't have to read and study Rand. You don't have to DO it. But if you don't, I'll never be free of you and your demand that I DO something for you or those you allegedly care about.

Study Rand. Hold your head high. Let's shake hands as happy equals and make a toast to liberty.