Some economic theories believe that wealth is created through labor, that creating jobs will therefore create wealth. The reality is that wealth creates jobs, and not vice versa. In China we see the extreme logical consequence of this idea - millions are put to work building vast cities and malls which sit empty for years…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rPILhiTJv7E&feature=player_embedded#at=353
"Structuralism argues that a specific domain of culture may be understood by means of a structure—modelled on language—that is distinct both from the organisations of reality and those of ideas or the imagination—the "third order" (wikipedia)
Huh??? Understanding can be had by using a means of structure that is not connected to reality OR the imagination of those attempting to understand, but some abstract "third order" … sounds like Platonic Idealism
Article on Solitude and Leadership
By William Deresiewicz
If you want others to follow, learn to be alone with your thoughts
http://www.theamericanscholar.org/solitude-and-leadership/
The lecture below was delivered to the plebe class at the United States Military Academy at West Point in October of last year.
More rebuttals to Aristotle Bashing
Aristotle gets the whole range of guilt applied to him. Usually he is blamed for the dark ages, because everyone believed Aristotle had all ready figured everything out, so didn’t bother to try to figure out anything new. Aristotle himself would have been disgusted by such an attitude. This writer from a forum I frequent argues that Aristotle was virtually irrelevant. His comment and my response follows:
(Aristotle hater) - " What you present here is a testable hypothesis: Hellenistic science and technology descend from Aristotle. I’d have to see your data. The best way to show this would be to show that later Greek scientists explicitly cited him. Second best would be to show that their contemporaries reported this. You might know of others. James Lennox, an Objectivist and an expert on Aristotle’s biology, notes that even his biology fell fairly quickly into obscurity after his death. To show that he was influential in fields that he didn’t work in (or where he was dead wrong, such as cosmology and mechanics) would be a hard sell, but you’re welcome to try."
Eratosthenes, when setting out to measure the size of the Earth in Alexendria around 240 BC cited Aristotle’s arguments proving the Earth was indeed a sphere - that constellations appeared lower or higher in the sky as one traveled north or south, and that the shadow of the Earth cast on the moon during a lunar eclipse was always round. Eratosthenes was a librarian of the Library of Alexandria and friend to Archimedes.
Aristotle argument that the Earth did not move based on the observation that the relative position of the stars never changed, though wrong, was completely reasonable given that stellar parrallex is not visible by the naked eye and was not observed until the 1800’s, it was never the less cited by Ptolemly when arguing his Geocentric model and was prevalent enough to not only be mentioned by Tycho Brahe, but to in fact SWAY his opinion to reject Heliocentricity in favor of Geocentrciticy (though begrudgingly) Tycho Brahe was the best naked eye astronomical observer to have ever lived, he spent years trying to observe stellar parallelx, and finding none, went against Copernican theory and supported the Ptolemly / Aristotle view.
Daniel N. Robinson Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Georgetown University and a member of the philosophy faculty of Oxford University says of Aristotle in his Teaching Company lecture "Great Ideas of Philosophy"
"I’ve occasionally said to classes that if I had to single out any event as evidence that some civilization out in the milky way was taking pity on humanity for its slow progress…the evidence might well be Aristotle and his accomplishments. Its almost as if such a distant galactic neighbor said ‘Goodness sakes those human beings do not seem to be getting along at all, Aristotle, why don’t you go down there and get things going"
He continues
"The sheer intellectual power of this man, expressing itself in biology, natural science, ethics, politics, metaphysics, logic, is simply without parallel in the history of thought. There is almost no academic or scholarly subject taught that does not bare his stamp of influence."
“Plato is dear to me, but dearer still is the truth”
Aristotle was a student of Plato’s and greatly admired his teacher. However as his own philosophical inquiries progressed he began to question the wisdom of his teacher, wrestling with this and eventually coming to terms with it, he wrote "Plato is dear to me, but dearer still is the truth"
For centuries after the age of the classical philosophers most of western civilization had embraced Aristotle’s ideas about reality entirely uncritically, while embracing most of Plato’s ideas about knowledge and religion. The Dark ages were characterized by an uncritical acceptance of the teachings of the ancients, where for nearly 1500 years virtually no advancements were made and all questions about reality were directed toward the ancient texts.
Aristotle would have never welcomed this, his own writings are full of deep sense of inquiry and his own opinions changed on many topics as he investigated them further. Aristotle’s deeply inquisitive nature is evidenced by his love for collecting and analyzing animals, attributing characteristics to them and classifying them - the entire science of Taxonomy was primarily founded by Aristotle, as well as the rules for describing nature accurately in the what we today refer to as Aristotlean logic. But on some matters his speculations were wrong, and the uncritical acceptance of these for centuries hindered further progress.
The Roman doctor Galen, who did in fact proclaim to have figured everything out in medicine, was also uncritically accepted throughout the Dark Ages, he is the origin of blood letting and disease coming from an imbalance in the various ‘humours’ (fluids in the body) today some words are historical descendants of his medical quackery, such as being sanguine.
The middle ages did cultivate an atmosphere of inquiry and questioning, but it was entirely focused on theological matters that had little relevance to material progress on earth, and it was only when that questioning attitude was shifted toward descriptions of reality that the renaissance and scientific revolutions would begin. One great admirer of Aristotle was Isaac Newton. And one incorrect teaching of Aristotle’s was that objects need to be perpetually pushed in order to keep moving, but Newton’s understanding of nature was making it obvious to him that some things keep moving - even forever - without slowing down and in fact something else has to push on them to slow them. This today is his first law of motion and the notion we readily recognize as inertia, but the fact that he was proposing something that contradicted Aristotle greatly disturbed him.
Wrestling with this, he finally came to terms with it from Aristotle’s own famous quote about Plato. Paraphrasing Aristotle and illustrating both his admiration for Aristotle and accepting that he had moved beyond Aristotle’s teaching, Isaac Newton wrote in the margin of one of his notebooks "Aristotle is dear to me, but dearer still is the truth"
"You can state all you want that our health care system is the "best in the world," however every study/survey that compiles a spectrum of measurable outcomes ranks us extremely low, and of course the most expensive"
Ok, I’d like to address this point since you have re-iterated it a few times. What you are referring to is the WHO report, a briefing you can find here
http://www.who.int/whr/2000/media_centre/press_release/en/index.html
There are numerous problems with this report, but let me first ask you what you think are good things to measure the quality of health care on. Lets say for instance we measured the average life expectancy, would that be a fair assessment? At first thought it might be, but consider for starters that the US has twice the land coverage and about half the population density of most every other developed nation (especially Europe) and because of this, we drive much more than our european counterparts, and we spend a much greater amount of time traveling at higher speeds. Naturally, this causes many more premature deaths, since car accidents are one of the leading causes of early deaths. Since such accidents will cause many more people to die much earlier, the entire statistic of ‘average life expectancy’ is skewed in favor of nations which are smaller, have higher population densities (using more mass transit) etc. Is this then a fair and reasonable way to judge quality of health care? Wouldnt a much more accurate represention be how many people survive car accidents, and how long they survive for? Of course, this isn’t very good either because we drive faster and further, which might also put us further from health services. That means that the best judge of care quality would be to look at specific ailments or injuries and see how many people survive these, and for how long.
With that in mind, let’s take a look at the WHO report, from the link above
"In designing the framework for health system performance, WHO broke new methodological ground, employing a technique not previously used for health systems. WHO’s assessment system was based on five indicators: overall level of population health; health inequalities (or disparities) within the population; overall level of health system responsiveness (a combination of patient satisfaction and how well the system acts); distribution of responsiveness within the population (how well people of varying economic status find that they are served by the health system); and the distribution of the health system’s financial burden within the population (who pays the costs)."
Without getting into detail, do you think it’s fair to judge the quality of a nations health care on such things as the ‘distribution of financial burden within a population’ and ‘distribution of responsiveness within the population’ Notice that these two factors completely ignore how good ACTUAL care is. If you are a snake oil mystic and prescribe vasoline to cure cancer, yet you make everyone pay for this vasoline equally and make sure rich and poor have equal access to it, you will score higher by this standard. If you use chemo, radiation therapy, and stem cell treatments to cure cancers, but your population bears the cost unequally, you would score LOWER than the snake oil vasoline quack. Again, do you think this is a fair representation of the quality of medical care? **How much different people pay for medical care** is irrelevant! to the quality of health care! You can have terrible health care but make sure everyone gets an equal amount of it and score better than a system which gets the best kind of health care to as many people as possible.
If you were to rank the quality of cars in a nation, would you seriously propose ranking how expensive the most expensive care is compared to the least expensive car? And ranking how many people have cheap cars and how many people have expensive cars? Or would you rank the cars for safety performance, fuel effeciency, average age, etc? If you actually care about measuring the real quality of cars, you would ignore aspects relating to relative inequalities, and would average out all cars and measure them for specific attributes.
Basically there are two opposiing philosophical premisses at work here, one is a system which delivers the best possible cars to as many people as possible, and the other is to make sure everyone has a car, and that every car is equal, no matter how old or crappy the car is. Both of these still though are utilitiarian ethics, that is, they consider only the greatest good for the greatest number, but the universal and time tested criticism of utilitarianism is that it routinely ignores and violates the rights of individuals.
This WHO report is a ranking of how well nations score when compared against some abstract ideal of a perfect socialized medicine system, and in only small parts does it actually rank quality of care. ANd where it does actually measure the quality of care, the US wins hands down. Consider:
- The US is 37th, and CUBA is 39th
Cuba has horrible health care, but everyone get’s an equal share of this horrific health care and it costs everyone the same amount. Not to mention it’s a dictatorial communist nation, and as such, no doubt lies about it’s quality of care.
- Responsiveness: The nations with the most responsive health systems are the (1st) United States, Switzerland, Luxembourg, Denmark, Germany, Japan, Canada, Norway, Netherlands and Sweden. (where is CUBA??)
- Fairness of financial contribution (again, why is this relevant to guaging the QUALITY OF MEDICAL CARE?) When WHO measured the fairness of financial contribution to health systems, countries lined up differently - Colombia was the top-rated country in this category (Colombia? Seriously? If you were poor and got to choose where to live if you got sick, would it be Colombia, or the US?)
- In North America, Canada rates as the country with the fairest mechanism for health system finance – ranked at 17-19, while the United States is at 54-55. Cuba is the highest among Latin American and Caribbean nations at 23-25. (And yet the Provicincial governer left Canada to seek treatment in the US)
"ST. JOHN’S, N.L. - Newfoundland and Labrador Premier Danny Williams had his mitral valve repaired in Florida - a procedure he says was not offered in Canada. However, Dr. Asim Cheema, a cardiologist at St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto, told QMI Agency that mitral valve repair is routinely performed in Ottawa, Montreal and Toronto."
http://www.torontosun.com/news/canada/2010/02/22/12987776-qmi.html
So even though Canada has the ‘fairest’ health care, a leading politician in Canada leaves Canada to get better care in the US.
Don’t worry, it get’s worse
- To assess overall population health and thus to judge how well the objective of good health is being achieved, WHO has chosen to use the measure of disability - adjusted life expectancy (DALE)
What exactly is Disability adjusted Life Expectancy?
From - http://www.who.int/inf-pr-2000/en/pr2000-life.html -
"For the first time, the WHO has calculated healthy life expectancy for babie..based upon an indicator developed by [who else but…] WHO scientists, Disability Adjusted Life Expectancy (DALE). DALE summarizes the expected number of years to be lived in what might be termed the equivalent of "full health." To calculate DALE, the years of ill-health are weighted according to severity and subtracted from the expected overall life expectancy to give the equivalent years of healthy life."
Ok just to make this clear, DALE basically measures fully functioning ‘healthy’ life spans, not, you know, how long you live after you get sick. So by this measurement, if you are a professional athlete, spend your whole life in great shape, then suddenly drop dead from heart disease, you technically have a higher rated DALE figure than someone who is in regular shape, gets sick a few times, get’s really sick later in life, and gets numerous medical treatments, surviving an extra couple of years. DALE conveniently SUBTRACTS these years from any measurement of the ‘life expectancy’
This is utterly absurd.
Consider then that the countries which will score best are the ones that see people die quickly after getting sick, while the ones that score worst are the ones that keep people alive the longest after they get sick. Compare this measurement with cost spent on care, and then the countries that score best are the ones that spend the least and see patients die quicker after they get sick (as long as they take longer to actually get sick in the first place!) while the ones that score worst spend the most and successfully prolong life after someone gets sick (assuming they take a decent length of time to get sick in the first place)
So basically the DALE was created specifically so the United States, which does in fact keep patients who are sick alive the longest by spending alot of money on it would score low, while nations which do not spend that much and do not keep patients alive very long score higher.
The US Ranks 24 by this standard of ‘adjusted life expectancy’
"The DALE system is simple," says Dr. Lopez. "In the old system, we measured a total life expectancy based on the average numbers of years males and females could expect to live in each country. However, people don’t live all those years in perfect health. At some point in your life, you will have some level of disability. These years with disability are weighted according to their level of severity to estimate the total equivalent lost years of good health. You subtract this from total life expectancy, and what remains is the expected number of years of healthy life."
Now WHY exactly would you consider being disabled and alive to be ‘less alive’ somehow than being entirely enabled and alive? Do you think this is a fair why to measure the quality of health care?
To me, the best measure of quality of health care would be things like how long you live after getting diagnosed and treated with X. What are US Heart Transplant Survival Rates? Cancer Survival Rates? Minimally invasive surgery survival rates? Kidney Transplant Survival Rates? I don’t have the time to google these, but why are these not the measurements the WHO is using to guage health care? The only attempt to measure the ACTUAL quality of care is the DALE system, which is inherently biased against any medicine that prolongs the lives of the sick.
Also, who has developed most of the procedures and equipment that currently make good heatlh care possible in the first place? Who invented the artificial heart, the MRI, the CAT scan and PET Scan? Who discovered and tested most of the worlds life saving drugs? Which country has the best medical schools in the world? Etc etc etc.
**See also - http://granitegrok.com/blog/2010/01/the_real_healthcare_rankings.html
Do you believe in love at first site?
My cousin asked -"do you believe in love at first site" Thoughts?
My comments - As something mystical, no, but as a real tangible emotion - sure.
The human brain is an immense and powerful pattern recognition system, as such it can easily recognize patterns we are not consciously aware of and your emotions can respond in kind. It’s entirely … Read Morepossible that one can recognize some aspects of someone on a mere glance that they believe (rightly or wrongly) to be an accurate representation of their highest ideals manifested, and thus emotionally respond in that manner. Whether what you think you recognize is accurate or not requires sincere introspection, and whether your response was appropriate in degree does so as well, hopefully one would take that incredible emotion as great incentive to get to know the object of it well enough at an explicitly conscious level and determine if it was proper.
Additionally - there is no doubt that love at first site is a real emotional reaction that some people have experienced. This does not mean, however, that it is automatically right or proper.
Our emotions our responses to the things we deeply value and our subsconcious assessment of how it relates to our values (does it pose a threat to them, or does it further them?) If it is good for our values, we have a positive reaction, if it is bad, a negative one.
However it is important to understand that our conceptual assessment of a situation might not be accurate and thus our emotional reaction could be improper, and it is also important to work - throughout life - to clearly identify your values. You could harbor contradictory values which consequently can create conflicting emotional responses. Or you could believe that emotions are automatic sources of knowledge, that whatever you feel is a gateway to some kind of ultimate truth. This is a detrimental attitude to adopt though and it divorces in the long run your emotional reactions to things from the true nature of those things. … Read More
Our emotional reactions should always be checked against a honest rational introspection on our part. If you feel someone is a cheat without knowing why, if this person is to be a part of your life, you ought to force yourself to examine exactly why you feel that way. Feeling a strong emotional or physical desire toward someone, even a stranger, is no different. The reason for the reaction might be random, it might completely incorrect, or it could be a manifestation of social habits you were raised in, or the consequence of deeply held values you’ve examined and cultivated throughout your life. It is only through honest personal introspection that you will understand the cause of the reaction and gauge whether it is appropriate or not.
Matus1976 Podcast Update - E10 - Comments on Love with excerpts from the Novel – “A Ship Made of Paper” http://tinyurl.com/kremjf
The Objective Morality of Environmentalism
Objectivists consider Life as the objective standard of morality, the basis of ethical judgment. Anything which harms life is evil, anything which is beneficial to life is good. Now by “Life” objectivists do not mean the mere mechanical perpetuation of existence, but a particular kind of life, a fulfilling Aristotlean Eudaemonic life proper to rational beings living in the real world in voluntary co-operation with other rational beings. Those beings must have goals, values, and engage in a productive course in life to achieve that which they value and not be co-dependant or exploitative. Someone who values their mechanical existence over their ‘good life’ will find himself quickly betraying those things that make life enjoyable for the sake of things that allow him to exist, leading in a perpetual spiral toward a less meaningful existence. Rand clarifies this as ‘Life qua Man’ that is, the thing’s proper to life in the context of an individual’s values and Man’s nature.
Nihilistic skeptics, atheists, and philosophers throughout the ages have insisted that there is no such thing as an ‘objective’ morality. Theists will make a claim that the word of god handed down as moral commandments are in fact an ‘objective’ basis for morality, and in their case they use ‘objective’ to mean something like ‘absolute’ and ‘irrefutable’ in this their use of the term objective has infiltrated the skeptical philosophers, like Michael Shermer, using the religious definition of objective also insists there is no ‘objective’ basis for morality and justifies this by saying how can you say this or that is right or wrong, according to what? Shermer misunderstands ‘objective morality’ when he uses this a criticism of Objectivism, as if Objectivism has identified through revelation the one true morality, instead of identifying the only one proper to rational beings in the real world.
But when theists use ‘objective’ morality they hijack the concept of truth and deliberation through reason and usurp it with revealed dogma. To them, ‘objective’ morality is something that demands obedience no matter what and achieves it only through an omniscient omnipotent being as revealed through an elite aristocratic few only possible to those few. But skeptics are wrong to use this as the idea for ‘objective’ morality. We do not say that the ‘objective’ mass of 1 cubic centimeter of water is 1 g because it is announced by the fabric of space-time or decreed by an omniscient being and revealed through divination. They are ‘objective’ because they are the product of reason, logic, and observation. Objective in the context of science is something that is strived for that is removed from subjective interpretation and bias. An “Objective” morality is not something ingrained into the fabric of the universe in the sense that it can be deduced through Newton’s laws of motion or quantum mechanics, as skeptics seem to think is a requirement for morality to be objective, (in doing so rendering the very concept of objective pointless) but it is objective in the sense that it is removed from subjective interpretation or bias, it is objective because it is the natural logical consequence of the laws of physics and the nature of rational beings that exist in a real universe.
Liberals are still confused about this, theists have it easy, they look it up in their book, argue a little about interpretation, then decree something as ‘objectively’ immoral. But nothing that only an elite few have access to who provide official interpretations is ‘objective’, it is not something discernable by any person using their mind, reason, and observation - as anything that is called ‘objective’ should by definition be. Liberals aren’t sure where to go, they know that, for instance, killing someone is wrong, but not sure if it is right to say someone in another country is wrong to kill someone else when their culture makes it ok, such as ‘honor killing’, the inhumane treatment of the ‘untouchables’ in India, etc. Richard Dawkins wrestles with this contradiction in ‘the God Delusion’ where he associates religious indoctrination with child abuse, but then is a little confused about what that demands of him morally, if one is witnessing child abuse, expending a reasonable amount of energy to stop it is moral to him, so if a country is indoctrinating children with a hate filled ideology, abusing them essentially, it should be morally defensible to remove from power the tyrants of that nation. But this get’s in the way of the moral relativism, ‘tolerance’ and ‘multi-culturalism’ liberals profess so strongly (but rarely extend to inhabitants of their own nation who hold different opinions!)
Some Liberals though, I realized, do have an objective basis for morality, which they seemingly adopt whole heartedly, that of environmentalism. In the way that Life qua Man is the objective standard of morality to Objectivists, some vague platonic ideal abstraction of a pure and pristine environment is the objective standard of morality to liberal environmentalists. Whatever nation, culture, or creed, regardless of multi-culturalism and ‘tolerance’, if you’re burning down trees, killing cuddly animals, or dumping trash in rivers, all that bottled up moral rage and condemnation that liberals have been holding comes billowing forth. Now, you could be killing people because of their ethnicity, holding the people in your nation as literal hostages and running it like a prison camp, etc, but moral condemnation is sparse. They just say “who are we to say they are wrong” or “That’s just their culture” But if you’re burning coal, forget it! You are the incarnate of all that is evil!
This falls right into line with the growing criticism that environmentalism is just filling the psychological void of religious thought that secularism in the west has left gaping wide open. It has their garden of Eden – “Sustainability”, the fall of man from that where everyone lived in blissful harmony with nature (and not the painful disgusting short brutish lives they actually lived), it’s emotional disregard for facts, it’s original sin, and now, it’s ‘objective’ basis for morality.
One might try to argue that environmental degradation affects everyone and that’s why it’s morally objectionable to everyone everywhere, but this argument fails for two reasons. First it implies that unless something directly affects ME then I make no moral judgment on it, so what if you’re raping my next door neighbor! In fact an assault on any person on the planet is an assault on everyone’s rights because leaving it alone promulgates a world where that kind of thing is ok, where rights in general are not respected. It is always in your best interest to oppose the assault and infringement on rights any where in the world, because when you do not it will always, eventually, come back to bite you. Which leads to the second, the harm which comes from the promulgation of murderous tyranny, which is so often ignored because of ‘multi-culturalism’ and things like ‘self determination’ (as if a small group of thugs getting hundreds of billions in weapons from an expansionistic murderous tyranny like the Soviet Union and using that to enslave and force to war an entire nation, such as was the case of Vietnam, was anything remotely like ‘self determination’) is far more detrimental to your average person’s well being than coal power is. While it is true that these kinds of nations, the most unjust when life is your standard of morality, are also the worst polluters, it is also very true that they are the source and primary fuel for aggression, democide, famines, wars, terrorism, and pandemics.
At the end of WWI, Winston Churchill insisted that British Troops assist the Czars in defending themselves against the revolution which brought Lenin and communism to power, but the war weary west labeled him a war monger. Less than a thousand troops took the Czars with little resistance. It is said that in the making of a movie some years later glorifying the revolution more people were injured than in the actual revolution itself. A little opposition may have gone a long way, but instead what rose to power was the most murderous tyranny in the history of humanity. At the end of WWII, Winston Churchill again warned that we should move on the Soviet Union, while it is now at it’s weakest, and they again called him a war monger, and so we were thrust into an existential prisoners dilemma game with a murderous expansionistic tyranny that brought the entire world to the brink of complete nuclear annihilation.
It was not the Soviet Union’s dirty coal plants or poorly designed nuclear power plants that killed 60 million people this century (more than twice as many as were killed in World War II) and motivated the invasion of 1/3rd of the nations on the planet, thrusting dozens into civil wars and perpetual slavery. It was not the emissions of the crematoriums in Auschwitz that did not meet EPA guidelines that enabled Hitler to kill 20 million Jews, Gypsies, ‘unfits’ and homosexuals (incidentally, Stalin killed more Jews than Hitler did, but he just killed them along with other people, so it was not ‘genocide’ in the eyes of the semantically obsessed morally confused west) It was not raping the earth for steel that started the most dreadful war in all of humanity, it was the alliance of two militaristic tyrannical xenophobic megalomaniacal cultures and one merely power hungry expansionist culture. It was appeasement, indifference, moral relativism, isolationism, and utopian wishful thinking that ignored these murderous tyrannies and every reasonable warning sign until too late that wreaked this havoc upon humanity and the inhabitants of the world, and it will be those same characteristics that will wreak havoc upon humanity and indeed all life on earth in the future.
“300″ Is One of The Greatest Films Ever Made
"300" Is One of The Greatest Films Ever Made
Frank Miller’s interpretation of the tale of 300 lone Spartan warriors fending off hordes of Persian invaders is hands down one the best films ever made. Though 300 takes some artistic license and contains historical inaccuracies, the purpose of good art is not to teach history but to convey important ideals and themes. 300 is unabashed in its representation of the highest ideals of man, of clear cut good and evil, of right and wrong, and of a heroic defense, to the death, of freedom, justice, and reason. The movie invokes and justifies feelings of empowerment and a renews your idealism, giving you the moral and spiritual fuel for your struggles for the good life by witnessing one of the most spirited defenses of ideals humans have ever accomplished.
Should a sculptor capture the scar on a man’s body or a painter a cold sore on a woman’s mouth? Are these encouragements of humility, professing that mankind is flawed? Or are these dishonest concretizations of temporary flaws into a permanent representation of reality? A beautiful Hellenistic sculpture glorifies all the highest ideals of man; honor, pride, intellect, integrity, and beauty. The broken, disembodied, disheveled forms of modern art are anti-intellectualism, de-humanization, the destruction of ideals and values, brought into permanent physical form.
Art, according to Aristotle, is in it’s best form a representation of man as he ought to be, not as he is. Art, according to Ayn Rand, is the selective concretization of abstractions of the highest ideals of the artist. When someone chooses to capture something, especially an idea or principle, in a permanent form of representation, they are left with the options of how they wish to capture it, and what language they wish to convey the idea in. A modern artist might try to represent a complex idea in an abstract and objectively rational form but when the manifestation in physical form of an idea becomes so disassociated from any rational means to interpret it, it is indifferent from useless Rorschach ink blot tests and is much more an indication of the irrational nature of the thought of the artists, the subjective psychological biases of the viewer (as the French paper Le Monde demonstrated in it’s review of the film "Hostel" when it ranked it as the best American film of that year because they somehow interpreted it as a commentary on American Imperialism, instead of the violent pornographic sadism that it really was) and a thinly veiled abdication of any objective standard in art, than it is an idealized concretization of metaphysical value judgments. Is a spattering of incoherent paint drops on a wall, like any Jackson Pollack painting to be considered "art"? Is a novel of incoherent prose "art", Is a movie with no logical progression, consistency, or plot, like "Lost Highway" art? Is a novel encompassing an entire day of nothing like James Joyce’s "Ulysses" art? These things, lacking barely any objective distinction from randomness, or being glorifications of nothingness, are not art, even though they may hang on walls or have leather bindings, to consider these art, is to take any useful distinguishing character of art away from the word and idea. Readers may disagree on what Aristotle and Ayn Rand considered Art to be, but any definition if held consistently which includes meaningless intellectual vomit indistinguishable from randomness, does indeed renders the concept of art without value.
The proper form of art in a philosophy based on reason, reality, and life as an ethical standard is one that encourages a life based on reason, which can be tangibly connected in a meaningful manner to the reality of the witness to the art, and which advocates and promulgates a ethical system which holds life as it’s standard. Such art must be objectively understandable, but the setting, context, historical accuracy, etc are completely irrelevant to the conveyance of the message. Art is a selective recreation of elements which pertain in and understandable manner to the issues we deal with in reality, based, as Rand, suggested on the artist’s metaphysical value judgments. Art is not a literal recreation of reality (cold sores, bunions, societal flaws and all) but instead is a recreation of the critical elements of reality required for conceptual conveying a message or theme.
Consider then, what great art is, and understand that "300" is probably the greatest concretization of human ideals in visual media ever created. "300" is not a historical documentary and contains technical inaccuracies from the way the Spartan’s fought to the nature and makeup of Spartan society. But if you want a documentary, turn to the History Channel. This movie is absolutely NOT a historical documentary and to dislike it because it is not historically accurate is to assert that all art must be nothing more than accurate retelling of historical accounts. Yet we do not belittle the great works of Shakespeare because they contain linguistic anachronisms or the great epics of Ancient Greece because they contained gods and monsters. "300" is a moral epic told against a historical backdrop, containing real historical figures but representing them as profound human beings we can all look up to and admire, in situations and stories indeed conceptually similar to the factual historical reality. Stories that serve to inspire and encourage us to weather difficult storms, persevere against obstacles blocking our goals, and continue to fight; not because we might win and not because it is our duty, but because it is being true to our own ideals in defense of our deepest values, that these are things ought to do because it is right.
In classical Greek fashion, Frank Miller was not presenting Sparta (and man) as he is or was, but as he *ought* to be; physically perfect, morally absolute, passionate and intelligent, emotive and rational. When facing the Persian emissaries, King Leonidas does not call for negotiations and capitulations, he does not negotiate with his would be murderers, he kicks them into a well. When debating what to do against the coming Persian onslaught, Leonides abandons the advice of the corrupt mystics and gathers a volunteer force to face the Persian hordes. When faced with the corrupting offer of riches and rule over the entire Hellenistic empire, Leonides, facing certain death, declines, opting to fight in defense of his ideals instead of giving up what he values most to perpetuate his mere mechanical existence, a life which would then be of self torture as demonstrated when he condemns the Spartan Ephialtas who betrayed Leonidas and the 300 to the Persians to “a very long life". Facing absolute certain death, Leonidas and his mean nevertheless stay on and fight, knowing that delaying the Persians at Thermopylae would allow time for the rest of the Spartan army to join with other Greek city states and ultimately repel the Persian invasion - a battle which some historians rank as the most important battle in all of history.
"300" also un-apologetically and flagrantly disregards the false dichotomy between reason and passion. King Leonidas is no barbarian robot, but a passionate lover to his wife, and passionate fighter for justice. He respects and cherishes his wife, who is as morally strong as he, and he fights and dies for her freedom, not wishing to see her condemned to a life of slavery, while she fights to save his life.
When ordered not to fight by the superstitious religious elders, Leonidas disregards their feelings and edicts and mounts a strategic defense of a critical area of Greece, ultimately saving every thing and everyone he values. The coming of this movie reminds me of the context of Star Wars in the late 70’s. Where movies had disco sound tracks and nihilistic themes, coming out of the 70’s Vietnam protest and moral relativism era, Star Wars came along to tell an inspirational and uplifting grand heroic moral epic with a classical and powerfully emotive sound track. Today in our sea of moral relativism and ‘flawed’ heroes (consider the plethora of movies that actually glorify villains, like ‘Natural Born Killers’, mock heroes, like "True Lies" and "Die Hard", or celebrate violent death and torture, like "Saw" and "Hostel" ) "300" comes along to tell a powerful inspiring tale of moral absolutism and heroism. I can not recall the last time I heard people cheer at a movie, and it wasn’t just the style of the movie, it’s the message as well, presented in a good style, that resonates strongly with people. I for one find myself filled with a little more hope for America since a movie like this did so well in the box office. This movie appeals to our innermost capacity for idealism and invokes feelings of empowerment and justifies them. It brings us moral and spiritual fuel for the struggles for a good life we undertake.
Because of all these virtues, "300" has caused quite the firestorms of criticism. Most of them center around the historical inaccuracies in the film, focusing on petty details, such as the armor the Spartans wore and the methods they used to fight, while ignoring glaringly obvious historical inaccuracies, like Xerxes being 14′ tall and having a henchman with bone saw arms, neither of which had any remotely possible intention of being interpreted as a historical accuracy. These critics ignore these things and focus on petty details in an attempt to undermine the moral tale of the story. Yet nobody cries that Homer’s "Iliad" is a historical falsehood, because it is not meant to be a documentary, it is meant to represent the highest ideals of ancient Greek civilization. Nobody attacks Shakespeare for his inaccuracies in Julius Ceaser, nobody derides "Beowulf" because Grendel was not real. Nobody attempts to argue that Dante’s "The Inferno" is worthless because the hero travels into the fictional Hades. The great works of literature last not because they are historically accurate, they rarely if ever are, but usually because they convey great human moral truths in a powerful story and in a manner which people can objectively connect with. Likewise “300" is not a documentary, so critics attacking it’s historical inaccuracies (especially in a time where historical accuracies are difficult to ascertain anyway) are simply trying to make a name for themselves by attacking something better than they are ever capable of.
Many other criticism lay around attacks on the Spartan way of life in general. Critics will say that the real Spartans were mystical and collectivist. They might ask, why not play this movie in Nazi Germany and see all the Storm Troopers yell in delight with the same reaction and inspired Americans do? (Obfuscating of course the ideals which invoke the reaction with the physical reactions themselves, as if rallying in the name of freedom is the same things as rallying in the name of murderous tyranny merely because in both cases one is ‘rallying’) Sparta, they will say, had slavery, was a heavily collectivist society, treated it’s women poorly, etc. In all these cases they completely ignore the context surrounding Sparta and the context of the Ancient world. It was a world where EVERY SINGLE HUMAN BEING WHO EXISTED was a slave, and where most societies did not even have a WORD for Freedom. Only the world of Ancient Greece even had a word for freedom (eluethera) to differentiate a kind of existence from slavery, and had portions of their populations, large or small, identified as free men. Every Ancient Civilization had slavery, ONLY ANCIENT GREECE had freedom, and yes even Sparta had free men. Only Ancient Greece had the idea of Freedom and the ability for men to achieve it.
They might argue that one could represent the heroic soldiers of Nazi Germany in the same manner. But heroism in the name of murderous ideals is merely savage brutality, Nazism advocated forced nationalist servitude in a time where half the world had decent (though flawed) systems which were based on freedom, where every culture had the concept and words for Freedom, and Nazi Germany actively crushed this. The context of Nazi Germany was totalitarianism rising in a sea of Freedom and Liberal Democracy. Nazism was a step backward in a world of freedom, Spartan and Greek civilizations were a step forward in a world of totalitarian enslavement. This film emphasized the only bastion of freedom in an entire world of slavery, indeed, they were the first steps forward toward Freedom in a march which still continues to this day. If you were to make a movie glorifying extreme nationalism and dictatorial rule, Nazi Germany is an optimal setting because it contrasts the concept of freedom embraced by much of the world, if you are making a movie defending and glorifying freedom and reason, Ancient Greece is an excellent setting as it contrasts the prevalence of slavery and tyranny which dominated every other ancient civilization.
The very concept of "freedom" had to originate somewhere for it to develop into it’s modern form. Yes Sparta also had slaves, no not all Spartans were free. But let us not forget that women in the US did not get the right to vote until the 20’s and black men until after the civil war. Give the ancient Hellenes a break as the rest of the world would not even match their limited gains toward freedom for nearly 2,000 years. Would we chide a movie about the bravery of Union soldiers in the American Civil War by saying "well women couldn’t vote"? No, every salient step toward freedom should be celebrated, and the Ancient Greek city states steps took the first and most important steps in that direction, and at the battle of Thermopylae and in the greater context of the Persian wars, would come face to face with the greatest threat that ideal would ever encounter in a victory whose repercussions resonate throughout the world for thousands of years.
My only major complaint with 300 was that the Spartan 300 did not in fact stay and fight out of duty, as was depicted in the film, but in fact stayed and fought, even knowing it would bring their deaths, to give their land the vital time necessary to collect an army to defend the city states of Greece. Though this is a historical inaccuracy, I cite it because the accurate story was thematically much more powerful. Leonidas appealed to the Spartan honor code of never surrendering in the movie, yet it was in fact this very event which founded the Spartan tradition of never surrendering.
Also, as Leonidas left his wife for the final time, the narration insisted that the Spartan code did not allow the expression of love or regret at this moment, as it would have been a sign of ‘weakness’. This, to me, deviated from the intense passion and love of values that Leonidas showed at all other times with his wife and the Spartans embraced. A minor complaint, but it was out of place with the character the Miller had established with Leonidas.
Additionally, Frank Miller appears to feel that true heroism is sacrificing ones life in the name of a higher ideal. Sacrificing ones own life for a higher ideal, for something that is more important to someone than their life, is noble and just, but only when it is the last and necessary course of action. Fighting for ones highest ideals, perpetually and indefinitely through the whole course of one’s life, is far more difficult and far more admirable. Dying in the name of a cause, many people think, is the highest and most noble sacrifice, but in reality it is a fleeting moment and temporary decision made permanent, Living for a cause and fighting perpetually for it is far more noble, far more difficult, and far more rational.
This film is not about the Greeks versus the Persians, nor is it a historical docudrama, these are only the setting where a theme is played out. Good stories transcend the backdrop they are performed on and speak to people of all eras because they speak to an important ideal. The theme of this movie, the message it was conveying, the ideals it’s characters were embracing and fighting for, was not in defense of mysticism and slavery, but was in defense of individuals fighting to their last breath for their highest ideals, but not just any ideals, specifically the ideals of reason and freedom. The theme is of these brave men (brave because courage in the name of evil ideals is not courage, but savagery) fighting against the brutal enslavement of them and the people they care for at the hands of a murderous tyrant.
Like great historical fictional figures of Antigone and Hector, like the true to life historical figures of Cicero and Cato, and Raul Wallenberg of the modern era, and countless others who refused to capitulate and turn in their loved ones or loved way of life and died because of it at the hands of murderous thugs, the theme is of these valiant people standing up for and defending what they know is right and just in the face of the most brutal forms of oppression and savagery. It is a theme not only of moral courage but also of perseverance and overwhelming tenacity, of struggling through the most tremendous odds for what you know to be right, even if you face death along the way.
For the purpose of life is not to perpetuate the mere mechanical structure of our existence, it is to perpetuate not just life but a particular kind of life, an Aristotealan Eudaimonic life, a life of productive and intellectual growth, a life of goals and challenges, a vibrant life of learning and experiencing new ideas, new cultures, a life where your highest values, the health and well being of yourself and your loved ones and the growth you pursue, are passionately identified and defended at all costs, and are never surrendered and never abandoned. Where your passion and your goals drive your life and your friends and lovers are fellow travelers in your journey.
When you struggle at pursuing your goals and values, think of Leonidas and the brave 300, fighting for days on end through piles of bodies, the Persian hordes in front of them and their wives and children in the cities behind them. Know you have it in you to push yourself that much harder in pursuit of your goals and ideals. But be sure your goals are sound and ideals are good, fancy clothes and big houses do not necessarily make a good life, and pursuit of the irrational may actually damage the things you do value. When you are exhausted and battered, think of the 300 Spartans facing millions of Persians, fighting for freedom and justice and reason, think of their courage and tenacity and find strength in yourself that they as fellow humans found and that you know you have in you. Always fight for your ideals and the things you value in homage to Leonidas and the 300 and your own highest potential. This is one of the greatest movies ever made, see it, enjoy it, feel it, love it.
The Cultural Celebration of Masculine Immaturity
Newsweek ran an interesting article recently
“Why Young Men Delay Adulthood to Stay in Guyland”
http://www.newsweek.com/id/156372/page/2
What this article identifies and attacks is the cultural celebration of masculine immaturity. The celebration of this aversion to responsibility in men can easily be seen in men living their college party years far into adulthood, or mooching off their parents well into their 30’s, whose mothers keep track of their checkbooks and pay their car insurance. Men well into their 20’s or 30’s who do nothing but party and play video games, who do not conceive of looking beyond the expediency of the moment and who subsequently can not pursue long term goals.
Some notes from this article particularly astounded me
- To turn on television or see a movie is to find a smorgasbord of regressive adventures for the single man of every stripe. Movies like "Pineapple Express," Judd Apatow’s latest celebration of beta male bonding; TV shows like HBO’s hypermasculine pal party "Entourage," and beer commercials like Miller Lite’s "Man Laws" ads make delayed adulthood seem like a lark—roguish, fun and, most of all, normal.
- According to a study released last month by the Parents Television Council, prime-time broadcast audiences are three times more likely to hear about people having sex with pets, corpses or two other people simultaneously than they are to see a blissed-out married couple between the sheets…"Today’s prime-time television," the PTC concludes, "seems to be actively seeking to undermine marriage by consistently painting it in a negative light."
I feel the fashion trends of uncombed hair, pre torn and faded clothing, to be manifestations of this as well. I doubt we will ever see a mainstream idea of women being ‘dressed up’ to be something which includes hair artfully styled to look like it is not styled at all, or wearing pre-torn, pre-faded, and pre-stained ‘new’ jeans. I’m always inclined to laugh when I see a ‘dressed up’ man with disheveled hair and torn $100 jeans next to his dressed up girlfriend, who looks stunning.
Almost unbelievably, the article states this
- Almost 20 percent of college guys said they would commit rape if they knew they wouldn’t be caught
- College guys believe that 80 percent of their friends are getting laid each weekend, says Kimmel, whose survey of 13,000 kids, mostly 18 to 22 years old, puts the actual figure at closer to 10 percent.
- But on their own and without their liquid courage, there is also isolation and discontent. A 28-year-old Emory graduate, who declined to be named for fear of ridicule, talked of feeling ashamed of his life, which has led to countless conquests but not the literary success he’d hoped for; he’s living at home in New Jersey and working at a hotel front desk in the meantime. Another guy, 26, an Arizona State alum who lives in Tempe, is a coupon-book salesman, but clearly self-conscious: he carries fake business cards touting him as an MTV entertainment executive
The hedonistic pleasure for it’s own sake life, full of parties, sex, and drugged euphoria’s, is characterized, more than any other lifestyle, by the economists concept of the “diminishing margin of utility” What this fancy term means is that the more you do the same thing over and over again, the less value you derive from it. Ultimately, if you do it too much, you are merely swimming against a current stronger than you. Expending all your energy but moving nowhere, or even backwards. Diminishing marginal utility, if left unchecked, leads to disutiliuty. The perpetual conquest of video games, women, and consciousness, leave a man nowhere to go but downhill. Each successive conquest is less meaningful than the previous ultimately spiraling into an unfulfilled unhappy confusing mess.
By contrast, the value based goal orientated productive life, Aristotlean Eudaemonism, is the only life characterized by a perpetual increasing margin of utility. Our goals must be rational, and achieving them leaves us with an objective standard of our ego, we feel confident that we can face the world, and succeed in it, not by manipulating other men, which is in essence living parasitically off of them, but by engaging in voluntary beneficial trade for every other man, and wanting what is best for each person for their own sake, as they do for you. Our goals must be productive, our lives should be full of intellectual, physical, and emotional stimulation and challenges, not the parasitic conquest of women, but the conquest of nature, the vagaries of existence, and responsibilities and challenges of consciousness.
On Happiness, the article states:
- A raft of recent studies suggest that married men are happier, more sexually satisfied and less likely to end up in the emergency room than their unmarried counterparts. They also earn more, are promoted ahead of their single counterparts and are more likely to own a home.
Thus we are led to a culture which idealizes sex, partying, the evasion of responsibility, the pejorative Machiavellian manipulation of individuals. You might rightly call this attitude, the of celebrating masculine immaturity, as the “Peter Pan culture” or, as one of the most interesting blogs I’ve found on it refers to it as “Pyschological Neotony” [http://alfin2100.blogspot.com/search/label/Psychological%20neoteny] which is this psychological state that comes from a parental shielding of children from challenges in life, from the things that might hurt their feelings, and from deliberately avoiding challenges and growth in life. This parent usually does not prepare their child to live a life on their own, but instead shields them from all the difficulties of life, leaving a child psychologically crippled with they face their first real challenge.
Lest you paint me an advocate of traditionalized marriage, let me espouse my major qualifier. As most well know, about half of all marriages end in divorce. Of the remaining half, it’s safe to say a large portion of those (my guess will again be half) are bad enough to warrant a divorce but one or both members are too afraid, cowardly, abused, or confused to seek one. Of the remaining quarter, half of those are probably merely mediocre, stifled and without passion, with partners just going through the motions. Of the now remaining eighth, let me suppose that half of those are ok, or even pretty decent by most standards. To determine these real numbers a detailed philosophical and psychological study would be required, in lieu of such a large study my educated guesses will have to suffice for the purpose of this article. That leaves us with about 1/16th of marriages being fulfilling, happy, perpetually positive, and even encompassing a increasing marginal utility, to use that economics terminology. Another term might be capitalizing on the growth of the compound interest of mutual admiration, respect, and quality interactions can provide.
My guess is that only 1/16th of marriages are good? Well, the outlook is not so gloomy, the reason why so many are so poor is because so few people hold their partners up to any significant standards. They associate love as a mystical quality or an emotion of duty, feeling obliged to love someone because that is what they are supposed to do, promised themselves they would do, or have been convinced by society to do. But the rational integration of a few core values, and an objective estimation of one’s self and one’s partner, coupled with a mutual ideal of striving for a fulfilling relationship together, can do marvelous wonders for a marriage. It is the fact that so many people put up with poor behavior that so many people perpetually get away with it. When we are taught that love is unconditional, the abusers and thieves receive as much love as the honest hardworking compassionate respectful partner. When we abandon our standards for love, it is those who are least deserving of it that benefit the most, and those who are most deserving that are hurt by it.
Imagine the life of the Peter Pan man as he attempts to convince a seemingly virtuous girl of his worthiness as a partner, that sleeping with him will give her an elevated sense of self esteem. And by her surrendering to him, his self esteem is superficially boosted as well. The worth of this interaction is the doubt, the ‘challenge’, the control, and the conquest. Repeated affairs with the same person are of no value, the chase and conquest are over. The short term elevated sense of self comes only from the conquest, not from the tribute that such an act represents. Now imagine this situation removed of all pretenses. The woman says to the man that she is his, he has won her, perpetually. She will sleep with him at any time. She likes him as he is; there is no race, no challenge, no competition, but only the naked and explicit recognition of self worth. At first, the man will derive value from sex with this woman, it still holds the potential of a conquest and challenge. But as the sincerity becomes more obvious, the source of their spiritual fuel for their ego is put in doubt, and the sexual act is robbed of the stolen value and relegated to a mere physical hedonistic act. Ultimately, the man would stop sleeping with this woman, because he’s all ready got her, he already conquered her, and so gained his short term ego boost. Sex to him is not a celebration of self worth, existence, and admiration and respect for his partner, as it is for her. It is little more than a Machiavellian power struggle sometimes topped with an orgasm.
Conversely, consider two partners who have a deep respect and admiration for each, even through their non-essential faults, and who both strive to be the best person possible, who embody to a significant degree the core values of each other. When sexual they will be celebrating their own ego, celebrating their own self worth, celebrating their love for existence and paying the greatest homage they can to the person most important to them. They both continue to grow and change, in a positive direction, and with each other. These are the people who find fulfillment and lifelong love.
A person can not have a thousand best friends, both logistics and psychology prevent it. Similarly, he can not have 10 loving partners that he shares the deepest of intimate connections with. The depth and strength of an intimate connection is inversely proportional to the number of people one tries to have that connection with and directly proportional to the quality and length of time of interactions with the few individuals they choose to wholly devote their intimacy with.
It’s not just that marriages generally produce happier people, who live longer lives, who are less stressed. A bad marriage can sabotage all of those, it’s important not to confuse the average with the particular. The point is that that a good marriage can be all of those things, but can also ultimately produce the most fulfilling life possible to us, forged on the most profound intimacy once can share with another human being built up over time with the best match possible and sharing the best quality interactions possible.
On this, the author sums up nicely
- “Guyland is not without its charms, but it pales next to what I have known with my wife over the past three years.”
Here is an interesting news bit on “non intrinsic stimuli”.
Scientific American 60 second - January 15th, 2008.
From - http://www.sciam.com/podcast/episode.cfm?id=7A81E74F-E554-39DF-62E0C6F540A3CDF8
“ You’d think we enjoy something because of it’s intrinsic qualities, food should taste good because it molecules tickles our tongue. But it’s much more complicated than that. For example, one study shows that drinkers knowing the name brand and ingredients increase the drinkers pleasure. Researches at the California Institute of Technology investigated our neural response to non intrinsic stimuli, 20 subjects tasted what they thought were 5 different wines and they were give the price for each of these. In reality only 3 wines were used, and 2 were offered twice, once at a low price and once at a high price. Subjects consistently said that the wines they thought cost more tasted better. Functional MRI showed no difference in taste centers in brain, but revealed increased activities in brains pleasure centers. Somehow our brains combine both actual taste and what we expect about the taste. “
One can surmise the thought process inside these researchers heads “Hmm, why in the world would our perceptions or thoughts about something alter how that something effects us? I thought we were just robots and responded directly in pre-programmed ways to pre-programmed stimuli” Clearly we are not merely mechanical automatons who respond in exact ways to the same thing. Our emotions are, in fact, automatic estimations of stimuli based on our values and our understanding. The subjects of this study attached some value to the cost of wine, which is reasonable considering cost does roughly equate to quality in most areas. These researchers act surprised (this is news, after all) but this is in fact the only obvious way emotions would work. Do we all respond, emotionally to the same things in the same way? Obviously not. What makes me sad, might be irrelevant to you. And what makes you happy, might cause apprehension in me. Why is that?
Yet we do all share the same kinds of emotions, we all feel joy, sadness, apprehension, etc. These emotional reactions are obvious in everything from infants to tribes untouched by western conventions. The facial expressions and body reactions to emotional responses are almost identical. It is clear then that emotional responses are in fact automatic and nearly instinctual. In infants, the emotional reaction exists, but the values have yet to be formed or identified, so often reactions are disjointed from what we think they should be attached to, like crying for apparently no reason. As they grow, babies learn to value certain things and soon their emotional reactions come to align with their values. In distant tribes untouched by western conventions, the smile is still universally something of happiness and joy, the tear is still the response to sadness. Why is this not opposite in some cultures?
So if we have the same emotional capacities in response, why are our responses different? Do emotional responses come from our genetic code then? No, since identical twins can have diametrically opposed emotional reactions. So the answer is again clear, our emotional responses come from our values. What brings joy and sadness to those distant people will depend on their needs and their values within their social and environmental context. What brings joy or sadness to us similarly will be based on what we value. If there is something we value and we see that value furthered, our mind and body automatically respond to recognizing our values furthered within our understanding as something good, and so invoke a feeling of happiness. A new product at a lower cost which we find a lot of value in would invoke happiness in us, but to the workers who will be put out of business it may invoke apprehension or sadness. An elderly person in severe pain may find happiness at the prospect of their own death, while young healthy full of life person would feel deep sadness and apprehension at the prospect of their own death. Emotions are responses to what we value, if we value our life, then that which furthers it will bring us joy and things that harm our life will bring us sadness. If we value a quality of life for our friends and loved ones, than things which raise their quality of life will bring us joy. If we value our own accomplishments over those of others, than success by our friends would cause jealousy and anger. Emotions then are completely proper responses, but that does not mean they are automatically correct, because they are still based on our own values, which we choose and integrate into our lives, and also our assessment of a situation, which may very well be wrong. This is why it is always good practice to introspect and examine our emotional reactions.
The nature and purpose of emotions have been expanded by philosophers from Aristotle to Ayn Rand, and ought to be obvious with consideration and reflection to anyone. Yet mainstream science is still very confused about emotions, swinging them from being absolutely pre-programmed and determined (as is demonstrated by Richard Dawkins equating immoral people with broken machines) or purely random, since the things which bring about emotional responses appear so different from person to person. Studies like this demonstrate unquestionably that these “non intrinsic stimuli” exist, and that they in fact have a much more common name: Values.
Richard Dawkins “Let’s all stop beating Basil’s car”
http://www.edge.org/q2006/q06_9.html
“But doesn’t a truly scientific, mechanistic view of the nervous system make nonsense of the very idea of responsibility, whether diminished or not? Any crime, however heinous, is in principle to be blamed on antecedent conditions acting through the accused’s physiology, heredity and environment.”
My post - The Abdication of Volition
http://matus1976.com/philosophy/abdication_volition.html
“When a person who is in love exhibits elevated levels of these opium like drugs, the scientists then interpret that to mean that they are in love because the brain has produced that drug! Which is ridiculous, of course, you do not fall in love because your brain produces a chemical, your brain produces a chemical *because* you fall in love. The difference is superficially subtle, yet vitally important to all of our conceptions of humanity and emotions. It is the difference between being a slave to your emotional whims originated in the mindless mechanistics of your biological chemistry and having your emotions be the logical consequences of the deepest values you choose. It is the difference between being a robotic slave and a thinking, feeling person.”
"Liberty and Freedom, you can make a distinction between them. Liberty perhaps being political rights, freedom; not being enslaved. The ancient Athenian had only one word "Eleuthera" …and to him it was the noblest and defining character of his nation. To be free." – J. Rufus Fears – “The History of Freedom” Lecture series.
Pop culture is often a reflection of predominant philosophical themes. By the widespread use of an idea or phrasing we can often discern some of the philosophical attitudes of people that partake in these particular cultural expressions. They are of course never 100% accurate, and sometimes poor philosophical ideas are obfuscated and intentionally hidden to be presented to the mainstream culture. But in this general regard, there is a popular song by 3 Doors Down which contains the line “So you call this your free country, Tell me why it costs so much to live” and it reflects, I believe, a popular cultural sentiment. This line and sentiment infuriates me for a variety of reasons, the most important being that it wantonly confuses contradictory definitions of the word “Freedom”.
Freedom obviously has many different uses, for the purposes of this essay I will discuss the four predominant ones in English. To start with, one definition is being free from oppression (that is, no threat of having people force you to do something against your will) and another is Free as in ‘without cost’. Different languages use entirely different words to say these different concepts, it is only the fact that the English language uses this same word to mean a couple different things that this line is possible, and consequently that is even has a chance of trying to make the point it tries to make (that it should cost nothing to live) and that perhaps this language quirk is a major reason why this cultural sentiment exists at all, since it is superficially ‘clever’.
To illustrate why this is a fallacious way of thinking, let me use that exact same reversal of definitions of the word “Freedom” in a different context to illustrate how completely egregious it is to mix those two definitions conceptually. Consider the following statement.
“Of course I think black men should be free, everyone ought to have one”
Such is the betrayal of freedom (from oppression) that is permitted by mixing those definitions.
Being free from oppression is absolutely not the same thing as being free from cost, and ironically insisting that something be free from cost actually destroys freedom from oppression. Life, and existing, does have a cost, and it always will. That cost is food and water primarily, shelter secondarily, and health and medical care lastly. When we are hungry, we can not make food fall from the sky and into our mouths just by wishing it to. That food must be grown or killed, collected, processed, transported to us, and prepared for consumption. Every step of this process is complex and consumes a great deal of effort and time which other people have to put in. Whenever someone demands free (from cost) food, they are demanding that all of people, the farmers, packagers, truckers, train operators and tractor builders, fuel processors, grocery stores, etc, work for them without pay in order to provide that food free from cost.
We can not wish a heated home with running water into existence; such a thing requires the material and intellectual effort of literally thousands of people. Should everyone be provided with a heated home with running water for free (without cost)? To insist such a thing means that the thousands of laborers, builders, designers, carpenters, plumbers, contractors, etc do this work without pay.
Similarly, when we insist on free medical care, we are advocating every single medical practitioner, researcher, innovator, nurse and health aide to work for us to provide us these things for free without paying them anything.
Now let me be clear, I think as many people as possible ought to have the best health care, education, shelter and food possible. But under absolutely no circumstances is it right to advocate forced enslavement of people to provide these things. Each and every one of us has a right, fundamentally, to our own life, is it ours to live freely as we choose. No one else has any right to dictate to us or enslave us, and similarly we have no right to do that to anyone else. No one has a right to tell a farmer forcibly what he should charge for his food when it was his own mind, effort, and labor which produced it. No one has a right to tell a doctor what to charge for his services, his abilities are the product of his own effort and mind and they are not owned by anyone but himself. To force him, implicitly at the end of a gun, to charge no more than a certain amount for his services, is to tell him everyone but himself is the actual owner of his abilities; and as such his life. He is enslaved to everyone. He is a slave who is the property of “the people”
In fact, demanding a *right* to anything that is the result of someone else’s labor or mind means that the people who make those things have no rights. There can be NO RIGHTS in a society which demands the enslavement of all the producers and providers. No one EVER has a right to enslave. A right can not be just when it comes from the enslavement of everyone else, or even one single person. If you have a right to free from cost medical care, enforced by your government, it means you have a right to enslave the providers of medical care. If you have a right to education, it means you have a right to enslave the providers and producers of education. If you have a right to food, it means you have a right to enslave the producers and distributors of that food. This right to enslave is a founding element of socialism and communism, and no free from oppression society can be founded with the right to enslave embedded into its framework.
When we talk then about being free from cost, we are talking about a particular kind of freedom, which I will call material freedom. Material freedom is the acquisition of material goods with no cost to the person who has acquired them. Contrast this then to what I will call Political Freedom. Political Freedom is freedom from being forced to do something against your will by another person. These are the two types of freedom that are confused in the lyrics mentioned previously and in the popular cultural sentiment as well.
That life has a cost; the actions and efforts to sustain it, and thus could never be free (unless technology like nanotechnology literally renders food and shelter as cheap as dirt) conjures up the implicit idea from mixing these definitions of freedom; that the cost of living is similar to political oppression. That needing to work to live to provide yourself food and shelter in order to survive is no different than being forced by a captor as a slave laborer under the threat of torture and death. There is a tremendous distinction between these. Needing to partake in physical labor in order to acquire the material needs for survival is a consequence of physical reality and the laws of physics. We can not continue to exist merely by wishing to. We must act. All life requires a particular series of actions to be sustained, and every single person on this planet lives by only one of two means; providing that material existence for themselves, or looting or stealing the material means of survival from someone else. Needing to get permission from a dictator to live is a far different thing than working to grow food or build housing, or working to freely trade with someone to acquire those things. Blurring the distinction between the two in any way serves to perpetuate dictatorial rule, as it then can be hidden behind the guise of the ‘natural’ difficulties inherent in life. If the cost of living is similar to political oppression, than the fact that life requires action and effort means that political oppression must also be a part of life and dodging a dictators noose is as natural a component of survival as toiling in a field is. Who is it then that benefits most from convincing you that the lack of material freedom is the same as the lack of political freedom? Well those who seek to politically enslave you of course, or that seek to ally with you to enslave someone else under the banner of ‘rights’
The idea that needing to provide yourself the material necessities of life is a violation of freedom brings up a third common definition for freedom. I call this freedom Metaphysical Freedom. Metaphysical freedom is literal freedom of volition, it is the ability to do anything you want instantly with no effort just by wishing it, whether that is transporting yourself instantly to another continent or planet, or insisting that you do not need food to live.
Metaphysical freedom has limitations placed on it as well, and just like Material Freedom being confused with Political freedom, Metaphysical freedom is also often confused with Political Freedom. In fact the lack of Material Freedom is a consequence of the limitations forced onto us in regards to our Metaphysical Freedoms. Those limitations are, of course, the laws of physics. Life requires energy to sustain it, it requires action and effort to acquire the fuel for the energy and a perpetual and directed course of action intended to further that life. The laws of physics do not allow us to survive without eating, to work forever without rest or food, or to get a better life merely by wishing it. No one has Metaphysical Freedom, and probably no one ever will, though advances in technology will get us closer and closer to a pure metaphysical like freedom, we will likely always still require energy and effort to survive. Insisting though, that life should have no cost to it, that cost being food, shelter, and medicine, is an affront to the restrictions placed by the universe on our metaphysical freedoms. It is screaming to nature in frustration that you must follow her rules. It is screaming because your car wont start, or your investment failed, or you lover no longer loves you back. It is throwing a childish tantrum at reality, it is unproductive, useless, and nothing less than ignorant savagery. When you fail at a task or something happens to make your life more difficult, you have not been frustrated by a malevolent universe out to perpetuate human suffering and misery, you have instead corrected a misconception you held about the nature of the universe. Nature and reality exist and function in particular ways, to prosper as physical beings in a material world requires us to understand and follow the rules of material existence, not whine and wail when things do not go the way of our whims and conjur up flawed philosophical notions of metaphysical freedom.
The restrictions placed on our metaphysical freedoms by the laws of nature lead us to our final definition of freedom which I will discuss in this essay, Physical Freedom. Physical Freedom is the literal freedom of action, to move about, to speak, to do things, to work, to act on the physical world. Yet again this additional definition of freedom is frequently confused with the political freedom from oppression and the freedom from cost of materials. You might hear in conversations with anarchists that Physical Freedom ought to be identical to Political Freedom. That is, everything you are physically able to do you should be allowed to do, this includes physically brutalizing and oppressing another person. After all, if the police prevent you from oppressing someone they are in fact restricting your freedoms, but in this case they are restricting your Physical Freedoms, they are not restricting your Political Freedoms. Is it any wonder than whose interest is served by blurring the distinction between Political Freedom and Physical Freedom? Again if infringing on your ‘right’ to assault someone is an assault on freedom, than it is only those who advocate dictatorial or tyrannical rule who seek to call a system where anyone can do anything to anyone else as long as he is physically able to do it, Free. This is not Freedom in any meaningful political sense of the term.
The lack of distinction of Physical Freedom from Political Freedom often leads hardcore egalitarians and socialists to proclaim that the laws of physics themselves are a form of oppression, which of course is the only logical implication of any statement that derides the fact that it costs effort to live by providing food, and to have to deal with the physical realities of nature is a form of cruel oppression, and the people able to understand and overcome nature owe it to the people who are not able or willing, and owe it to them specifically because they are not able or willing, to shield them from the difficulties of physical existence. To make the world soft, coddling, padded, welcoming and free from anything remotely damaging to the fragile egos of these solipsists.
To summarize then, the four types of Freedom are:
Material Freedom – free from cost, cost as labor or effort or money
Physical Freedom – a literal freedom of action and movement, constrained only by the laws of physics
Metaphysical Freedom – literal volitional freedom unrestrained by the laws of physics, being able to do absolutely anything you wish instantly without effort. Includes being free from being forced to do something against your will by the laws of nature. Metaphysical freedom is a philosophical impossibility.
Political Freedom – Freedom from being forced to do something against your will by someone else.
Because of the nature of Material Freedom (that of being free from any cost or effort at acquiring the material necessities for life) any advancement in Material Freedom, when provided by government decree, necessarily bears a zero sum relationship with Political Freedom, You can not have a right to your own life if everyone else does. Any material good that is provided, that the government says everyone has a *right* to must come from the material products and effort of other people, and as such those others must be forced to work, i.e. enslaved, to provide those goods and services. If you say “I have a right to education” you are saying you have a right to force others to provide you with education, a right to enslave them. Thus, political figures like Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez, Robert Mugabe, etc, operating under the guise of freedom are in fact seeking to forcibly enslave the majority of the population.
Is it no wonder then that every single communist nation in existence has always forbidden leaving the country? Is this not the ultimate expression of not having a right to your own life? People are not politically free in these nations, they are merely a physical tool whose only purpose is to attempt to provide equal material freedom to everyone else. Nations which do not allow people to freely leave them do not even deserve the respect of being called nations, and instead should be referred to as they truly are, prisons. Dictators and rulers of these nations, the worst of which are North Korea, Cuba, Laos, Vietnam; are in fact literal hostage takers. These nations operate under the flawed idealistic premise of material freedom as the end goal, and as a consequence have absolutely no political freedoms and are brutally oppressive, poor, and painful to live in.
Conversely, any advances in Political Freedom (including both economic and civil, which really should not be distinguished) lead directly to advances in Material Freedom, that is allowing people to rule their own lives and to discover and invent of their own accord, leads to the greatest advancements possible to man and thus the greatest reduction in the effort required to survive, implicitly speeding toward Material Freedom, though never quite completely reaching it.
I am a strong proponent of Political Freedom, that is, A life without oppression from other people. I am a strong advocate of Physical Freedom but only when it does not lead to restrictions on Political Freedom; anyone can do anything they want as long as they do not assault person or property of others. I am adamantly against Material freedom when it comes from the enslavement of the material production of those able to produce useful things, but completely for it when the free and voluntary exchange of these useful things results in people making the world an easier and more pleasant place for them to exist.
Thus, a just government would defend at all costs Political freedom both civil and economic, allow Physical Freedoms where they do not conflict with Political Freedoms, and necessarily progress more toward Material Freedom than any controlled or centralized government because of the advances made from innovators and producers which reduce the material cost of everything man needs to survive. Such a government should include a constitutional separation of church and state *as well as* a constitutional separation of business and state. While an initial incarnation of it might require taxation to sustain itself in order to provide basic infrastructure, national self defense, protect civil liberties, enforce rule of law, and final arbitration in matters of dispute, eventually a streamlined system could work on voluntary fee based system alone. Laws would allow individuals to do virtually anything they wanted as long as it did not infringe on someone else’s rights, or assault them physically or economically. Prisons would contain only violent criminals. The society would be wealthy, politically free, physically free, continually approach material freedom providing for wonderful, long, healthy lives for its inhabitants.
But when we confuse the meanings of Freedoms we open ourselves up to promulgating dictatorial rule in the name of an abstract and harmful ideal of ‘freedom’ which is in fact a literal enslavement of the vast majority of the population. Words are the only means by which we can convey ideas and as such are extremely powerful tools, we must always choose our words wisely and there is no more important area to be aware of the meanings of words than when it is in regards to the freedom (political and physical) of sentient beings.
My aunt, Delores, died a few days ago. She was 78 years old, had been married for 62 ½ years, had 8 children, 24 grandchildren, and 15 great grandchildren, with 2 more on the way. I haven’t seen her since thanksgiving and she died on January 6. I am glad she got to live the life she did, she had a wonderful and fulfilling life. But couldn’t it have been for a much longer time?
I remember playing in her yard, the stories she would tell of her children, and getting accosted by a bat in her barn. All the times we came to visit and she and Hub were always so warm and welcoming. Ready to give you some freshly cooked food, or some cookies. Or some Tea. I sit and write this as I sip on some tea, I remember that she would make me a cup of tea every time I went over there, even when I was very young, it is how I started drinking tea. The many days spent there just sitting at her table talking. I love her, she was a good person and I will miss her terribly.
We are only able to express our emotions, our love and affection for our family, through words, and words will always be but a pale shadow of the ideas and feelings they are meant to represent. Just saying “I love you” as I often did to DeeDee, does not ever do the core feeling enough justice. I wish that I could have conveyed to DeeDee what I felt for her, how much I admired her and value her, but whenever I try to extrapolate on such things I always seem at a loss for words, and I can never seem to get as close to someone as I want to be. A person’s mind is such a rich and complex place that you could explore it for their whole life and still never truly know them. We have difficulty in even getting to know ourselves, after all. Maybe some day we will have the technology to transfer a feeling directly to another mind, we may be able to capture the very feelings and emotional power and convey it to another person, imprinting the pattern of your feelings in your mind on theirs, in the way a physical embrace imprints the warmth and presence of another person. But until then we must struggle to truly convey our feelings through only words and embraces.
No one tells you, that as you grow old, your heart and mind remain that of a person in their 20’s. They never tell you that you dream just as much, want to do just as much, want to live as strong and as vibrantly as you ever did at the prime of your life. That while you desire all of that, your body fails and crumbles, withers, weakens, creaks and aches. That your spirit is young and alive and wants to jump up and race and run and fly at any age. But your body protests every step of the way, and even now as I enter my 30’s I feel the small hints of it, and I know enough to see it when I look into the eyes of the people older than I and see that spark flicker at the life they *ought* to be living right then, railing against the reality of their bodies. I know that my aunt was young and full of life even to her very last moments.
I didn’t get to see her as much as I would like but I have spent so much time working on things. I kept wanting to go and visit her and my uncle, I love them both very much, and of course love them as relatives, but as individuals I love them. I didn’t see them because I always chose to work on things instead, to work on my projects and my long term goals, because ultimately I wanted to help them when I got successful. I wanted to get a membership to Alcor so I could go see them and tell them about it. So I could show them my bracelet and necklace and possibly have more of an impact than if I didn’t have a membership, if I wasn’t signed up for what to them would be a strange procedure that I was asking them to sign up for they would have a much harder time giving it a fair hearing. I didn’t see them. I chose to work. When challenged with the question ‘What would you do if your loved one only had a few days to live?” I always answer that I would do everything I could in those few days to try to save them. But that means you would not be spending quality time with them. Which is more important? I guess it’s best to weigh the chances of success. But to not try and to see them die, is unbearable to me. I must act in accordance with my values. I could struggle and struggle to try to save them and no one would ever know, it would just seem like, to them, that I was distant. That I didn’t care. So it seems with DeeDee perhaps, that I was distant, and didn’t care. The truth couldn’t be more wrong, I love her and wanted to try to save her, I knew she was sick and dying, the only chance I would have would be for them to try cryogenic preservation. I doubt they would have, but I could have at least tried. But I didn’t, I never got the chance to. I couldn’t afford my own Alcor membership and so was trying to get one of my businesses successful enough to afford it, so I could go to them and try to get them to sign up. The night of her death was a message on my answering machine from Alcor, asking if they could assist me in signing up.
Now she is gone. Forever, Delores is dead now. Her last breath has slipped out and her cells stopped working. Her mind immediately starting to deteriote. Gone forever, a beautiful, wonderful, fascinating mind, person, gone for all of eternity. There is no afterlife, no heaven, no resting in peace, she is just gone. She ceases to exist. We can not begin to wrap our minds around such a thing. We can not imagine not existing. But one day I will not exist, and you will not exist, and everyone you know and love will not exist. Why? Why do we let happen? It is not right, it never has been, and never will be.
A single person is more unique than a whole galaxy devoid of sentient life. Then even a whole universe. Life. Conscious life, is the most precious thing in the universe, yet we waste it foolishly. We risk it so we think we might value it more. Our lives are so short that we’ll do crazier things since we have so little life to protect. We all have known for months she would die soon, and I know my parents and brother will, and I will someday. There is no escaping it, no evading it, no delusions that comfort me. Just the real and tangible lack of existence. There is no real way to console someone on the death of a loved one. Consolation is not possible when there is absolutely nothing that can ever make you ok with something like that. The closest we have is distance. Our memories fade, the pain becomes constant, and then dulled, and then in the background. Our minds adapt and get used to the world without them. We learn to live with it, but we never get over it. I did not mourn outwardly much tonight, I was sad, and I cried, but there was not anger, no rage at the world. I know what kind of world we live in, I know what preciousness is lost every second, every day. I am used to it, I think about it constantly.
90 Billion lives since the dawn of human existence, gone forever. It is not right. It was never right, it never will be right. Death does not give life value, the end of something does not make it’s beginning worthwhile, death is the destruction of values, all values, the end of something is the destruction of that something. We tolerate it because we can do nothing about it. We make up stories and delude ourselves so we don’t have to deal with the real horror of it. Life is the source of all values, it should always hurt, immeasurable, when a fundamental value is lost to us, forever. They did what they could, people will say. But we didn’t. We didn’t do all we could. We sat around, watching TV, playing video games, chatting it up online, going out to eat, partying, hanging out with friends. All the while it looms over our every actions. You will all die. Everyone you know and love will die, will cease to exist. What are you doing about it? Nothing. We aren’t doing anything. Well tell ourselves that we can not become experts at things because we are not born that way, that we can not learn and do the things required to fight aging and death, to give us all indefinite life spans. That no matter how hard we try we can’t do anything anyway. But is that true? Are we really being honest with ourselves. To do so means coming to the full and conscious recognition of how horrific death is, something we are not eager as a people to do. So instead we all fade, deteriorate, suffer, cry, and die. Persons slipping away into eternity forever. You, your loved ones, everyone you know and love will die and disappear forever. What are you doing about it?
Death is terrible and tragic, with every single death, the sun should dim, a cold wind blow across the world, the seas should calm, all sounds and lights should fade, and everyone stop in their tracks and bow their heads, knowing that one of their own is gone. That a magnificent human being now ceases to exist, lost to the ravages of entropy for all of eternity. But today it would happen so frequently that we would all become numb to it, and the sun would flash like a strobe light. We lower our flags to half staff when a member of the government passes, or there is a great tragedy. But every death is a tragedy, and our flags would never raise if we captured them all.
Each of us, every human in all of history, values deeply their own life. And faced with it’s inevitable demise, cursed as the only animal on the planet consciously aware of it’s own mortality and imminent cessation of existence, we have been forced to psychological compensate for such an unfathomable horror.
Buddhism, recognizing the immense suffering caused by the loss of a life one deeply values, sought to eradicate values so one would not suffer at their loss. That is, in order to not be upset at the loss of a loved one’s life, one needs to absolve themselves of values, and in doing so will absolve themselves of suffering. Such a state devoid of values is what “Nirvana” literally is. But this is wrong. When a loved one dies, it should be upsetting, the loss of a value is the nature of sadness. It should wreck you to the core of your soul. When a loved one survives, we should be happy, because happiness is the getting or keeping of a value. Values are the basis of suffering, but are also the basis of joy and happiness.
The Judeo Christian religions and offshoots, in an attempt to stave off the immense psychological horror that comes from death, simply made up an afterlife where everyone is miraculously resurrected to live for all of eternity in the presence of their loved ones. Death is not so bad to them, because it means literally that we are in a better place, free from pain and suffering.
Death is horrible and unconscionable, and there are very few psychological mechanisms we have to deal with. They are, essentially, to be indifferent to life, and thus indifferent to death, to devalue life, as Buddhists do, to convince ourselves death is not real, as the Judeao Christian and related religions do, to convince ourselves there is value in death, or last to be honest with reality and recognize the grievous and horrible nature of death, thus suffering psychological consequences for the whole of one’s life.
It is difficult and burdensome to choose the last, but I will not fool myself into believing something just because it makes me feel better. I will not fool myself into believing someone loves me, that I love, when they do not. I will let her go and live her life. I will not fool myself into believing that there is a bag of money buried in my yard, when there is no such thing, just because it would make me feel better and more financially secure. I will not fool myself into believing we survive bodily death when absolutely no evidence exists that even remotely suggests such a thing, just to feel better about it.
As I stood at my aunts graveside service and listened to my strongly religious cousin, one of her children, re-iterating some of these thoughts on the afterlife, I thought about the root of this desire, and I empathize with what drives people to think these things. Do they really truly believe that she is in heaven looking down on us and smiling? Probably. As he begin to admonish non believers while at her grave side, my mind begin to wonder ignoring his insulting and disrespectful tangent. I asked god, standing there, lets see it. Bring her back, right now. Lets see a blinding white light and her rise from her grave, healthy and restored. Reunite her with her husband. Show me, I said. Where are you? Do you ever do anything? She is dead, in front of you. Bring her back and I will believe. Of course nothing happened, and my eyes rose to the forest above as I cried.
In the modern secularly enlightened west, it is popular to try to find some value in death. Since these secularly enlightened people won’t be so egregious as to convince themselves into thinking there is an afterlife, and will not renounce values as a Buddhist would, they seek to convince themselves that there is value to be had in death. We see this effort manifested in some of the popular euphemisms of our day. Things like “Death gives meaning to life” (it does not, it takes away life) “Death makes you recognize and truly value things (It does not, it is the destruction of all values) “Death makes you appreciate life more” (it does not, since you will not be conscious to compare non-death to death, you can not value non-death more because of it, you will simply cease to be) “Things that have beginnings must have ends” (I prefer never ending stories) “We must die to make way for later generations” (I would prefer to know and love my great great grandparents then to have them ‘get out of the way’) “Death is a part of life (or natural)” (so were small pox and the plague, and today so is cancer, heart disease, and diabetes, ‘natural’ is for unthinking animals and plants) “The impermanence of life is what makes it special” (all things have intrinsic value to you whether permanent or not) The corollary to this last point is responsible for some of the depression atheists allegedly feel, that the transitory nature of things make them less valuable (as opposed to more) but to me, having something for sometime is better than having nothing ever. But having something you value forever is better still.
The problem with all of these evasions and psychological obfuscations, which no doubt had a lot of value when humanity had no option in the matter, is that it takes away the psychological motivation to do anything about death, and it also demotes life to nothing but the means to an end; death. But life is an end of its own, it doesn’t need to be there in order to accomplish something else, it has its own intrinsic value to each and every one of us.
I love my life, and want to live it forever. I think that most people, if raised outside of the dominate cultural philosophically narratives that devalue life, demote values, or outright fool oneself, will eventually come to the rational understanding about the intrinsic value of life that I have, and not be so ready and willing to give it up. They would also choose, if able to make an informed choice, to live their lives for as long as possible, coming to explore the world, solar system, and galaxy, and coming to know and truly love people important to them in the deepest sense possible, living with ancestors and descendants many many generations removed.
We can keep a car running for generations, and as good as new, by fixing and replacing worn out parts as they fail. But our body, that which is most precious to us, withers and fails. Why can we not repair our bodies like we do our vehicles and homes? For 100,000 years humanity had no choice in death. For some 99,750 of those years, people would mysteriously get ill and drop dead for no apparent reason, until we discovered and understood viruses and bacteria. Today we live much longer lives on average then we ever have in the history of humanity, and an average persons life in a post industrial western nation is like that of a king’s from a thousand years ago. Our household gadgets and electricity do the work of an army of slaves. We live in ornate palaces with running water, heated, able to communicate nearly instantly with anyone, anywhere, and demand and receive entertainment at a moments notice through tiny wires strung across the nation. A king of 1,000 BC could only dream of such things. Yet today more of us have these, and more and more people continue to get better standards of living. Still much of the world lives in brutal poverty and oppression, but the world is getting better. Too slowly, but it is getting better for people. But even in all of this wondrous technological achievement, we still grow old, sick, and die. But we might be the first human generation living on the cusp of a technological breakthrough, that of real, tangible mechanisms to slow and defeat aging and all disease entirely. We may one day soon be able to perpetually repair our bodies as parts fail, and even make some parts better than before. We may all have the ability to live as strong young healthy adults for as long as we’d like. And if our children and parents embrace the same path, we would live forever with people we love dearly. Combined with the rapid technological progress of humanity and the tremendous growth in global standards of living, it could be that one day, mankind, with his reason and passion for life, creates a literal heaven spread among the stars. If there ever is a heaven or a god, it will be made by humans and in their own image.
<b>"Well, folks, it’s not so simple. For one thing, you do not possess a natural gift for a certain job, because targeted natural gifts don’t exist. (Sorry, Warren.) You are not a born CEO or investor or chess grandmaster. You will achieve greatness only through an enormous amount of hard work over many years. And not just any hard work, but work of a particular type that’s demanding and painful. "</b>
Read this great article on the “Myth of Natural Talent”, it’s conclusions are obvious to anyone who actually has accomplished a great deal of things and rings true of the advice repeated over and over again by the most accomplished business men, scientists, and artists. The natural talent myth is worshiped by everyone who doesn’t want to feel responsible for their own potential. It’s much easier to attribute all that success to someone else’s genetic lottery winning than it is to attribute ones own lack of success to laziness and lack of fortitude. Now, that is not to say it’s anyone’s duty to do absolutely everything they can and be the most accomplished and productive individual possible, it is your own life and your right to do with it as you please. And relaxing and enjoying life is a fine thing, but lying to ones self about ones potential and capacity is not. You must honestly and rationally choose your course in life. Everyone out there, everyone reading this, is capable of the most extra-ordinary feats of intellectual magnitude, business success, or artistic grandeur.
An average single human mind is still the most power computer on the planet by orders of magnitude. It is yours and completely at your disposal to use to further your highest values.. It requires learning new things all the time and striving to become an expert in these things. Unlike all conventional computers, the more a human mind learns and integrates, the *faster* it goes, The more you learn, the faster you are at figuring things out and the better you are at learning even more things. Eventually, you may become an expert at acquiring expertise in new fields. It would take decades, It requires pushing yourself each day farther than you think you could go, it requires optimizing all of your time and welcoming honest self critical analysis. It requires long term consistent dedication, an unceasing and unyielding effort to remain true to your goals and values. It isn’t easy or simple or quiet, it’s hard and tiring, but it is incredibly rewarding and fulfilling.
What It Takes to Be Great
By Geoffrey Colvin
From - <a href=”http://biz.yahoo.com/weekend/great_1.html”> http://biz.yahoo.com/weekend/great_1.html</a>
What is Love
Love, and emotion for that matter (in a healthy brain) is our response to our highest values. Love is the emotional price you pay for *valuing* something and seeing it expressed in another human being. All of our emotions are responses to the things we value most being expressed. When we value the health and well being of ourselves and our loved ones, we are happy to see things perpetuate those values. If you value honesty, sincerity, kindness, integrity, productiveness, etc, deeply, and you see that expressed in another person, your emotions respond properly.
Our mind, logic and reason, do not operate in conflict with our emotions, our emotions are the logical extensions of our deepest convictions. Proper relationships of love are based on admiration and respect for a person, an individual. Not a robot or a social automaton. If you value fashion and trendyness the most, you will love someone that embodies those things. If you value money and prestige the most, you will love someone that embodies those things, but in both of those cases it is very easy to find another person with more money, fame, wealth, prestige, or as is the most common case, hotter. So your emotions become fickle and easily swayed. It is any wonder than that people go from an initial high in a relationship to feeling like they are going through the mundane routines? If you are truly inspired by someone, and you admire and cherish them, and they feel the same about you, will you ever really become bored of them?
A proper loving relationship, when one values proper things and integrates them into their own self fully (e.g. valuing honesty, one must become honest, valuing rational independence, one must not be co-dependant) will blossom into an amazing and easily life long relationship full of complete admiration and respect. A proper loving relationship, since to say "I love you" one must have a clear concept of "I" and a clear concept of "you" can not come from two people who fear being alone, who don’t like spending time with themselves, who perpetually seek to be distracted from dealing with their own innate boringness, it must come from two independent intelligent people sure of themselves both doing what they most want to do. A proper loving relationship comes from where the individual rational self interest of two people meet, no one giving up any part of themselves for the sake of a ‘relationship’ but both of them forming a profound and amazing relationship based on the thing most important to each of them.
Such relationships are rare, I have since I came to this opinion only had one of this nature in my life, and it was the most amazing by far of all the relationships I have ever had. I fully believe that the vast majority of people are in extremely unhealthy relationships, they do not hold their partners to any standards and they don’t base their affection on any solid ground, while they cheat on each other, lie steal and manipulate, they chant to themselves ‘but I love him! (or her)’ After obfuscating the source of their original emotion, they demote love to something they are just supposed to feel and elevate feeling it for someone who does not deserve it to a status of a moral virtue!
In many cases, a significant other will spend most of their time berating their partner, in order to psychological demoralize them. It amazes me how prevalent this can be, the ‘you are not pretty, no one would want you, you are a loser, you are pathetic’ etc. Things like that stem from basing one’s self esteem on other people’s assessments of you. A person who does this knows what kind of control it gives them over some one, even if they don’t explicitly know it, they are aware of it at some level because it is how control is established over them. So if you don’t like them, it is in fact insulting to him, so they have to insult you to compensate. They must beat you to the psychological punch before they lose their self esteem to you.
When people have a healthy basis for their own self esteem they don’t need affection from other people to sustain it, since in essence needing someone else’s appraise is enslaving one’s self them, just as lying to them and manipulating them is. When you know who you are and have a healthy basis for your own assessment of yourself, then when someone likes you (for the right reasons of course) then it is more a reflection of them and their qualities than it is of you and yours. You know who you are. You know what quality of a person you are if you have integrity. It becomes a scenario that when people like you, they will rise in your estimate of them. You’ll think more highly of them because they value what you value, and recognize it in you. But it’s only when they like you for the things that you most like about yourself and when those things are proper. You must like about yourself your integrity, honesty, commitment to what is right and just, love of your life, your fundamental outlook on life, and they must like the same in you. If someone likes you just because you are hot or rich, well that doesn’t say too many good things about them. It’s good to be someone who can financially support themselves and to be attractive of course, but to base a relationship and affection solely on those is terrible. If someone likes you because they’d be bored otherwise, or because they’d feel lonely, well again that doesn’t say much of them. You become two parasites sucking each others life force working toward a common confusing cloudy mess.
So set yourself some standards. Look for a decent, stable person who has their own hopes and dreams and desires. Look for dreams and goals that do not create conflict with yours. Have ones of your own. Look for integrity (that is, being internally consistent) Look for honesty and sincerity. (Integrity is also being honest to ones values) Then you learn the problem with having standards, and why so many people end up compromising them. You realize quickly how few people stand up to even rudimentary ones. Why is that? Well, that’s the topic of another post, but I would blame a terrible influence of the preomdinat cultural – philosophical attitudes. Once I started really thinking about these things and really being ‘picky’ about these standards, it started to look like I will be alone for some time. Alone is not how I would prefer to be, but I would certainly dislike to a much greater extent being dishonest to myself and my highest values, and subsequently being with some psycho manipulative narcissistic nihilist.
It never ceases to surprise me that being honest and sincere and rational are things so alien to most people. Usually people think it’s ok to be dishonest as long as you can ‘get away with it’ or that no one is physically injured in the process. When I last ate at my friends restaurant, I pointed out to the waitress she missed one of my items I ordered on my bill. She acted surprised, “Wow, you’re so honest!” It’s surprising, or at least it ought to be, that she was surprised by honesty. Well, first of all I wouldn’t consciously steel from my near life long friend, but additionally there is little reason not to be honest. Not only is honesty is far more spiritually rewarding (in appropriate contexts) but it is far more pragmatically rewarding. Honesty cultivates sincere, deep, long lasting friendships and relationships that are mutually beneficial and enlightening, including business and working relationships.
So don’t sell out, too many people do. We have only one life and it is ours to enjoy, not to bow down and apologize and cave in to every jerk who wants to force us to live for them.
Compared to many modern ‘enlightened’ people who yap about how we are ‘not meant to be monogamous’ and such things the old fashioned ways are far more rational in many ways. They came about for good reasons and helped humanity survive for a long time. That’s not to say it’s all good and it couldn’t be when it’s philosophical basis was corrupt (that is, it was based on duty and obligation, not reverence to ones self and one’s deepest values) But the secular materialistic nihilistic interpretation of love, that of corrupting social trickery to keep people in check and monogamy as obligations handed down by pious tyrants is far more destructive, and both that and the old ways are much more unhealthy than the truth of the matter; that love is our response to our highest values and monogamy is not an obligation or duty that flies in the face of our ‘genetic tendencies’ toward polygamy, but instead is the highest and most profound tribute we can pay to one another. Religious indoctrinations of monogamy sought to acquire the cause of monogamy (the overwhelming desire to dedicate oneself to one person) by going through the motions of the effect, yet every wedding I have been to included both men and women present bemoaning and whining about being with the same person for the rest of their life and acting as though a wedding was a sorrowful moment of the final loss of freedom in a person’s life. Such is the only logical consequence possible when one removes the cause of an action, and goes only through the motions of it. If one feels disheartened at the prospect of perpetual monogamy and intimacy with only one person for the rest of their life, than they ought not be getting married in the first place. Pre wedding parties ought to be magnificent celebrations, not a spiritual funerals mourning the loss of single hood.
A lot of people wish for their prince charming or (what is the female equivalent, princess submissive?) to be loaded. Money, in it’s purest form, is a means to acquire values. In absence of values money has no worth. When people forget the purpose of their money, they often end up actually hurting the things they value in pursuit of more money, as they eventually associate money with a source of value and not a means to further values. The father who works long hours to buy a 4500 sq ft house and 3 SUV’s and white picket fence and Jacuzzi on the porch, if lucky, one day realizes why he never sees his wife or children. If unlucky, he just continues to live miserably perpetually wondering why the more he gets the less he feels. His pursuit of money got in the way of his pursuit of values.
When on the market for a relationship, you should always pick someone that embodies your deepest values. But look at the conceptual basis, not the particulars. Maybe they dress differently, or like a different kind of music, or have a different political viewpoint, but it is why they like those things that is important. It is the motivating principles behind their actions. Their overall outlook on the world. Someone may not have read as much or studied as much or went to school as long as you or have as much in the bank as you’d like. But they may have well been raising a family, or taking care of a sick relative, or just enjoying living, which is perfectly fine as we have no ‘debt’ to pay to the world for being alive (the last major secular remnant of original sin) Even if their political ideologies are a polar opposite, that is better than someone having no political opinions, at least the former actually cares about the world they live in the way you do, and tries to form an opinion on what makes it best; very stable solid ground for you to work from. The latter you can have no connection with. If a person of the former persuasion is intelligent, passionate, and rational, and you are as well, you will work out your differences of opinions and you will have no conflicts of interest.
Oddly, people almost always use the word love properly in every context but it’s most important one. Every time someone says “I love this car” or “I love this movie” or “I love this city” they recognize that those things are manifestations of their highest values, even if they don’t understand it explicitly. But when it comes to a person they love, forget it, most couldn’t name any of those qualities they admire or cherish. Go ahead and ask the person who loves you why they do, and ask yourself that of the person you love as well. People will spend hours complaining about their significant other, but when someone objects “well why don’t you break up with her” and they always quip, as if reflexively, “because I love her!” Yeah, but what do you mean by that? Why do you love her? Do you really love her (or him), or is it just that you don’t want to be alone and end up saying ‘eh, you’ll do’ at some point.
It is often fashionable to extol the virtues of unconditional love. Proper love, enlightening love, spiritually enlivening love, is inherently *very* conditional. Consider that if someone goes around and sleeps with everyone in sight (and what is sex after all but in it’s best the physical expression of your deepest admiration and respect for someone) people denigrate them to no end, calling them whores and gigolos and what not, yet we elevate to a moral virtue the idea of giving out love to everyone and everything, not matter what they do. Such an attitude takes any and all value it had away. To give love to anyone, to love all of humanity, means love has no meaning. Replace love with the brilliant or Olympic athlete and it becomes clear how equalizing diminishes value. If it is so wrong to give sex out unconditionally that why is it good to give love out unconditionally?
And in that theme, replace the word love with hate, which is always used in proper context, and the point is further demonstrated. If one insisted that they hated everyone for no reason we might lock them up in a mental institution. Usually people hate someone for a particular reason, that they hurt them or someone they cared about, or are just intrinsically terrible people. But we think loving anyone and everyone for no reason is morally healthy? In reality, the only people that benefit from this altruistic love are those who are least deserving of respect and admiration, and everyone else is hurt by it.
Consider then, conversely, the person who seeks sexual only relationships. Sex is inherently an intimate act. Trying to remove Sex of it’s intimacy is an absurdity. When having sex you are going through all the physical motions of deeply caring about someone, you are touching and caressing them in ways not appropriate in all other social contexts. If you find yourself sleeping with someone, and then wake up with them asking yourself “hmm, is it ok to spoon with them or is that weird?” “Hmm, can I hold hands?” Well, you just engaged in the ultimate extension of physical intimacy! And now you are skittish about holding hands and lying with your bodies close to each others! If such thoughts surface in your mind, then you know intrinsically that you weren’t at the point of sharing the deepest of all physically intimate acts with them.
So why did you sleep with them? Why do men (more often) and women seek sexual conquest? They want to feel better about themselves, returning back to the concept of basing your self value on other people’s reaction to you. The people that seek this tell themselves they just like the physical pleasure of the act, yet if that was the case masturbation would suffice. They tell themselves they just like sex, but if that was the case than prostitutes would suffice, and would willing women really have any troubles finding any random man to sleep with them? Hardly.
So clearly it is something more than the physical feeling of it and the company of a member of the opposite sex (or same, given your orientation) It is, in fact, the elevated sense of self worth that one hopes to acquire by engaging in the ultimate expression of physical intimacy. After all, the proper reason for doing such a thing is literally from mutual admiration and deep and profound respect. Seeking that from the physical expression of admiration is the ultimate form of the philosophical self deception of going through the motions of the effect to try to acquire the cause. Men seek woman who they think are morally pure and demanding, who portray an elevated sense of self respect, and who they fool themselves into thinking have made a great exception for their case. Women seek the same, spiritually, a man who will give them an elevated sense of self respect because of the status or the position of the man, what else could be the primary compulsion of women who flock to celebrities like cats in heat? The women the men seek to conquer have value because they allegedly reserve sex only for those specially unique and deserving people, thus allowing the man to convince himself that he actually is of a higher deserving stature. Both are no different than savages building runways out of bamboo poles and making radio sounds through their mouths, or society forcing monogamy on a relationships desiring of it, or someone buying a sports car that is way outside his means in order to impress his friends. They are all examples of, in Ayn Rand’s words, “going through the motions of the effect to try to acquire that which should have been the cause.”
In reality, in a healthy proper loving sexual relationship, both should be confined to only the rare instances and people that truly deserve it. To the people that express your deepest values. Love is the emotional price we pay for having values. The great thing about that kind of love, the kind of love that is based on respect and admiration, is that it is not required that it be requited. And if you think about it, should any ideal form of love require that to sustain it? If sex is the physical expression of love, then love can be sustained without it, even when your respective values drive you apart, the love is not diminished because that respect and admiration for the person remains. It does not require physical expression as sustenance, although that is an incredibly great addition. Jealousy, suspicion, paranoia, it all goes out the window. After all, would you ever want someone to be with you who didn’t actually want to be with you? Would you want someone to pretend to be your friend who didn’t really want to be? Would you really want someone you respect and admire and even cherish to sacrifice themselves, their identity, their sense of self, just so you wouldn’t be lonely? You would condemn someone you allegedly care about to self imprisonment. I don’t want friendship and especially love to be based on charity, that is insulting beyond measure.
I feel so many people are in unhealthy relationships that I hope I might get them to think a little longer and deeper about who they are and what they are doing. Remember, think about your values and integrate them fully into your life. Hold yourself up to your highest standards, and hold your significant other up to those standards as well. Do not put up with insults, manipulation, and deceit of any form or degree. Saying “no one is perfect” does not excuse people from even bothering to try. Love is our response to our highest values, love is the physiological response our bodies have toward the perception of that which we value most manifested in another person. Think about the values you base your relationships on. Convenience? Scared of being alone? Basing your self esteem on what your significant other thinks of you? Do you ever find yourself saying “you’ll do” or “well, sure he’s psycho but at least I am not alone” or “at least she hasn’t cheated on me” then you are very probably suffering from unhealthy relationship.
Consider last in all these cases who benefits from these twisted conceptions of love. Who benefits from insisting that one ought to love all fellow men? The people least deserving of it. Who suffers? Those most deserving of admiration and respect. Who benefits from insisting that love is something we have no control over? Those who don’t deserve it, those we would not love if we had any standards. We do have control over it because we have control over ourselves, our values and our integrity. The emotional response of love is a reflection of those. Who benefits from insisting that love is mysterious and magical? Again, those who don’t deserve it. Who benefits from the idea that love needs to be worked out? That relationships are hard and difficult? That marriage is work, that love is tough? The people who cause the conflicts that need to be worked out. The people who make relationships difficult by not respecting you and your individuality. Proper love is full of admiration and a deep and profound respect and cherishing, it is based on proper self esteem, self respect, and most importantly rational selfishness. I say the last because love can not be based on the absence of self, as is intrinsic behind the principles of self-less-ness. Without a self, without being able to say “I” you can not love someone. You can not have deep values and convictions and can not respond to them with emotions. To the extent that you abandon your ‘self’ is the extent at which you confuse and muddle love. Love is intrinsically and properly selfish. The proper relationship, the greatest kind of relationship, the most fulfilling, desirable and long lasting, comes from the meeting of the mutual desires of two intelligent, passionate, rational individuals with deep convictions and standards for themselves and others, not from people who abandon their passions and convictions.
The most important aspect about these comments on love and the nature of emotions, however, is that they are *right* Physical experiments prove the nature of emotions, that they are logical extensions of our deepest convictions (in healthy minds, severe physiological differences or chemical imbalances can very obviously alter the proper functioning of a system of perception, recognition and reaction that is based on physical bodies, minds, and molecules) They are not disconnected from our rational faculties, but are instead the ultimate logical extension of them. They are lighting quick calculators that assess the situation you are in and compare it to your values, thus invoking feelings of pleasure or pain. Brian scans and psychological experiments have proved as such over and over again, yet the idea remains completely outside the predominate cultural and philosophical interpretations of love. Why is that? Well that is a topic worthy of an even longer essay.
If you have found any value in these ideas on love and emotions, they come mostly from philosopher and novelist Ayn Rand and the great Aristotle, with minor contributions and extrapolations from myself and the many people I have discussed this topic with on different forums devoted to the ideas of both of these amazing people. Rand’s contributions on the nature and purpose of emotions are no doubt one of the most important contributions she made and some of the most important ideas for spiritual health of humanity.
- Michael
Phoenix Trip part 1, Alcor Conference part 1
This past week I traveled to Phoenix and stayed there for about a week. I’ll write on the rest of my trip later, but the first few days of the trip and the primary purpose of it was to attend the 2006 Alcor Conference. Alcor, you might remember, was in the news recently as the company that allegedly houses the now cryogenically suspended body of baseball legend Ted Williams. This conference was not only about cryogenic suspension, and only two presentations dealt primarily with that topic, but it was much more so “An Inside look at the science and medicine of tomorrow” as the conference was called. Presenters and speakers included representations from other cryonics organizations, local and state government officials; who spoke on legal policies surrounding Alcor and the state of Arizona, and many prominent scientists in the fields of economics, mathematics, physics, and cryobiology.
The conference was held at the Scottsdale Marriott just outside of Phoenix, AZ. The Scottsdale Marriott was a gorgeous hotel, with an outdoor fireplace topped by lions and incredible view. At 280 a night it better be nice, but as conference attendees we were able to get a discount. Even so, I switched to a different hotel after the conference.
Given that, the conference was very professional and in an ornate hall. The first night was a reception on the water patio, near the pool and the fireplace and adorned with a fountain. We mingled at met a great number of incredibly interesting people and saw many people that we had read much from and about. The welcoming speaker was originally scheduled as the Arizona Secretary of State, who unfortunately could not make it. I believe the replacement speaker was from the local chamber of commerce who assured us of how friendly Scottsdale was to Alcor, he was intelligent and it seemed clear that he was well informed about Alcor and cryogenic suspension in general. After the welcoming speech we disbanded and mingled. Bonnie and I met Stephane and Magali from the Montreal area who were the two friendliest and most welcoming people I have met in my life. Both were Alcor members.
I also met Brenda, who was a film maker from Toronto, intent on doing a documentary on cryogenic preservation, she stated that her original intent was just to do a documentary, but after researching it herself she was now interested in signing up. I am eager to see the results of her work. The night was full of interesting and fascinating people, lawyers, bankers, retired people, engineers, people from all walks of life. These were not crazy people or socially mal adjusted people, but mostly normal people. I say mostly because they, and we, shared one major trait that the majority of the population does not. We truly love our lives, love being alive, and love all the splendor and joy the world can bring us. And in that, we are comfortable acting in accordance with our deepest values.
The next morning marked the real beginning of the conference. It started with a continental breakfast in the beautiful Arizona sun by the pool and a fountain. We all chatted and said hello to our friends we made the night before, and then moved on into the ballroom.
It looked as though about 200 – 300 people were in attendance, the ball room was fantastic. We found our seats and waited for the conference to start, the feeling was excited and electric. It was incredible to be in a room of such strongly like minded individuals.
We were welcomed by the publicist of Alcor, who relayed an overview of the conference and gave a brief history of the field of cryobiology then moved onto the first speaker.
The first speaker was Dr. Theodore Kraver, a PhD in mechanical engineering from Arizona State University and a degree in Aeronautical and Astronautically engineering from MIT. He was major player in the field of cryogenic fuel storage technology for NASA in the 60’s (rocket fuel is cryogenically cooled so the powerful gaseous full is condensed into a more manageable liquid) Dr Kraver and some associates formed the first cryogenic suspension company and he designed the suspension storage chambers which is extensive background in cryogenic fuel storage was vital to the NASA Apollo program. Dr Kraver gave a history of Cryonics in America, from the first patients and suspension technologies to the modern facilities available at Alcor and the Cryonics Institute.
Dr. James H Bedford, the first and oldest cryogenics patient surrounding by wasteful melodramatic venting of liquid nitrogen.
The following segment was a panel discussion involving Arizona State Representatives Michele Reagan (R) and Linda Lopez (D). The discussion was moderated by Alcor’s public policy consultant, Barry M. Aarons. The conversation centered around the political climate surrounding Alcor and cryogenic preservation in general. About two years ago a bill was proposed in Arizona that would have essentially placed Alcor’s cryogenic facility under the regulations of funeral parlors, which would have required either embalming or cremation of patients. Michele Reagan and Linda Lopez, of opposing political parties, centered on common ground and fought the bill; preventing it from passing. Today Linda Lopez is sponsoring an end of life options bill with specific provisions legally guarding cryogenic preservation. This discussion raised a lot of questions by the audience concerning the influence of the predominant political climate and the effects it would have on cryogenic preservation. Most were worried, justifiably in many ways, about the rise of the religious right in America. However America currently has the only political climate supportive of cryogenic suspension at all. Australia follows closely behind. As a later speaker, Brian Wowk, pointed out, it is the extreme left of Europe that has created a political structure which completely represses alternative end of life options like cryogenic suspension. In most European countries cryogenic suspension is outright illegal. One can only wonder why this allegedly intellectually superior and much more secular culture has only one Alcor member (whom we befriended) in the whole of the European Union and has made any attempts at starting a cryogenic suspension organization illegal and has made it nearly impossible for a patient, when they die, to be brought to the US for suspension. As Alcor put it, if you are a member, do NOT die in France. Desiring cryogenic suspension is absolutely not a manifestation of religion, if European culture is as strongly one of secular enlightenment as it prides itself on, the only thing that would make the concept of cryogenic suspension as alien as it is would be a deeply embedded nihilism.
The next presentation on Nanomedicine and Medical Nanorobotics was given by Robert A Freitas Jr.
This was probably the most amazing of the presentations. Dr Freitas is the Sr. Research Fellow at the Institute for Molecular Manufacturing and is the author of the “Nanomedicine” series. He is a major player in the emerging field of Nanotechnology, designing many of the currently projected molecular assembling technologies and is also a member of the Lifeboat Foundation, which I an early member of and work closely with. His presentation was the first time I have seen a clear conceptual representation of the scale of nanotechnology. His animations and lectures detailed exactly how one could make an assembly system which starts from individual carbon atoms, grabs them in diamond tips and assembles them in perfect geometric patterns in more tips and more assemblers. The assemblies are added to other assemblies, and those to others. The animation follows the journey of an individual atom through these conceptual manufacturing systems all the way to the end, where it becomes a nanotechnological computer, whose computing power probably equals that of all the computers in the world combined (nanotechnology could potentially fit computers with modern computing power into devices too small to be seen with a naked eye)
This phenomenal animation can be viewed here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqyZ9bFl_qg
Another excellent animation of a practical nanotechnology application is the Dermal Display http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bt-lv6IJPxc This founding concept of this animation was developed by Robert Frietas and his presentation narrated it. The animation was created by a fellow extropian member and animator, Gina Miller.
Robert also spoke of some of the promising examples of nanomedicine, including artificial red blood cells which hold hundreds of times as much oxygen as standard red blood cells do and might allow a human to hold their breath for hours, artificial platelets which would clot blood in microseconds, even major injuries, and artificial white blood cells which could be programmed to attack specific pathogens, rendering humans immune to all unwanted bacterial and viral infections.
Respirocyte inside a blood vessel with neighboring red blood cells
A small nanorobot is show here repairing a neuron and tracing it’s neural connections.
Ultimately, the point of Robert’s presentation was to give some concrete examples of Nanotechnological applications that will be able to repair damage to the human body at the molecular and eventually atomic level. Perhaps advanced cryogenic preservation techniques will avoid molecular damage problems all together, but they are a consequence of current cryogenic preservation techniques. Robert’s presentation gave real cause for optimism in the area and for the hopes of future medical capabilities.
The next speaker to take the stage was Ralph Merkle, PhD. Ralph gave a more lighthearted conceptual overview of modern nanotechnology and societal conceptions of cryogenic suspension. He emphasized that while cryogenic suspension was indeed experimental and no one could guarantee it’s success, would one really want to be part of the control group or part of the experimental group?
An animated simulation of a molecular differential gear designed by Eric Drexler and Ralph Merkle
Following that was a Cryonics Organizations Today Panel discussion featuring Tanya Jones from Alcor, Melody Maxim from Suspended Animation, and Ben Best from Cryonics Inc. There is a lot of sordid history behind cyronics organizations, and given the very limited number and predominate cultural distaste for them, one is left with a feeling of disappointment at the lack of cohesiveness. It appears that there is a lot of ‘bad blood’ between Alcor and the Cryonics Institute, but the new heads of both organizations are extending considerable effort to bring the organizations together and to share and licensed technology. I have no idea what the bad history was between these organizations and frankly couldn’t be bothered to find out. The Cryonics Institute offers less expensive cryogenic options and would not disclose any information on their vitrification process, which wouldn’t be divulged until a patent was protecting it. Alcor seems more professional in it’s presentation and function, but is more expensive. Suspended Animation is a company dedicated to the actual vitrification and preservation process, which involves replacing blood with a cryoprotectant (a liquid that prevents water from freezing) and stabilizing and cooling the body. If you are interested in getting a cryogenic suspension then choosing which storage facility to go with and whether you would like suspended animation to do the actual suspension or the respective storage facility requires considerable reasoned investigation.
The next speaker was J. Storrs Hall, PhD, who was lecturing on the type of society that awaits those revived. This was probably the least favorite of the lectures I heard and I cringed at quite a few parts. I dislike these kind of futurist expositions, in reality it is very difficult to have any idea about what the functionality of society would be like 100 or 500 years from now. Some key relevant points he made, however, were that if you were revived, it would obviously be in a society which values life intrinsically, since they wouldn’t have gone through the effort to revive you otherwise. Often people cite dystopian futures for reasons not wanting to be revived, and even though all historical trends argue against these dystopian futures (the world is getting better and better, cleaner, and people are living better and longer lives than ever before, and there are fewer wars and fewer percentages of the population starving now than ever in the history of humanity) if those futures were so dystopian, they would not revive you anyway.
Dr. Hall then went on to the ideas I don’t like, talking about uploading and copying and “transferring your consciousness” to another body, robotic or otherwise. Such a transfer, if non-invasive, would merely be a copy of you (since you obviously continue to exist, that transfer could in no possible way be a continuation of you) and if the copying mechanism was destructive, destroying the original does not make the question moot as you are still dead. I find this mentality frequently among transhumanists and extropians who are more than happy to equate copying and uploading with “you” and I am absolutely surprised at it’s presence because it is such a naïve position, especially in minds like Dr Hall’s. Later Ralph Merkle shared the same surprising sentiment, equating copies with continuations of the original and equating it to sleeping and waking up. Well, when one goes to sleep there is no logical reason to assume they were destroyed, disassembled and re-assembled. Just because something could have happened does not make it rational to act as though it did. Basic scientificl and logical principles of parsimony and Occam’s razor require interpreting the real world only on data that is required as part of the explanation. Imaging things where there is no evidence to support is irrational and extremely unscientific. Thankfully, the next lecturer challenged both on this point. Being an econonomist, and the son of one of the most famous economists (yes there are famous economists, no Paul Krugman doesn’t count) and a physicist I feel no doubt helped solidify his rational mindset.
I will end part one on that note, look for the second part of this in the near future.
Additional Information
Alcor’s home page – http://www.alcor.org
Eric Drexlers Foresight Institute – http://www.Foresight.org
Ralph Merkle’s home page - http://www.merkle.com/
The War in Iraq Is Going Either Very Well or Very Poorly… Or So-So… I Think
The War in Iraq Is Going Either Very Well or Very Poorly… Or So-So… I Think
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“After listening to the numerous opinions on the Iraq War, it has become quite obvious that something is happening in that country. The current state of affairs will most certainly be detrimental to the Middle East’s future unless it is beneficial or of no effect whatsoever. This goes doubly for Iraqis themselves. And I can say that with great certainty as it the opinion of the numerous pundits who have been to Iraq or read a book on Iraq or saw numerous news stories on Iraq as well as the numerous pundits who have listened to those pundits. While some (or many) may argue that some (or many) of those opinions are based more on biases than facts, it is important to remember that that doesn’t mean those opinions are wrong. Unless they are wrong… but they may not be. So keep that in mind….”
An excellent editorial emphasizing the fallacy of those ‘Who have it all figured out’ and their direct extrapolation of their infinite knowledge to a crystal ball like assessment of the current state of world affairs. It is amazing how every cab driver, school teacher, coffee shop hippie bum, IT desk jockey (I am not exempt) “knows” exactly what will happen in Iraq, why it happened, what should have been done, what shouldn’t have been done, and what the world will be like because of it in 50 or 100 years. As this amusing and entertaining editorial emphasizes, no matter what you feel you will get plenty of information, books, news articles, media, and pundits to back you up. The war in Iraq may cause civilization to come to an end, inspiring a global jihad, or it may prevent it’s collapse through precipitating a Berlin wall like collapse of fundamentalist terror breeding states in the middle east. How do you _know_ what the outcome will be?
Lets take a step back and try to make a healthy assessment of the current state of the world and what is going on it. No one has it all figured out, the Iraq war would not have turned out perfect no matter how much planning went into it (but it could have been better?) nor do you or I know that invading Iran instead would have been better, or that invading no where would have not merely adjusted the current ‘cause celebre’ to simply something else, there always has been one, after all. US intervention during the cold war certainly seeded a lot of the animosity present in the Middle East today, but western culture in general breeds plenty of animosity on it’s own, without military presence in the holy land or historical meddling. The world, the current geo political climate, is very complex, and very large, and no single human mind can completely understand it. To come to an ‘opinion’ of the war in Iraq after reading a couple news paper articles and then proclaiming divine wisdom, is really the height of arrogance.
The are many compelling and intelligent arguments to be made for and against the war in Iraq and there are many stupid arguments on both sides. It can be quite common that people with identical values (the desire to see a safe, free world for ourselves and our children for example) can come to entirely different conclusions yet both remain completely logical. The key difference will likely be in their information sets. Some people keep their information sets confined and censored, others open and constantly adjusting. One must learn as much as possible and form as rational an opinion as possible, but one also must pick a go-no go date and finally act on their judgment. You cant perpetually deliberate on a complex decision, especially if it is one that is a matter of life and death. Yet the matter of life and death decisions are the ones that ought to be deliberated most carefully.
What line do you tread? How sure are you of your opinion? Would you stake your life on it? Your wealth? You car? You could be completely and utterly wrong, even if you perpetually aspire to always be accurate, rational, and un biased. You can stand by your own judgements if they are rational and well informed, but be carefull in condemning others for judgements different than yours, they probably know many things you do not, and vice versa, but you both probably have many common values.
Selfish reasons for having children
As a person interested in the philosophy of objectivism, I am amazed at the plethora of anti-children sentiments that abound in it, and among modern ‘secular educated’ adults. Usually, people feel themselves too selfish to have children, not wanting to sacrifice the time and attention required for raising a child well. On one forum, one responder went so far as to suggest a Ferrari is a better investment than child rearing, being of similar costs. Additionally often those making these sentiments revert to championing the virtues of dog ownership, as happened in the thread I participated in which spawned this post. One can not help but wonder that what drives someone to want a dog, but not a child, is rooted in the difference between the two. Could it be a that a dog perpetually remains loyal, obedient, and socially demanding (they are genetically social herd animals) while when raising a child a parent must contend with an individual intellect that could disagree and have countering opinions? While I could certainly never know what justifies one over the other to an individual, the fact that it is far easier to raise something that never leaves your side and never questions you remains pertinent. While it is certainly not a good idea to have a child out of any sense of duty or obligation, having and raising children can certainly be something selfish and rational. As a now 30 year old male who wants to have children, I thought I would chime in with some comments on the pro-child bearing side. Here are a few selfish reasons I would like to have children.
1) I can’t imagine anything more fascinating than watching a life come into being, and to develop and grow. Watching my friends children make conceptual leaps (especially when I help them do so) is something I find utterly enlightening and absolutely fascinating and it brings me a great deal of Joy. As a scientifically minded person, is there any process in the world more fascinating than bringing a life into the world and preparing it for a life of it’s own? I don’t think so.
2) I enjoy facing challenges and overcoming them and I believe they make me a better person. Raising a child well (especially in today’s world) is certainly a challenge, and should be interesting, and lessons learned will help me become a better person.
3) I do not want to leave the world to fools. As an involved parent you have a lot of influence of the information a child is subjected to and values that become important to them, rationality, honesty, integrity, motivation, dedication, ambition, etc. Being a person that practices these virtues with a great deal of effort, I think it is likely a child of mine would be similarly minded and as such might have significant impact on the world, possibly making my life better, easier, or longer (or even possibly indefinite) Idiot children of drug addicts certainly will not cure any disease I am likely to get nor invent any new energy source which will add years to my life, nor will any dog.
4) The better the mind, the longer the range. I have read that Honda plans for a market 50 years out. While it will take a lot of time and resources to raise a child well, it may well pay off more for you just as any proper investment could. I am a motivated goal oriented highly ambitious person, a child my prevent me from achieving those goals, but conversely they may very well help achieve those goals, if it is what they want to do.
5) Instead of rotting in a nursing home when I am old, I would like to have someone who would want to take care of me out of the respect and admiration and selfish love they feel for me just as I will my parents when they reach that age in trade for bringing me into the world and raising me well.
Also I should note that almost all of the arguments against children can be made against romantic partners as well (e.g. I am too selfish, they take too much time, i have one as a sense of duty, etc) of course this is not applicable in very early years, but it is later on.
Raising a child need not consume as many resources as is often considered in the west either, children can be put to work early on in things they find a lot of fascination in doing. I do a lot of welding, metal working, aluminum casting, etc and had my best friends 12 year old daughter work one day in my shop with me, and she absolutely loved it, far more than gossiping or playing with dolls, or whatever 12 year olds do. Her younger sister is very jealous and wants to come next time.
It is said that our only instinctual tendency is to learn, or more precisely to make conceptual connections between perceptions. A child’s mind is the most powerful, fascinating, and information hungry thing yet known to exist, and it is only after years of drudgery, stifling, and psychological bludgeoning that this great learning machine gets dulled into a grey automaton.
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