From: Man Alive! - "Evaluating values."

[Greg]

From: Man Alive! A survival manual for the human mind.

( http://selfadoration.com/ManAlive.html )

by Greg Swann


Chapter 6. Evaluating values.

The name philosophers give to any ethical doctrine promoting
self-love or self-interest is egoism. I use that term myself to
describe the system of ethics I am elaborating here, but I'm not
crazy about it.

First, most creeds that call themselves egoism actually refer to
invalid ideas of the self whose interests are to be served.
Either "self" is used to mean the reflexive idea of the bodily
self or to self-identity -- the object of sentences like "I
clothe myself" or "I promote myself on the internet." Or "self"
is deployed as a matter of bodily or pecuniary utility: "It was
to my self-interest to take a loss on this one deal in order to
hang onto a valuable client." There is nothing wrong with any of
these behaviors, they just don't have anything to do with the
actual human self, the self as we documented it in the last
chapter.

The second type of ethical creeds called egoism is actually
other-centric. Whether the philosopher claims that his egoism
permits him to dominate other people, or that his egoism forbids
other people from dominating him, the focus of the doctrine is
not the self at all -- not the self as I describe it nor even the
reflexive or utilitarian self -- but is instead those other
people.

I'm inclined to think that most philosophical or theological
arguments -- of all sorts -- are essentially Cargo Cults: The
doctrine in all its interminable, incomprehensible verbiage
exists to justify some desired end-state goal the proponent had
already upheld in advance of writing his supposed defense of that
"inevitable" outcome. The theorist works backwards, from the
conclusion to the allegedly-validating premises and evidence,
tying everything up with a tidy rhetorical bow. This is
completely invalid as a matter of method, of course, since the
map is not the territory. It is simply absurd, when you cut
through all the fog, for the champion of some doctrine to insist
that human nature is what his theory commands that it "must" be.
If you tell me these folks are deliberately fooling themselves, I
will happily agree with you. My concern is that they do not fool
_you._

And invalid arguments of egoism are really the _least_ of my
concerns. Virtually _all_ ethical arguments are anti-egoistic --
anti-self. They are focused, despite their outward differences
and despite their outsized meta- or extra-ethical claims, on
inducing you to _renounce_ your own values and interests -- to
the benefit of the theorist and his gang. We owe Fathertongue to
one incomparable genius who not only abstracted the first of the
ideas that ultimately became rationally-conceptual volitionality
but managed to propagate the idea of abstracting ideas widely
enough that it has survived to the modern day. But Fathertongue
is the language of elaborate lies as well as elaborate truths,
and it cannot have been very long thereafter that some
pre-historic Eric Cartman figured out how to flatter and wheedle
and threaten his brothermen into surrendering their values to him
unearned.

We like to think of human history as a clash of great men, their
hair flowing in the breeze, their muscles rippling, their eyes
fixed firmly on the horizon. In reality, virtually all of the
so-called great leaders of history were just like our fearless
leaders in the present day: Chiseling, conniving, endlessly
grasping grafters, each one striving with all his crafty cunning
to go one-up in the sleaziest possible way on all the others. We
celebrate and revere the most successful career criminals of each
human epoch, and we forget entirely the brilliant minds who
actually _produced_ all the riches we take for granted.

Still worse, we fail to note that each one of those renowned
thugs was backed up by a scheming little shaman, a full-time
professional rationalizer of evil, whose job it was to tell the
same transparent lies to the boss thug and his henchmen over and
over again, to assure them, again and again, that their actions
were righteous because they so obviously were not, to keep them
from drowning in the liquor they had to swill to quiet the
cognitive dissonance within their own minds. That shaman -- first
a high-priest, later a theologian, still later a philosopher --
was also tasked with the vitally important job of gulling fools
into believing that a brute like Alexander the "Great" was a
greater benefactor to humanity than a genius like Socrates. Just
about everything you know of human history is a testament to the
success of that shaman and his intellectual heirs.

Your values are inverted, and I can demonstrate this with an
example very close to home. For your whole life you have been
told -- and you have probably believed -- that the United States
Constitution is a grand and noble document that exists to
safeguard your liberty. In reality, it is a sort of peace-treaty
drafted by three corrupt political factions in early America. The
owners of the newly-erected factories in the New England and
Mid-Atlantic states wanted to impose high tariffs on goods
manufactured in England, thus to make their much-shoddier
products more appealing to American buyers. Planters in the
Southern states wanted legal protection _for_ and official
sanction _of_ the despicable practice of human slavery. And poor
ordinary people wanted "free" land, to be expropriated by the
U.S. Army from the Native Americans who had occupied it thereto.
The liberty-loving revolution of 1776 was contorted into a
rent-seeking _coup d'état_ by 1789, and the whole wretched
abomination was rationalized in _The Federalist Papers_ -- which
you very probably pretended to read in high school or college.

I cite that example not to criticize you but simply to draw your
attention to the fact that you are being lied to most of the time
by philosophers and other so-called "thought leaders" -- and for
the most part you don't know it. What you learned best, in your
very-costly education, was a contempt for the mind and for the
works of the mind -- and this is precisely what the philosophers
who taught your teachers wanted for you to learn. You were taught
to cherish anything and everything that does not matter in the
uniquely-human life and to despise the one thing that _does_
matter -- the human mind. A dog will defend its food and a lion
its lair, but not only will you not defend your self, you join
with all your fellow men -- "We're all in this together!" -- in
heaping scorn on your _sole_ means of survival. You are the only
type of entity in all of existence capable of conceptually
identifying the values your life -- your _self_ -- requires. And
you are the only creature capable of failing to _do_ what your
life requires.

This is not an observation to be proud of, but it is yet another
demonstration of how much you are unlike other living things. The
philosophers, theologians, academics and other would-be "thought
leaders" who make it their business to convince you to despise
your identity as a human being will insist that humanity's
greatest stain is to be found in the hydrogen bomb. What better
proof, they demand, could there be of the incomparable evil that
is rationally-conceptual volitionality -- free will -- than an
artifact of the mind that can destroy all life on Earth? The
human mind is pitiful, pathetic and corrupt, they insist, an
ape's brain with delusions of grandeur, And yet, somehow, it can
contrive the means to exterminate all life in a flash. That much
is funny, as all contradictions are funny once you unpack them,
but they don't know the half of it. If we were to collect enough
random junk in space and throw it all at the same target, we
could create a new star -- a self-sustaining nuclear critical
mass. How much more like a god must we become before we will
deign to worship the awesome power of the human mind?

Evil ideas lead to evil ends -- ultimately to Squalor -- but good
ideas lead to Splendor. The problem for the mind -- for _your_
mind -- is to distinguish the one from the other.

As a matter of ontology, of being, your life is your self -- your
own iteratively self-abstracted idea of your life -- and your
self is your life's highest value. Because we have been
indoctrinated to despise and denigrate the self, people will be
quick to disagree with that claim, saying things like, "No, my
family is my highest value!" But the word that matters most in
that sentence is the one that shows up twice: "My." If we think
about it all the way through, the statement unpacks to this
proposition: "My own on-going self-regard would be diminished if
I were not to provide appropriately -- intellectually,
financially, emotionally and as a moral exemplar -- for my spouse
and children." What could possibly be more egoistic than that?
Even suicide -- self-slaughter -- can be an expression of the
self as the cardinal value in a fully-human life: "I cannot
continue to live with my self after committing or enduring this
atrocity."

The putatively egoist moral philosophers I picked on at the start
of this chapter will insist that "everyone is selfish." That
claim is false at both ends of it. My objective is to change this
sad state of affairs, but very few people alive as I write this
are fully, consciously committed to pursuing the values most
vitally important to the self. While most of us manage to produce
enough human values to stay alive as human beings, we do that job
pretty badly -- mostly because we have voluntarily diverted our
minds away from our own values and toward those of our
despoilers. Not only do we forge the chains that bind us, we
celebrate our self-inflicted slavery as the highest of virtues,
and we do everything we can to preserve our sacred chain-gang:
"We're all in this _together,_ damnit!" Moreover, the unexamined
pursuit of bodily or pecuniary utility can very easily lead us to
a condition of self-loathing. How _does_ it profit a man to gain
the whole world and lose his own soul?

The cardinal value of your life is your self. This is a statement
of ontology -- of being -- not of teleology -- shoulding. You did
not choose to become a self, but if you had not, you would not be
a human being. You would be alive, and your life would be
precious to the people who love you, but you would simply be a
genetic _Homo sapiens_ within whom the flower of Fathertongue
either was not or could not be cultivated -- or was, but was
later cut off by a non-lethal brain injury. The
ontologically-unavoidable existence of the human self is the
metaphysical link from is to ought -- from ontology to teleology
and back -- that thoughtless philosophers have insisted for
centuries does not -- and _cannot_ -- exist. Whether the ends
they sought were good or evil, they failed to think about human
nature _as it really is,_ and, in consequence, they were unable
to see how a being of free will -- of rationally-conceptual
volitionality -- could be as much constrained by the laws of
nature as a rock or a tree or a reptile.

You cannot avoid being a self. You cannot both _be_ a human being
and _not be_ a self. That is the law of identity as applied to
human beings -- genetic _Homo sapiens_ within whom has been
cultivated the gift of mind. That cultivation by your parents and
their friends and family members induced you to abstract the idea
of your self within your blossoming mind, and, once you have
mastered that idea, you cannot eradicate it from your mind
without eradicating your mind entirely. And while you might have
surmised that _I_ believe that modern philosophers, theologians
and other so-called "thought leaders" want to eradicate your
mind, I know this is not so. They don't want for you to _be_ a
dancing bear -- a mindless animal unwittingly soiling its own
identity in pursuit of ephemeral "treats" -- they just want for
you to volunteer to sacrifice every value the uniquely-human life
requires in exchange for their empty praise.

And with that observation I dismiss from further consideration
every theory of moral philosophy ever propounded -- putatively
egoistic or openly anti-egoistic. Any one of them may or may not
contain useful seeds of truth, but all of them as a group proceed
from an incorrect understanding of human nature -- of
rationally-conceptual volitionality -- of free will. None of
those doctrines acknowledge the self for what it is, and so they
cannot illuminate the idea of value as it is appropriate to a
fully-human life. Most philosophical and theological ethical
creeds are aligned _against_ the true interests of the self, of
course. But even those that purport to uphold the idea of
self-love do so only with respect to deformed and defective
representations of the self. _Until_ you have walked the
intellectual path that you and I are following here -- until you
have taken this journey with me or without me -- you don't even
know what the self is, so any pronouncements you make about it --
for it or against it -- are necessarily factually incorrect.

So what might be the cardinal virtue in an
ontologically-consonant moral philosophy? Self-love, of course.
If you haven't figured it out yet, this whole book is about
self-adoration as the highest possible virtue in the
uniquely-human life. Philosophy is about shoulding -- "What
should I do?" -- and my entire philosophy of the fully-human life
can be summarized in three words: Love your self. The pursuit of
bodily utility is _completely_ teleologically appropriate to the
life of any other organism -- and they don't need us to tell them
that! But mere bodily utility is not sufficient for the life of a
human being: Man does not live by bread alone.

The term "ontologically-consonant" is immensely useful, so long
as you retain in your mind the fact that what you are most
fundamentally is a self. Any object or action or idea that
advances or enhances the true interests of your self is a value
-- it is _of_ value to your self, in the context of the full
hierarchy of your values. Anything that retards or diminishes the
interests of your self is a disvalue. In the next chapter we will
talk about a more granular evaluation of values. The point to be
made here is that virtue and vice writ large can only be
meaningfully judged by reference to a cardinal standard of value,
and that standard, for all human beings -- whether they like it
or not -- is the self.





Save the world from home -- in your spare time!

That headline is my favorite advertising joke, a send-up of all
those hokey old matchbook covers. I don’t know if anyone still
advertises on matchbook covers. I don’t even know if anyone still
_makes_ matchbooks. Presumably, by now, smokers can light their
cigarettes with the fire of indignation in other peoples’ eyes.

But I have always believed that ordinary people _should_ be able
to save the world from going to hell on a hand-truck. Our problem
is not the tyrant-of-the-moment. The only real problem humanity
has ever had is thoughtlessness -- the mindless acquiescence to
the absurd demands of demagogues.

That’s the subject of this little book: The high cost of
thoughtlessness -- and how to stop paying it. It weighs in at
around 75 pages. I’m nobody’s matchbook copywriter, and I would
have made it even shorter if I could have. But it covers
everything I know about the nature of human life on Earth --
what we’ve gotten wrong, until now, and how we can do better
going forward.

Why did I bother? Because the world we grew up in is crashing
down around our ears. Nothing has collapsed yet, and there is no
blood in the streets -- so far. But as the economists say, “If
something can’t go on forever, it won’t.” My bet is that you have
been watching the news and wondering what you will do, if things
get ugly.

Doesn’t that seem like a fate worth avoiding? And yet: _What can
one person do?_ My answer: Read -- and propagate -- these
ideas. The book itself is offered at no cost -- and it always
will be. Even so, the price I ask is very high: You have to pay
attention.

If you find that you like this book, I encourage you to share it
freely, far and wide, in any form, with anyone you choose. Print it,
photo-copy it, email it -- shout it from the rooftops if you like.

You can read it at SelfAdoration.com.
( http://selfadoration.com/ManAlive.html )

Or you can download an easy-to-share PDF version.
( http://selfadoration.com/ManAlive.pdf )

If you post to public forums or you have your own
web site or weblog, download the propagation kit.
( http://selfadoration.com/ManAlivePropagationKit.zip )

Why should _you_ bother? Because if anything is going to save
civilization from tyranny, it will be ordinary people like us. _And
there are at least 2.5 billion of us on the internet._ Think what a
big difference some new ideas could make in that many human lives.

How _do_ you save the world from home in your spare time? _One mind at
a time..._