Individualism vs. Collectivism: No Compromise Possible

Collectivism does not cause the group to focus on the group. It is, in the end, only done through physical force by those who choose to make the individual focus on the group----or suffer the consequences. Voluntary cooperation with a group, or voluntary assistance to a group, is not collectivism. Collectivism is the generic term that includes, but is not limited to, Marxism, Socialism, and Communism.

You therefore do not "balance out" your right to be an individual, with the force behind a collective.

"There can be no compromise on basic principles. There can be no compromise on moral issues. There can be no compromise on matters of knowledge, of truth, of rational conviction." [1]

Why is it a compromise of basic principles to "balance out" individualism with collectivism?

"Individualism regards man—every man—as an independent, sovereign entity who possesses an inalienable right to his own life, a right derived from his nature as a rational being. Individualism holds that a civilized society, or any form of association, cooperation or peaceful coexistence among men, can be achieved only on the basis of the recognition of individual rights—and that a group, as such, has no rights other than the individual rights of its members." [2]

Individualism goes back to the Protestant Revolution; but politically, individualism and "individual sovereignty" go back to the Enlightenment, derived from the concept of "natural rights" which collectivism denies.

"Individual sovereignty was not a peculiar conceit of Thomas Jefferson: It was the common assumption of the day..." http://www.friesian.com/ellis.htm

 

[1] http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/compro…
[2] http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/indivi…

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Consciousness, and Intentionality

All references indicate a problem of semantics with the word "intentionality", but consciousness must be consciousness of something. There are two stages of "intentionality": that which occurs at birth, and that which comes after consciousness of being conscious.
 

"But here [in the semantics] the difficulty lies partly in the fact that the relevant use of cognate terms is simply not that found in common speech (as when we speak of doing something ‘intentionally’)." http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consci…

This problem in semantics is better explained this way: "Every intentional state is mental, but not every conscious mental state is intentional. For example, one may have feelings of anxiety that do not have any intentional content. http://science.jrank.org/pages/9796/Inte…

"Philosopher Franz Brentano has suggested intentionality or aboutness (that consciousness is about something). However, within the philosophy of mind there is no consensus on whether intentionality is a requirement for consciousness."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consciousne…

That "consciousness is about something" can be explained if you consider that any 'intentionality' (of any semantic persuasion) absolutely requires consciousness---after we become conscious of it:

"Concepts and, therefore, language are primarily a tool of cognition—not of communication, as is usually assumed. Communication is merely the consequence, not the cause nor the primary purpose of concept-formation—a crucial consequence, of invaluable importance to men, but still only a consequence. Cognition precedes communication............."
Ayn Rand  http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/langua…

Cognition precedes intentionality, because without consciousness one cannot have any intentions, no matter which semantic definition you use. 

 The question seems to be this:
Does some 'intention' of mind cause consciousness? 

But it can only be answered by acknowledging that the brain is hard-wired at birth to 'intentionally' seek objects of cognition, just as the lungs are hard-wired to seek oxygen and the liver is hard-wired to strain the blood stream.

But there is the matter of retaining intentionality after one become conscious of being conscious. Drugs and alcohol are only two of the means people use to try to eliminate their own intentionality.

But it still comes down to which semantic definition you use. "...within the philosophy of mind there is no consensus on whether intentionality is a requirement for consciousness." I think we can see that at birth there can be no intention that requires a reasoned purpose for it, but only one that is hard-wired. Because "Concepts and, therefore, language are primarily a tool of cognition—", it is at that point that it would seem we can choose to maintain our individual, purposeful "intentionality" or let it go.

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Ethnicity and Racism

For the sake of "diversity" we allowed the concept of "ethnicity" to enter our cultures. While we have always valued differences here in the US--for example in Holland, Michigan the Dutch are so old fashioned that people from The Netherlands often travel here during the Tulip Festival to see the old traditions long forgotten in Holland--there is a difference between celebrating such things, and trading it up for racism, which we have done.

30 years ago, the author Ayn Rand saw this form of racism coming and described it:

"'Ethnicity' is an anti-concept, used as a disguise for the word “racism”—and it has no clearly definable meaning. . . . The term “ethnicity” stresses the traditional, rather than the physiological characteristics of a group, such as language—but physiology, i.e., race, is involved . . . . So the advocacy of “ethnicity,” means racism plus tradition—i.e., racism plus conformity—i.e., racism plus staleness."
http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/ethnic…

For the sake of ethnicity, the left "celebrates" the dialect called Ebonics, and once advocated teaching it in schools! But by institutionalizing it as they did, they made it a target for educators who saw it, not as a valid dialect, but as as horrible lack of education, a failure by the educational system. Those educators didn't despise the uneducated, but despised the left for institutionalizing a failed system. However, those less educated than the educators looked at what the left advocated, and began hating the messenger--those who used Ebonics. Those who use Ebonics are now the targets of racists who say that the blacks and other poor who use Ebonics are inferior. This began when the left "celebrated" the diversity of the ethnic classes too poor to learn proper ( or at least good) English.

Because of our "celebration" of ethnicity, it has become taboo to question the many large and small Muslim communities in the US who refuse to learn English, communities we now find are organizing to send their youth to the Middle East for training in terrorist camps. This doesn't mean that even the majority of people living in those communities agree with terrorism--they do live in the US for other reasons, after all--but politically correct celebrations of ethnicity have not allowed us to properly question the motives of people who appear to be questionable citizens in those communities.

The same can be said for "ethnics" all over the globe. One reason for the Balkan War of the 1990s was "ethnic cleansing". That is what Hitler was doing, also.

"The Rwandan Genocide was the 1994 mass murder of an estimated 800,000 people....It was the culmination, largely influenced by the Belgian colonization which favored the Tutsi minority group because of their more 'European' appearance, of longstanding ethnic competition and tensions between the minority Tutsi, and the majority Hutu peoples."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rwandan_Gen…

"Ethnic Cleansing: The elimination of an unwanted group from a society, as by genocide or forced migration."
http://www.munfw.org/archive/50th/4th1.h…

It is not what the Israelis want to do to the Muslims; after all half of Jerusalem is controlled by Muslims, and Yassar Arafat had the chance to create a Palestinian nation during his life time, but at the last minute, after all the years of wars and negotiations, "the Old Warrior" changed his mind and said no, because the ethnic cleansing of the Jews from Palestine was more important to him.

So long as we celebrate "ethnicity" and not simply the cultural differences and traditions, racism will continue to escalate.

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Locke: Perception and Knowledge

"Knowledge then seems to me to be nothing but the perception of the connexion and agreement, or disagreement and repugnancy of any of our Ideas. In this alone it consists. [Essay IV i 2] "
http://www.philosophypages.com/locke/g04…

For some philosophers, "idea" is that which is in the mind as a condition of sensation, or "the given".
"Given, The: Whatever is immediately present to the mind before it has been elaborated by inference, interpretation or construction."
http://www.ditext.com/runes/g.html

In other words, for those philosophers, if you sense that your hand is touching something, there is the "idea" that something exists which your hand is touching. But whether or not you call that an "idea", I know of no philosopher who doesn't also call it "the given".

Locke meant more than this. Locke meant by "perception" something that is defined in the mind beyond the mere point of the given; it had to be elaborated by inference, interpretation or construction, (induction; deduction; conceptualization).

This is easy to acknowledge when you read his words again: perception is the connection and agreement, or disagreement and repugnancy of any of our Ideas. The mind's acknowledgment of "the given" will neither agree nor disagree with either previous nor future events of what is "given" to us to perceive. But a perception is the acknowledgment of the given; acknowledgment requires a correspondence between "ideas"; ideas must be that which is "elaborated by inference, interpretation or construction", because without those, ideas would remain only as perceptions about which we know nothing except that they exist.

Ayn Rand, a Lockean herself, put it this way:
"A “perception” is a group of sensations automatically retained and integrated by the brain of a living organism, which gives it the ability to be aware, not of single stimuli [the given], but of entities, of things....A percept is a group of sensations automatically retained and integrated by the brain of a living organism. It is in the form of percepts that man grasps the evidence of his senses and apprehends reality. When we speak of “direct perception” or “direct awareness,” we mean the perceptual level. Percepts, not sensations, are the given, the self-evident. The knowledge of sensations as components of percepts is not direct, it is acquired by man much later: it is a scientific, conceptual discovery."
http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/percep…

Locke, therefore, meant that perceptions were separate from sensations, and as far as "knowledge" of them was concerned, we have that only when we perceive that one idea is connected to another, at which time we also see that it either agrees or disagrees with the others. If it disagrees, it or one or more of the others is "repugnant", or contrary.

Perception is not the simple acknowledgment that we have had a sensation of "the given". An infant is "given" many things at birth, and his mind is in terrible turmoil attempting to determine the nature of his new world. He must determine that "mother is good"; "food is good"; "dirty diapers are bad", etc. But even then, until he gains a language by which to identify these things, they are still nothing more than "the given". He doesn't have the conception of a dirty diaper; he only knows that something happened to him and he doesn't feel good after that, and until he is taken care of.

So for Locke, "perception" is acknowledgment--of one idea or concept either agreeing with or disagreeing with other ideas, whether conceptual or not. An infant without a language can still determine that one thing is contrary to another (such as his mother makes him happy, then she makes him sad or angry, and he must eventually learn how one person can do both.)

So the key to "perception" in the language of Locke is to understand that it means the acknowledgment of at least a pair of "ideas" which will be either in agreement with each other, or "repugnant" to each other. 

It is only from the perception of like/unlike ideas that we can come to have "knowledge", because what is not "knowledge" is literally "unacknowledged" and must be greater than "the given".

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How Do Our Eyes Know What's In Front of Us?

This is a common enough type of question for people who know little or nothing of the 'simple level' cognitive mechanics of the mind, the kind that might be called in college "Cognition 101". The eyes don't "know" anything; but lets use this question as a metaphor.

Our eyes don't know until our mind figures it out. Our mind doesn't figure it out until it has enough prior examples in the memory from which to make inferences and draw conclusions. The mind doesn't have any prior (a priori) examples at birth.

"As far as can be ascertained, an infant’s sensory experience is an undifferentiated chaos. Discriminated awareness begins on the level of percepts.

"A percept is a group of sensations automatically retained and integrated by the brain of a living organism. It is in the form of percepts that man grasps the evidence of his senses and apprehends reality. When we speak of “direct perception” or “direct awareness,” we mean the perceptual level." http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/percep…

We must go from that state of undifferentiated chaos, to a mental state whereby we can begin to makes sense of the world. We can only do that by using the hard-wired system of the brain that is like an empty thumb drive--empty except for the operating software called "logic"; a thumb drive which gets filled by life's experiences--like seeing and touching a tree for the first time. You don't know what it is. You parents or a sibling or someone tells you.

("Logic" has two connotations. The one we think of first and most often is that of an induction, deduction, argument, etc., that demonstrates a thought that is in accord with reason; in other words, it appears rational, whether or not we detect a mistake in it, such as a fallacy. The second connotation is the processes of the mind by which thought would be impossible without, like a car without an engine.

(The second form of logic is built in to our brains. If it was not, then Aristotle could not have deduced that there are exactly 256 forms of categorical syllogism, no more no less, that the mind has at its disposal. These 256 are identical in every culture and language on earth. But they are devoid of content, i.e., of metaphysical measurement, until we gain experience from which to form percepts using that system of logic.)

Just as your lungs know how to breath, and your stomach knows how to digest, your mind knows how to perform the functions of logic. But an empty stomach can't digest; and an empty mind can't make inductions.

Until your mind knows whatever basic percepts it requires for survival in its specific environment, your eyes "know" nothing that is front of you--neither things of empirical content, nor the things of conceptual content that you can "see" even with your eyes closed.

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Identity of the Knower and the Known: The 'I'

The question is often asked, "What is the 'I'?"

The "I" is the identity of the human consciousness, called the "knower", as it distinguishes itself from that which not part of its identity.  It comes down to something called the "ego-centric predicament":

"The epistemological predicament of a knowing mind which, confined to the circle of its own ideas, finds it difficult, if not impossible, to escape to a knowledge of an external world..." http://www.ditext.com/runes/e.html 

When it escapes to the knowledge of that external world, what is left is the identity of the knower, and the knower calls itself "I".

 This is concomitant to the "subject-object problem", [1] [2] which arises from the premise that the world consists of objects, things which are observed through perception and become the "known". Consciousness is defined by its awareness of these objects; a consciousness with no awareness of objects cannot be said to be consciousness at all since consciousness is consciousness "of something". The "subject" of knowledge is the individual knower considered as an act of awareness of an "object". 

Thus, the contents of consciousness come to be known to the consciousness as different from the objects themselves. The subject is not the apple nor any other thing of which it is conscious: that is the object. The subject is the knower.

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What is a Belief System?

In any belief system, "system" is the operative word. A "system" must be functionally integrated in its metaphysics, its epistemology, its ethics, etc. This makes it into what is called "justified true belief". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justified_t… A system that is not functionally integrated will contain contradictions.
 
Justified true belief is also called the "tripartite" theory: "The theory states that if we believe something, have a justification for believing it, and it is true, then our belief is knowledge." [emphasis added] http://www.arrod.co.uk/essays/tripartite…

The part about a belief being "true" is also called the Correspondence Theory of Truth, which Aristotle and most other philosophers after him accepted as the proper standard for justified belief. Basically it says "p is true if and only if p corresponds to a fact". http://www.iep.utm.edu/truth/#H3 

But to be free of contradictions in any belief system--whether about going to the library, or about whether God exists or about what kind of God he/she is--it cannot be open to having holes punched it by other theories. Of course you can decide those other theories are wrong; but what if you see the logic and realize you have holes? You can close them up by listening to the criticism.

Hole-punching theories are called "defeasors". To have a "system" that is free of contradictions, you must be able to defeat the defeasors. This is called an "undefeated justified true belief." http://www.erin.utoronto.ca/~jnagel/333h…

Only when you believe your own system to be undefeasable can you have complete confidence in its integrity and its veracity.

Are there any such undefeated belief systems? Only the ones you believe in. Buddhists punch holes in Objectivism; Objectivists punch holes in Christianity; Christianity punches holes in monism; determinism punches non-determinism which is not necessarily the same as the belief in free-will; non-reductive theories punch holes in reductive theories; etc.

All of them are examples of belief systems. But they are based on what is known by the knower in the sense that the knower "knows P"; and we all "know" different things. This doesn't make all of them wrong. To the extent that they can be justified they are true.

But to the extent that you can defeat them with your own argument, they are not "justified".

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Objective Moral Standards

The first time the word "objective" was apparently used was "1610s, originally in the philosophical sense of 'considered in relation to its object'".

Objective moral truths are in relation to the object, rather than subjective in relation to pragmatic or other types of ends.

The object which such objective truths are in relation to is the standard that makes morality necessary: the life of Man both as species and as individual. This is set according to what Aristotle called "Man qua Man", or to put it another way, what is it about man that makes morals necessary?

It cannot be simply the preservation of the species--Hitler was doing that by preserving what he believed were Aryans. What Aristotle, Aquinas, Wm. of Occam, Averroes, and other rational thinkers could not conceive of didn't become a concrete idea until Jefferson and others like Madison and Patrick Henry and Thomas Paine read the works of Locke and Rousseau.

Locke, along with Rousseau, described a civilization in which government is "by the consent of the governed." This led to the American realization that there was such a thing as "individual sovereignty." This was logical, since to give consent to a government to do for you what is best not to do vigilante style, and what is best for "the general welfare", and what leaves you the most time on your hands for such things as living---to give consent you must first have that which you are giving away.

"Locke's theory of natural rights was, indeed, the theory of natural rights to which the Declaration would refer..."Individual sovereignty was not a peculiar conceit of Thomas Jefferson: It was the common assumption of the day..." http://www.friesian.com/ellis.htm

It is individual sovereignty, until the 18th century only a vague idea in the minds of freethinkers and libertarians, that is the source of the need for moral standards. "Objective truths" are those that correspond to man's nature as the rational animal: he must be given the freedom to utilize that rationality as nature has given it to him.

But more than that, it is that each man must be protected from force and coercion that would prevent him from utilizing that gift of individual sovereignty that nature gave him.

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Obama, Jindal, Federal Interference and the Tenth Amendment

Bobby Jindal is wrong. The Governor of Louisiana has been properly criticizing the Federal government for not allowing Louisiana to follow its own plans to protect its own waters and its own shore lines from the mess created by BP's oil spill.

"The Coast Guard told us yesterday – after weeks of reviewing our plan that they approved a single segment of just two miles to see if the sand boom works. This is another example of too little too late. We expressed this frustration to the President..." wrote Jindal on his official website. 

Jindal is wrong for allowing the Federal government to stand in the way of Louisiana, who will be the big loser, if Obama doesn't lose bigger politically speaking. But even political losses pale in comparison to what Louisiana is losing in natural resources, fish, wildlife, wetlands, and the industry of everyone in Louisiana; when the fishing industry comes to a halt, the Louisiana economy will begin to tank. Already the tourism industry including local restaurants that rely solely on tourism during the summer months is almost non-existent.

No, Bobby Jindal is wrong for not telling the Federal government to screw itself, and do what Louisiana knows it has to do. This would not only be the right thing for Louisiana, and for Jindal politically, because he would come out looking like David against Goliath. He would come out smelling like a rose, while the Obama administration would stink like the oil-drenched waters that could eventually ride the current all the way up the Eastern Seaboard after ruining the Florida coast, industries, and tourism.

But Jindal will come out smelling like a rose in the 2012 Presidential race, in which he is certain to be one of the front-runners. All the Republicans will smell better than Obama on the environmental front (let alone on the issues of Iran, the Afghan Presidential election and the Presidency itself, and jobs, jobs, jobs.)

This issue of the Obama administration telling the States what they can and cannot do to protect themselves, including investigating Arizona's new illegal-immigrant law, brings the Tenth Amendment issue closer to the showdown between Federal power and State's rights in the 21st Century.

Jindal might not win the Republican nomination, but he and the other Republicans will have a lot of ammunition to use against Obama and his policy wonks come election time, including this fall during the Congressional elections.

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What is Reason and Rationality?

Reason is that "intellectual faculty that adopts actions to ends," from Anglo-Fr. resoun, O.Fr. raison, from L. rationem (nom. ratio) http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?l=r&…

"Rationality" does come from "ratus, pp. of reri "to reckon, think," from PIE base *rei- "to reason, count" (cf. O.E. rædan "to advise; see read). (O.Fr. raisonable, from L. rationabilis" [ibid]

So where is the "ratio"? It is in the "correspondence theory", of which almost all western philosophers have subscribed, from Plato AND Aristotle (!) right into the 21st century. Relativists, however, go by the coherence theory, or some other epistemological method of straying from this ratio.

The "ratio" is the ratio of correct premises, correct inductions, and correct deductions to the state of objective reality. Objectivism is the modern philosophy based, almost word for word, on this 19th century origination: "in philosophical sense of "the doctrine that knowledge is based on objective reality," first attested 1854; from objective + -ism." http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?l=o&…

What is it that determines this ratio; in other words, who is to say what "objective reality" is? Actually, reality does a good job of telling us what it is. In the Baconian sense that "Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed," reality tells us what it is that must be obeyed to be commanded; and it is in this obeying that we find out who has the "intellectual faculty that adopts actions to ends,"; and we discover in that faculty just what ends are "natural". It comes down to metaphysics:

"Metaphysics is the foundation of philosophy. Without an explanation or an interpretation of the world around us, we would be helpless to deal with reality. We could not feed ourselves, or act to preserve our lives. The degree to which our metaphysical worldview is correct is the degree to which we are able to comprehend the world, and act accordingly. Without this firm foundation, all knowledge becomes suspect. Any flaw in our view of reality will make it more difficult to live." http://www.importanceofphilosophy.com/Me…

What causes a person to act rationally? Ayn Rand stated that it is volitionally up to each individual to decide whether to follow reason, or to what degree, since it is a "faculty" of mind, will, and epistemological strength.

If a person makes a terrible mistake--let's say, she forgets her baby is in the back seat of a car and it dies of heat exhaustion while she is under anesthesia at the dentist's office, it could be argued whether or not her forgetfulness was rational. But rational people do make such mistakes, and she did not choose to volitionally act against her faculty of reason; for whatever cause, she just forgot the baby. Some people have to take a mild sedative 1/2 hour before going to the dentist. Others have to take an anti-biotic and anti-biotics have been known to cause irrational behavior.

But unfortunately for the baby (and the family) forgetfulness is not necessarily irrationality. Irrationality must be said to be the PURPOSEFUL neglect of "adopting actions to ends," not the human frailty of forgetfulness (or other frailties of mind and character) when we are placed in stressful situations.

Getting stoned and forgetting the baby would be purposeful neglect, i.e., irrationality, because it serves no good ends to use alcohol or drugs when attending a baby. In that case there is no correspondence of actions or ends, to objective reality.

The degree to which that mother's metaphysical worldview is correct is the degree to which she is able to comprehend that her world has a baby in it, and act accordingly.

Other references:

http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/reason…
http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/ration…
http://www.iep.utm.edu/truth/#H3

 

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Shooting Our Way out of Plato's Cave

I like answering questions that others have posed, when I think I can give an Objectivist spin on the answer. And so I read the question of whether we are "reverting" to our animalistic nature, our brute side, with all the violence we seem to see that comes from not only terrorists, but from normal, everyday people. Is this reversion "predestined", asked the question. No explanation was given as to why it would be "predetermined", but the reversion to our brute side made me think in another direction.


No, not predestined. We are simply going backward into the cave of Plato, as we did after St. Augustine incorporated him into Christianity. Now, however, he has been incorporated, since the writings of Kant, into secular thinking.

"Aristotle may be regarded as the cultural barometer of Western history... whenever it fell, so did mankind. The Aristotelian revival of the thirteenth century brought men to the Renaissance. The intellectual counter-revolution turned them back toward the cave of his antipode: Plato." Review of J.H. Randall’s Aristotle http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/aristo…

It was because of the Augustine/Plato connection that the Inquisition used torture, murder, and the killing of witches. 

• St. Augustine, on the contrary, was still opposed to the use of force... Finally, however, he changed his views... Apropos of his apparent inconsistency it is well to note carefully whom he is addressing...in his writings against the Donatists he upholds the rights of the State: sometimes, he says, a salutary severity would be to the interest of the erring ones themselves and likewise protective of true believers and the community at large. link

• "No human judge," Augustine wrote, "can read the conscience of the man before him. That is why so many innocent witnesses are tortured to find what truth there is in the alleged guilt of other men. It is even worse when the accused man himself is tortured to find out if he be guilty. Here a man still unconvicted must undergo certain suffering for an uncertain crime –- not because his guilt is known, but because his innocence is unproved. Thus it often happens that the ignorance of the judge turns into tragedy for the innocent party.

 Now the Platonic/Kantian epistemology has turned a different direction, from the religious to the secular, where men (and increasingly, women,) are randomly killing others on campuses and in post offices and other public places. 

Why? They have been taught that it does no good to leave the cave; the flash of rationality and sanity outside the cave is no longer what it was. Those who keep men chained to the cave and cast long shadows are now on the outside of cave where they can catch you, and it is safer inside the cave. 

No one wants to remain in a cave, so they shoot their way out.

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2010 Copyright Notice

Ardi Pithecus ™,

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Marx, and the Theory of Alienation

"In a nutshell Marx's Theory of Alienation is the contention that in modern industrial production under capitalist conditions workers will inevitably lose control of their lives by losing control over their work. Workers thus cease to be autonomous beings in any significant sense. Under pre-capitalist conditions a blacksmith, e.g., or a shoemaker would own his own shop, set his own hours, determine his own working conditions, shape his own product, and have some say in how his product is bartered or sold. His relationships with the people with whom he worked and dealt had a more or less personal character." http://faculty.frostburg.edu/phil/forum/…

I agree this is possible, but I stood at machines for years doing the same thing over and over. And I thought about what I was going to do with the money I would have performing such work. I appreciated that if I had to create by myself, like the old blacksmith, the entire piece of work that was being constructed in that factory, that I would not have as much money. Instead I would be like the shoemaker in the fable, who only had enough money to buy the leather to make one pair of shoes, and with the profits he had just enough money to buy leather for one more pair of shoes, and enough food to see him buy until he sold that pair of shoes.

If workers feel alienated as Marx said they would, it is because the merits of capitalistic division of labor have not been made clear to them. Instead, what has been made clear, is that while they stand at a machine all day long investing nothing but their time, "the man" who put up the money to pay them for their time is reaping profits.

• The very system that allows the worker under capitalism to take home a bigger check than he could have dreamed of as a shoe maker, is make to appear to be the bad system. If you want your luxury car, your Iphone or your Ipad, your vacation to Orlando, your swimming pool, your McDonald's burgers and your children's bicycles and the braces for their teeth, you must have the division of labor.

Feel alienated, if you want to, but capitalism is the currier who brings the bigger paycheck. 

Unfortunately, the messenger who would teach them that has already been shot.

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How Shall We Cherish Our Lives?

People who cherish their lives are egoists, and therefore normative and good and decent people. But where does the blessing come from? At one time, it came from Jefferson, Madison, and their cohorts who gave us the legal "blessing" to be ourselves and find the best way to honor our own lives and the lives of those we cherished.

Today, the Originalist readers of that wonderful document called the Constitution of the United States are harassed as being behind the times. The only "blessing" we get from the progressive thinkers is the blessing of higher taxes to pay for enlargement of government and in the process for the shrinking of our liberties.

The Founders believed that God had blessed the U.S. and given all mankind a place to peacefully find a place to pursue his or her own happiness. Now, if it was God, he has either forsaken the idea of a place to seek our own happiness; or he has condemned us for choosing leaders who routinely destroy the Tenth Amendment. [For Tenth Amendment references see A and B.]

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