How to Get Rid of Your Competition

The pressure that induces governments to regulate does not come from reformers bemoaning abuses by powerful business interests. It comes from the business interests themselves, asking government to shield them against the harsh winds of competition.

Redacted from Dan Smoot, The Business End of Government

Wild Wild West

She threw away the key. And woe to the calamitous curiosity which might peer just once through a crack in the chamber of consciousness and look down, and sense that humanity rests upon the merciless, the greedy, the insatiable, the murderous, in the indifference of their ignorance---and in their dreams hanging on the back of a tiger.

In view of all this, where in the world does the urge for truth come from?

--redacted from Nietzsche, 1888

The Irony of Weightlifting

All ultimate and necessary truths are aspects of God's being, including the truths that are the means to all truths including themselves, truths that make up reason, logic, a set of values and conditionals, intentions and purposes.

There is a sense in which courage of one's convictions is in direct proportion to the extent to which one is willing to attack those convictions. Moreover, this way of negation is not only necessary for completing the structure of one's understanding of one's perspective and oneself, it is also required to understand surviving claims and their argumentative structures in the sharpest contrast to arguments for their negations. This prepares one more fully to examine competing claims, although again the resulting comparative analysis either contributes to the edification of one's view, or else changes it or negates it altogether. That's the necessary risk one takes.

 Moreover, one is already taking a risk in not knowing whether one will live through the coming day, and in operating according to whatever default view is assumed already. There's no such thing as a philosophical neutral zone.

The essence of the self-critical process is the attempt to approximate an ideal structure of justification. So why not an all-out attack on every front? Systematic, comprehensive, from the ground up, and developed into more than a habit---like breathing.

The result of course is to strengthen one's view, assuming it's true, and render being one's own worst enemy the greatest of friendships.

Anti-Randianism Necessarily Mimics Objectivism

I used to think that the 2D-characters complaint about Atlas Shrugged and other novels of Ayn Rand was legitimate criticism, but statist and and other coercive collectivists keep using the same arguments that the supposedly cardboard-cutout villians used in the book. The elusive 3rd dimension compulsively acts out Ayn Rand's characters for us, while criticizing her novels for not having realistic characters. One of the most striking ironies of the modern world.

I'm even starting to wonder if they are secretly copying certain passages for use in their ritualistic scolding.

If the characters are 2D, it's because Rand is holding up a mirror to flatland, even if possibly in spite of herself as well.

Adapted from a comment by robc at reason.com

While You Slept

In terms of the mind, everything God-like is already assumed in our principles of thinking, analyzing, and evaluating, and is referenced as a somehow distinct system of exceptionless infallible thought compared to our own error-prone system of thinking. As a universal criterial system, they embody rules for everything including determining which objects of experience are persons. Yet these principles themselves are necessarily treated as an independent unified guidance system, a God of personhood recognition criteria, exempt from the limitations of our imperfect aim at its ideality. It's personal because this system is necessarily the determiner of what is personal. It is therefore a personal being. We function in its image, however approximative. It doesn't *need* any ontological status that might be negated of it, and that precisely because of what it is as a factor that must be constantly reckoned with nonetheless, if not up front then in the background mimicking what it is denying.

Orthodox Rationalism

Being accurate to all concerns is what drives the emphasis on precision in philosophical and theological thinking, and self-reference is in a sense just as crucial as the most basic criteria.

But there is a salvation principle operating in the use of reason and logic. The salvation of God as a general notion of the ultimate mind as it influences the world of finite minds, and what God’s principles of being imply for a finite knower, include an operational saving principle in that same valuing and implementing of reason and against entropy and the probably entropy-driven tendency toward self-contradiction.

Add universal causality and you have the potential for a series of willful finitely-unrectifiable defections from the ideal of rational and logical thought and action. Sort of a sin cocktail that’s subtlely yet radically bad for you, but which we drink periodically nonetheless.

So the constant use of reason as necessary for life is already a partial taking advantage of the salvation of God in terms of some kind of general common grace granted by virtue of existing in God’s substantially rational and logical world, by instantiating and referencing transcendental principles that are nothing other than necessary instrumental aspects of the divine mind. And the fact that we don’t perfectly actualize the ideal also requires that we operate on the basis of reason in order to realize and recognize willful defections from that same reason and logic. The universal applicability of reason is a universal power of a nonlocal transcendent mind whose principles of thinking are necessarily instantiated in any finite mind. A perfect instantiation is all-powerful, which makes possible and guarantees the salvation offered through Jesus Christ, which is paralleled already in cognitive and evaluative processes which also must be believed in to survive and thrive in the immediate experiential world.

If Jesus saves, it’s only because a saving method of thought paved the way through principles that must be used for that saving action to have any meaning. Since one core aspect of God’s being simply *is* logical and rational principles, only God can perfectly rectify the effects of deliberate irrational acts and thoughts in a context of universal causality, and transform the whole person, eventually comprehensively.

Straining to Convince Themselves

 

"They are rid of the Christian God and now believe all the more firmly that they must cling to Christian morality. They must rehabilitate themselves after every little emancipation from religion by showing in a veritably awe-inspiring way what moral fanatics they are. That is their penance."

 Friedrich Nietzsche