One thing we may not at all realize and that the denialist does, is that it doesn’t matter that something is true, but only that an official story has been accepted.
This explains why lies perpetuate themselves as does culture, which has the necessity of being based on lies in order to facilitate order.
(in all cultures unless it is a contained population)
The concept of a fully integrated human being.
Meaning all compartments are one. Work life, sex life, car life, all gone. Made into one thing. With the coming of the Internet, the office life ends and brings it into the home. The end of privacy inside the bubble of inclusive space reigns supreme.
Primarily though, this can be seen in one’s ideology where belief is often dichotomized from action; splintered into a thousand social bubbles. Pull this way, or that.
The individualist society’s of the past where one can play two or three, or ten sides of a fence, as seen most notably in House of Cards for instance; will take over. This is another part of what ensures the eventual demise of national authority as cultural overseer. Corporations took over the job of the post-war government stronghold and pushed it into fruition with the 60’s. Now it is the Corporation, the next centralist system to be taken down. The next paradigm, the feudal niche.
The extreme ends of Narcisism are evident under electronic conditions to begin to appear to be its opposite: the smart phone’s constant state of tactile-reflection is very mentally rutting to the ego in its collectivist message, and so to speak; goes SuperNova.
Meaning, that in imploding upon itself, (the ego) i.e. looking at yourself “too much” whether it be on Facebook or FaceTime—you suddenly realize with electronic speed, that now instead of being in an isolated living room theatre, you have the rest of the world visiting ad-infinitum.
This virtual sort of tribalism is the feudal precursor to the physical based, off-grid living we’ll be doing very soon enough. Always remember the Hunger Games and O’Brian will always be torturing us since, and as McLuhan says: Terror is the prevailing emotion in the new eras.
Aside from paranoia and joy.
I’ll add that this also joins us in a very Buddhist sort of way. This comes from the Western belief of progress and lack of relativity that the electronic jungle wipes out. Boundless space is infinite so you don’t feel so great in the distances traveled per se. Medieval is this boundless future full of fantastic, with such things in it…
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From a voice file:
This is my own observation. I think that it is inherently cerebral. At the moment. At the moment. I suppose that will change when we are through media able to visualize everything that’s in our heads as some kind of (no doubt) 3d display tech, in which the viewer is now participant for real, in a void or vacuum of a million balloons he must now sort out. But even then that’s cluttered, and we will need once again to sort it out, and once again, if not permanently, overabundance of information is the problem.
Because the Internet is basically text now, and will be inevitably voice dominant in the future (with text only as subsidiary form and filter) –we instinctively have an emphasis on words as filter bits in which we are funneled most of our information whether to each other in bed making love, chatting in our cars while talking to lost loves, or building a website; it is all involvement with the same medium, over and over. Looking at nothing but what are in reality, literally, flat planes through which our eyes pass through maybe a centimeter.
We will then gain the loss of perspective of the New Guinean Jungle tribesman, forever surrounded by the trees and no perspective, nothing literally beyond a meter or two. Who thought upon visiting as Joseph Campbell and McLuhan point out, thought the buffalo on the horizon were ants. Why? Because for some moments at least, I don’t know, maybe minutes, maybe a day or a week or many years, but the tribesman literally thought the buffalo, boar sized beasts the size of three men put together, were ants crawling somehow in their vision like flies to swat from their faces, and I don’t remember, maybe they did.
“My Dad taught me many things.
Right here in this room.”
– Michael Corleone, The Godfather II
It felt as though a door had been shut on a party in the next room.
But the sound that seemed to be all around me, yet outside of me, the sound usually muffled by a shutting door, I knew, wasn’t a sound at all, but a feeling. The feeling that I was waking up on the eve of something new, big, the noise next door making me heavy with excitement.
It was a strange kind of immersive feeling. I lay in my old blue sleeping bag I think I’d found in the closet, unravelling its bright red inner lining from my body. I thought, “This is it, here it is: you’re free–finally free”
I lay in the basement of my father’s new townhouse, well, it was still somewhat new to me, he’d been remarried four years I think, at that time. It was the early morning of January 11th, 2005, I had just arrived once again from being away, which so characterized my twenties, this time from being in France, married with child for roughly a little over three years.
I’d left them, well, so to speak, after not having a job basically the entire duration of that time living in a prison with a person I discovered I had very little in common with, happened to marry, happened to have a daughter with, and stayed for that long–for that reason alone.
It had that this is a new life’ feeling. God I love that feeling, so fresh, like I’d never lifted a finger in that land before. But I was in the place I’d grown up, a few neighborhoods off from Springfield, in Annandale, Virginia.
Virginia never felt mythical, or enchanted in any way. Now it does, looking back, and each time I re-arrive there. Of course so much has changed, it’s risen into a sprawl comparable to LA now, and was well on its way, even at that time.
My dad’s old glass cased Sony stereo system with big ol’ black speakers rose up from the floor with some sort of oak or mahogany imitation wood.
I had turned on the lamp and remembered that, of all things, of all people, my old High School English teacher, Mrs. Rice, had picked me up from Dulles the night before. She was Jewish, had absolutely huge, enormous black hair, and quite a homely appearance, which was something she always would openly admit, which I always found interesting. It was even more interesting to me though, that she was once ecentric and yet, on every occasion I came in contact with her, had a talk with her, what have, you, she never talked about anything but the most asinine things.
We had a funny discussion, or rather, not quite a discussion, but a conversation in the car that was a bit different and at first made me think she was in fact the usual result of eccentricity: somewhat interesting . She wanted to know everything…Stay Tuned for More From Neal Cormier: Memoir I.
Love is often the runoff.
Of what was there when another person’s body gave us pleasure we didn’t think possible.
If we reached it.
Then we would think, what do I do with all this residual positive energy? Then we project that feeling beyond the physicality onto another person. This could be called Love.
Until we incorporate the Intellectual. Then it either survives or it doesn’t from there.
”Do the following rights exist? Or are they needs misunderstood as rights?
1. the right to anonymity.
2. the right to “not being recognized/identified without consent”.
3. the right to privacy.
Recently German government banned Facebook’s use of face recognition for auto tagging. They & others cited the above rights as justification.
I am wondering whether what the German government did is moral.” – A Member of Objectivism Online, Edwin
Junior Member
MY RESPONSE:
I think not.
The right to not have one’s face recognized is one’s own choice. And should be one’s own. And I think that the answer is software that can automate the work we would do as individual’s to help our own plight, i.e. choose yay or nay to a given pop-up as it is expressed on the web.
In terms of Rand’s Objectivist philosophy, there is no right to have a government that is our Nanny. First and foremost, but not as first-causality necessarily.
It falls right under the right to own one’s own store or shop I would say, online or otherwise. This is all akin to our choice to be able to designate smoking or non at a restaurant. I thoroughly agree that it is the right of the shop owner
to choose whether his shop is smoking or non. In the perfect laisée faire model safety would come from variety. The same reason that Monopolies are impossible according to Objectivism.
The Cultural Take: On the other hand, advertisers understand cultural context and environment. That said, they know how much the: ‘technically speaking’ kind of consumer behavior is what builds their businesses. Yeah, sure, we are able to choose, but under what conditions? Most consumer statistics reveal that behind the scenes we are actually making very different choices than how we’d like to be seen. We as objectivists and Objectivists, want to be seen as ‘Heroic Volitional Animals,’ but are we always? Should we really be that OCD? Those same business stats btw, are pretty clear that most of us, most of our lives, are making some very foolhardy decisions pretty routinely in terms of online agreements and popups etc. Which are very important a lot of the time. We have a responsibility not to be lazy, too.
But if we’re talking about our interaction with the web in any typical modern setting (my self and voice now excepted being an Art & Author Entrepreneur that receives Inspiration all day every day ) we as average Americans need to come to terms with this life, question it and get a new perspective on it I think. I mean, we are typically (I’ve waited tables for 15 years for instance) engaged in a world and life of slimmed down ‘me-time’ individual time and space, which is pretty much not our choosing and have very little time these days under the 9-5 superstructure (of human slavery), especially when you are the typical American: married with children in some fashion or other.
The choice to pre-designate by law and in ethics be good to be a choice, private or non, and may be ours to make, but in what, like 3.5 seconds or less?? (the average person’s attention span in terms of an agreement pop-up). And how many choices like that do we make on the web per day? Hundreds if not thousands if we are businessmen and perhaps I’d gander in the 60’s for the average American. Did I mention that the web is mine and many other people’s sole source of income?
So, in conclusion the answer to this question under this blog or ‘probe,’ to my point of view, (being objectivist and Not ‘Objectivist’) –is that Rights, since they do not exist in reality, (save absolute Reality) must be invented to produce the designated desirable outcomes. What is that outcome? If it is peace we aim for, I would say: no it is not the right of the government to make maladaptive laws for behavior that, if it were our choice, would not erode the pursuit of freedom from beaurocratic side-effects. Such is typical of maladaptive law (i.e. Socialism rather than having the balls to be a straight-up Communist).
On the other hand once again, we should also engage in software that protects us and makes ‘Philosophy Level’ decisions like Facebook’s auto-camming feature, automatically. I am only imagining that this software exists. But hey, we’re living in fantastic, exponential times, right? Anything you imagine in terms of Tech is likely to exist in some form or other. One day I looked down at my watch, the one my fiancé bought me. It was Dior. And so sleek that I didn’t even realize I was really looking at a dial-in and my own love’s face was staring back at me. Literally. It was a Dior-Watch-Video Phone.
Screw rings.
Goals are the concretization of ideals, and ideals are inseparable from the self. The result of any separation of these two results in either extreme of a broken person: pragmatism or so-called) idealism as an either-or.
The profit motive is therefore, wrong for the sake of pleasure or aims apart from rational ideals. Survival for one’s own sake, divorced from objectively derived principles which uphold a larger span of life and existence, is a contradiction in terms and can only be attributed to the life and existence of a lower animal.
A Careerist is someone who has chosen both to trump higher ideals, has chosen to be a chicken without a head. Ideals that act apart from the mere lifespan of oneself but do not necessarily act against the self are the only rational course of action to a human life. The abdictation of selfishness in the proper degree, would also be a contradiction to the properly appropriated, enlightened selfish nature of a human being. i.e. Man does not and should not act without pleasure, so long as pleasure or joy does not trump ideals.
So what of the many many situations that naturally and inevtibly arise in life where one can’t have both?
Aside from this and my main point is that both the profit motive as well as one’s own survival for its own sake is what has made the Careerist forsake all else.
It is important to split hairs to a great degree and not give in to the extremist mistakes of the past, i.e. capitalism vs. communism–in that money qua money as an organizational tool, and a tool that grants pleasure to fuel ideals is not wrong and in fact may be very ethically right.
If you doubt that the life of a Careerist is improper to man’s life—observe the modern effects on those individuals that have chosen such a path:
So what are higher ideals and what delimits them against every form of vague and contrite supposition?
The division between the domestic and the epic shall be sealed.
The division between the domestic and the epic was the beginning of compartmentalized man, the passive consumer industrial life.
The division between the domestic and the epic, or that which involved man in his total, seamless environment was the beginning of the obsolescence of man himself.
Let us not take that road.
The Internet marked the beginning of the end of individual versus collectivity as structure. And ended duality of the West. And ended the ‘The.’ That is why It has always been the only pure chaos that works. A machine, not humans, perfected the hybrid angel of neither and both–capitalism and communism as single entity.
The Total man breathes in all chambers. Compartmental man finds it strange that sometimes he must be ‘well rounded,’ yet accepts without question that he is forever a ‘Team Player.’ -A no mans land between meaning and nothingness.
Another very real equivocation that we deal with on a daily basis is the confounding of the profit motive with personally or collectively held values.
They are two different things.
The profit motive is also not always capitalism.
For instance in Ayn Rand’s view, (as this distinction tends to be absent from conservatism and even society at large) the profit motive and the motive to create and sustain one’s product or service are treated as one in the same. Hank Rearden in Atlas Shrugged even states that all he’s out for is to make money at one point. When, this is wholly incompatible with the rest of his actions which do things very often at ‘sacrifice’ of money for more spiritual and mental gains. This can be viewed in Wall Street 2, where Gordon Gekko realizes the values of human mutual aid in a very interestingly selfish way I think. Funny enough, even in the first one, Gekko’s values do indeed seem to be at one with his primary purpose: making money. But even he contradicts this in illustrating that “You don’t understand, its not the money, its the game.”
A show like Six Feet Under, on the other hand, is set in a philosophical landscape where individuals believe and know that the profit motive is not a valid primary aim for human life and hence this distinction is very well illustrated. The story is set from a small family owned funeral home business that’s struggling against their corporate competitor that is naturally only out to make money.
Very often the profit motive is one in the same with all one’s other values. Very often, it is not. In the times when it is not, one must never sacrifice the mind to the body. In order not to do this, one must understand this distinction. But in order to be a good objectivist in my own sense, one must act at a default that two are one, but at appropriate times when the spiritual and the material conflict, concrete particulars are to be expendable and not the tenets or desires of the mind.
(TANGENT: This is not to be misunderstood to mean that there are no materials that represent the mind’s work in terms of the object of what’s being valued. i.e. A painting purchased for one’s home reflects the conformity of the material with the mind in that one possesses it for spiritual reasons. If one’s painting is threatened to be burned or stolen, one might consider this a horrible thing in that they would not necessarily be able to replace that ‘mental-state,’ they can witness merely by looking above their couch. There are many other materials that do not possess the same congruence of the mental and the physical. These would include creature comforts and things built for more utilitarian use.
So when is it true that one is simply trying to ‘make money’ and living an absent life of hedonistic vacuousness? What drives them really, if I am asserting this to be incompatible to a rational mind? Who am I to say they aren’t living the most ideal life they’ve ever wanted?
Whether or not they are happy in this instance, is not in my view of objective concern since an organism can only value and be happy in terms of what it knows, and hence, happiness in the immediate sense is relative to what we know and are used to, and this is what makes the issue of personal happiness more complex. One is not happy in the higher overarching sense of a rational person if one is consistently limited to one domain. this is too large a subject to go on with here, but I should hyper link this later on and make another blog out of the subject of the margin of relativity in ethics.)
This was certainly true of Howard Roark, in The Fountainhead who would never divided his spiritual and material values.
Another example is in how society has fallen into the same equivocation as Karl Marx in believing that the only alternative to capitalism, is communism when had he had made a distinction between the profit motive and (ethics) values. It didn’t occur to me for instance that a revisionism of capitalism is even possible. i.e. a capitalism where good work is valued above financial gain.
Since we live in a society that is wholesale about the abdication and surrender of all values to the profit motive, it is hence, very easy I think if one tries to know this distinction well.
This is all coming out of my former view that the profit motive is always in some way at one with one’s values since making money is linked directly to survival. What we forget is that there are different kinds of survival. And that there is mental-spiritual survival as well as physical. I offer as evidence to my argument all of the daily teen suicides in which the mental-spiritual mechanism (philosophy) has been abandoned and in its place, now rests the sole reason for living: to make money. And since this is (I think) invalid to human existence being logical and volitional based, the profit motive cannot be the overriding priority of life, merely one of them.
The same alleged dichotomy is said to exist between selfish and selflessness. When, how can anything chosen by the self, be selfless if it is or has been indeed chosen by oneself? Indeed I hold this to be true. However, I believe that altruism as a component to philosophy is a value. That being established, selflessness does not exist, only two different kinds of values and two different resulting kinds of people with different ways of life.
Unlike the Objectivist view and very much like the generic view of objective philosophy and what I think it would hold true in terms of it, I believe that true altruists are people that derive most of their values and existence from social interaction. That being said, I think that altruism as a philosophy for man, is bunk. That is, altruism unlike perhaps republican democracy, cannot possible act as an all-encompassing philosophy. Notice however, that neither can egoism, only objectivism in this general sense.
I therfore believe that altruism is not the most efficient form of human existence when it is treated as the primary arbiter of one’s ethics. I therefore believe that though altruism is and must be a component of a rational enlightened selfishness, it is a disaster as the pilot being that social interaction is merely one dimension of a complete and therefore rational existence.
How many lives is it costing us to live the way we live?
If it were certain or even reasonable to think that a more efficient way of life could save those lives, and if certain people are preventing that way of life from emerging, aren’t they then, murderers?
By eliminating the opposition of these people, through whatever means, are we not then acting in self-defense?
It is no longer merely the vogue to ignore common sense, but now only sufficient to jettison the concept altogether.
I don’t know, there must be some other world that people are talking about when they make certain claims about things which fly in the face of the most commonly repeatable observations.
All I know, is that I must not be living in that world.
There are two phrases I hear from so-called ‘cultured Americans’ all the time:
1) ‘You never know.’
2) ‘Correlation does not equal causality.’
These are the two darling favorites among intellectuals today, though I hear them all the time in ‘mainstream’ society as well.
Abstract studies, mostly the realms of Psychology, Sociology, Philosophy, Economics, etc., that is, the so-called ‘humanities,’ must be studied mostly through repeatable patterning by independent correlation.
This is to be contrasted from the ‘hard’ or so-called ‘positive’ sciences such as Physics, Chemistry or Math, which operate on empiric direct causality more than they do correlation.
Though, true, correlation does not equal causality, it is also true that ‘correlation can mean a probability for causation.’ In other words, there are many instances in which a correlation denotes probability for a cause, often great probability.
It is this probability subjectivism and its consequent ‘new vogue’ have thrown out the window, and it is this probability that is the basis of common sense.
Neal Cormier 