Brainpolice : Environmentalism, Collectivism

Definitions

Brainpolice — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 05:08:00 GMT

So I put together some relatively witty definitions of my terms. If you're not offended by at least one of these, then you are awesome!

Constitutionalism - The belief that a piece of paper drafted and signed by a tiny aristocracy of men is a legitimate perpetual contract that makes the government voluntary on the part of those within a society that did not sign the document and limits the powers of governmental agents for all of eternity.

Minarchism - The belief that there can be a government limited to the protection of rights without violating rights in and of itself; the belief that all goods and services should be provided by the free market yet somehow the principle magically doesn't apply to the defense and arbitration industry.

Democracy - The belief that the government is controled by the people simply because every few years they get to punch a hole in a piece of paper with the names of a few rich and powerful men on it.

Nationalism - The belief that imaginary lines on a map constitute real and meaningful property boundaries; the belief that territories have human traits or personalities of their own; the belief that immigration is the spawn of satan.

Objectivism - The belief that the initation of force is wrong yet somehow it is permissible to arbitrarily invade Iran and Venezuela because "we" have oil interests there; the belief that only romanticism is real art; the belief that you can eliminate taxation and still have a "government".

Political Libertarianism - The belief that the state is inefficient and immoral yet for some strange reason the state is the only viable means by which we can bring about liberty; the belief that democracy is tyrannical yet we must use it to our advantage.

Paleoconservatism - The belief that conservatism was hijacked by leftists and communists and that the "true conservatives" are those who support protectionism and white nationalism; the belief that you're more conservative than those creepy neocons yet somehow you support just about as powerful of a government as they do.

Christianity - The belief that the path to salvation lies with devotion of one's life to a Jewish zombie hippie who is his own father.

Satanism (Laveyan) - The belief in the writtings of a former carnie con artist who haphazardly threw together the ideas of Ayn Rand and Aleister Crowley, incoherant ramblings on the Enochian key and rhetoric to drawn in rebelious teenagers.

Zionism - The belief that because your people were nearly liquidated once, you have an inherent right to liquidate others and forcibly remove them from their own territory.

Religion - The belief that fairy tales from centuries or millenia ago passed down through shaky oral tradition and written down by fallable men are actually absolutely true and codes to live one's life by.

Collectivism - The strange belief that groups have a mind of their own yet their component parts don't.

Altruism - The belief that self-destructive servitude for the sake of others is the greatest virtue; the belief that everyone should mutually be slaves to eachother.

Epistemological Subjectivism - The belief that all truth claims can be reduced to mere personal opinion or preferance, yet somehow this view isn't a mere opinion in and of itself.

Epistemological Nihilism - The belief that there is no such thing as truth, yet somehow it is true that there is no such thing as truth.

Statism - The belief that it is not only moral but necessary for a particular group of individuals to do that which is openly aknowledged as being immoral and not necessary for everyone else to do; moral hypocrisy at the institutional level.

Primitivism - The strange belief that living in a cave or mud-brick hut or as a hermit in the woods is preferable to modern industrial society; the romantisization of long gone tribal and hunter-gatherer societies (in which life was nasty, brutish and short) as peaceful and prosperous utopias.

Welfarism - The belief that the poor can be helped by giving them back a tiny chunk of what was originally stolen from them and keeping them in a state of dependancy on the government; the bribery of the lower classes.

Inflationism - The belief that all problems can be solved by simply printing up more money, despite overwhelming evidence that the arbitrary creation of new money creates problems in and of itself.

Monetarism - The belief held by a bunch of Chicago School economists who think that they are free market proponents but really are quasi-Keynsians.

Anarcho-Syndicalism - The belief that corporations are evil yet somehow corporate dominated, government chartered and cartelized unions are the path towards a free and stateless society.

Hobbesianism - The belief that a highly pessemistic view of human nature that entails war of all against all justifies absolute control by the state, despite the fact that the state is made up of *gasp* human beings.

Radical Environmentalism - The belief that the planet itself has intrinsic value and that human beings are inherently evil parasites on the face of the planet; the modern religion of nature-worshop.

Globalism - The strange belief that large-scale conflict and war would end if only we put all political power in the hands of a singular oligarchal institution with control over everyone in the entire world.

Animal Rights - The belief that non-human entities deserve human rights; the belief that chickens and bumble bees should be equal before the law; the attempt to liberate the unliberatable.

Marxism - The belief that some crazy rich German guy has predicted an inevitable egalitarian future and has mapped out the path towards the liberation of all poor and working people through the work of a benevolent dictatorship.

Racism - The strange belief that a particular roll of the genetic dice entitles and requires one to completely separate themselves from others with another particular roll of the genetic dice; the collectivism of bubble-headed bigots.

Secular Deities and the Problem of Humanism

Brainpolice — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 04:17:00 GMT

An atheist criticism of contemporary secularism

Most atheists and agnostics still have a religious mindset, only they have replaced the formal concept of a god with other concepts. In the absence of faith in an all-knowing and all-loving god outside of the universe, they have substituted faith in other artificial constructs that are considered to be inside of the universe. They rely on faith in an abstraction to be confident in the existance of order and morality. They act as if the non-existance of such abstractions, or at least the lack of them as a rationale, would lead to chaos and immorality. The abstraction worshiped may be the state, the nation, humanity, the planet or environment. These things are treated as if they were spirits or geists and are used as an appeal to authority.

To be sure, abstractions can be sensible and useful insofar as they are derived from reality by reason. But most secular people either do not derive their abstractions from reality or treat certain things that exist in reality as if they were deities. Collective concepts such as nations are treated holistically as if they were sentient entities in and of themselves and are used as an authority for justification of goals and actions. But strictly speaking a nation does not exist, at least in the manner it is being viewed by the nationalist, as an individual entity or actor. And for an example of the adoption of things in reality as deities, radical environmentalists tend to treat the planet itself as if it were a diety with intrinsic value. The planet most certainly does exist in reality, but it does not have intrinsic value and is not a sensible source of morality.

The vast majority of contemporary secularists still believe in things that do not exist, particularly collective constructs. They refer to specific groups of people, such as races and economic classes, as if they existed as singular concious actors. But realistically speaking, there is no race or economic class as a whole that one can point to as being responsible for anything. Nor can an individual reasonably claim to be acting on the behalf of such collective abstractions. "The white race" or "the proletariet class" cannot rationally be used as a reason justifying one’s actions. Racists merely use the abstraction of a race as a diety. Classists merely use the abstraction of a class as a diety. Statists merely use the abstraction of a state as a diety. In all cases, the functionality is the same as a diety. All deities in formal religions, of course, originated from the anthropromorphisization of elements that people interpreted from around them in the world. The contemporary atheist, while they may have abandoned the formal concept of a god, is merely repeating this process in reverse.

It is unfortunate but most atheists are statists, and usually of the "left" variety. I think this is partially due to the cliche way in which contemporary cultural politics is framed in public discourse. Since it is assumed that the "right" is for religious people, the secularist has more of a tendency to flock to the "left". Of course, I reject the notion that the "right" is necessarily any less statist then the "right", but that’s beside the point. The overall point is that while many atheists don’t worshop a god external to the universe, they nonetheless still worshop human beings or leaders or rulers. They treat certain human beings in positions of power as if they were a god anyways. But in my view atheists should reject the state and other such worldly "geists" for some of the exact same reasons that they reject the concept of a god. If you reject the concept of a god, you should have no more reason to treat humans as a god. Human beings should not be treated as gods. Noone deserves to be worshoped. Noone deserves to be a ruler. You have no more reason to consider rulers worthy of your respect then any non-existant deity. While the rulers might actually exist in reality, they nonetheless don’t necessarily deserve your respect any more then a deity.

While I’m not the biggest fan of Max Stirner and I think that he uses very odd language to get his point across, in his writting "The Ego and His Own" he pointed out the problem of secular people deifying either humanity as a whole as an abstraction or certain other human beings in general. Allow me to leave you off with a quote from "The Ego and His Own" that touches on this:

Atheists keep up their scoffing at the higher being, which was also honored under the name of the " highest " or être suprême, and trample in the dust one " proof of his existence " after another, without noticing that they themselves, out of need for a higher being, only annihilate the old to make room for a new. Is " Man " perchance not a higher essence than an individual man, and must not the truths, rights, and ideas which result from the concept of him be honored and—counted sacred, as revelations of this very concept ? For, even though we should abrogate again many a truth that seemed to be made manifest by this concept, yet this would only evince a misunderstanding on our part, without in the least degree harming the sacred concept itself or taking their sacredness from those truths that must " rightly " be looked upon as its revelations. Man reaches beyond every individual man, and yet—though he be " his essence "—is not in fact his essence (which rather would be as single* as he the individual himself), but a general and "higher," yes, for atheists "the highest essence."† And, as the divine revelations were not written down by God with his own hand, but made public through " the Lord’s instruments," so also the new highest essence does not write out its revelations itself, but lets them come to our knowledge through " true men." Only the new essence betrays, in fact, a more spiritual style of conception than the old God, because the latter was still represented in a sort of embodiedness or form, while the undimmed spirituality of the new is retained, and no special material body is fancied for it. And withal it does not lack corporeity, which even takes on a yet more seductive appearance because it looks more natural and mundane and consists in nothing less than in every bodily man,—yes, or outright in " humanity " or " all men." Thereby the spectralness of the spirit in a seemingbody has once again become really solid and popular.

Sacred, then, is the highest essence and everything in which this highest essence reveals or will reveal itself; but hallowed are they who recognize this highest essence together with its own, i. e. together with its revelations. The sacred hallows in turn its reverer, who by his worship becomes himself a saint, as likewise what he does is saintly, a saintly walk, saintly thoughts and actions, imaginations and aspirations, etc.

It is easily understood that the conflict over what is revered as the highest essence can be significant only so long as even the most embittered opponents concede to each other the main point,—that there is a highest essence to which worship or service is due. If one should smile compassionately at the whole struggle over a highest essence, as a Christian might at the war of words between a Shiite and a Sunnite or between a Brahman and a Buddhist, then the hypothesis of a highest essence would be null in his eyes, and the conflict on this basis an idle play. Whether then the one God or the three in one, whether the Lutheran God or the être suprême or not God at all, but "Man," may represent the highest essence, that makes no difference at all for him who denies the highest essence itself, for in his eyes those servants of a highest essence are one and all—pious people, the most raging atheist not less than the most faith-filled Christian.

In the foremost place of the sacred,* then, stands the highest essence and the faith in this essence, our "holy† faith."

-- Max Stirner, The Ego and His Own, Pages 48-50