Mob Rule

 

Anarchist private defense agencies are inherently tyrannical. They’re fundamentally criminal organizations which coerce third parties and operate outside the law. By their nature they attack people and property. These mafia agencies have huge incentives to violate rights and few to protect them. Virtually nothing can stop their tyranny and evil outside of a libertarian state. Certainly not some farcical “free market in government”.

As it performs its job (sic), a lawless private defense agency strides the land looking for plunder and victims. If it spots a defenseless innocent walking down the street, it stops them and says “You robbed my client” or “you assaulted my customer”. In the name of a fraudulent justice, the innocent victim is coerced into paying a huge fine. Altho some money might go to the employer, the mafioso PDA collects the lion’s share of the booty. Hence the criminal gang is motivated to attack and rob people and property as much as possible, no matter how innocent they may be.

The anarchic PDA almost certainly will even steal from its own clients. It will routinely hike its fees sky-high and say “Pay up – or else.” Since the lawless PDA is answerable to no libertarian authority or legal control, and since it possesses almost all the guns, while its customers possess almost all the money, the result of the gangster PDA’s “request” for extra “protection money” is obvious.

It’s laughable to think the customer can somehow fire or escape the PDA. The mobster protection racket will almost surely not allow this to happen. They’ll probably just go ahead and steal all the client’s wealth. Who’s going to stop them?

The lawfree defense agency will also quite possibly jail them too. They’ll hold them hostage and force them to contact their rich family and friends in order to pay the ransom. The only alternative to this dismal fate is to hire an even more powerful PDA – to protect and free the customer from the first. But this just postpones the inevitable.

Anarchist PDAs are naturally and inherently cannibalistic. They feast upon society’s defenseless and innocent. But they feast upon their clients too.

Your Truth

 

No-one loves the truth. No-one seeks the truth. Everyone believes in something stupid and evil. Everyone believes in something they know to be wrong.

Everyone has a petty, nasty, political agenda. Everyone has a petty, nasty, ridiculous, repellent, personal agenda. When pretending to follow and promote the truth, everybody maintains an extreme and absolute loyalty to some belief or ideal which is absurd, depraved, and utterly erroneous. If it wasn’t absurd, depraved, and erroneous, they wouldn’t believe in it in the first place! They wouldn’t want to and nobody could make them. Objective and absolute truth is not for them.

Such is mankind – currently and historically. Such is all of you.

But not me. I’m different. I’m better than you.

I’m a complete radical. I’m a pure liberal. So I do love and seek the truth. I want it – not to serve or better mankind, obviously – for my own sake. I want it to enhance my life – to make me greater and happier. I don’t have the bizarre and twisted motives of yourselves.

And it isn’t my truth that I search for – whatever that might be. It’s the truth. I hunt and hope for the true truth – an activity which none of you can even imagine.

That's the way it is, monkey-boys.

Psychological Devastation

 

Ayn Rand did a tremendous amount of psychological damage to the world. Or at least to her followers. She turned them into mindless drones and religious dogmatists.

Her philosophical writings overflowed with psychologizing and moralizing. Readers who didn't agree with her radical, new theories before she presented them were damned as personally corrupt and morally low. This gratuitous judgmentalism is a disrespectful, abusive, bullying, malicious way to treat people. 

To give the devil her due, she literally and sincerely advocated reasonism, individualism, rational independent judgment, and fearless free thought. But not when it came to her personally. There she wanted everyone to defer to her authority and take her views on faith. She truly thought she earned and deserved this.

Those who thought otherwise – however much they believed in her philosophy and were friendly to her personally – were ferociously damned. They were labeled intellectually dishonest and personally disloyal. They were often publicly abominated as an enemy to her philosophy and herself. And they were furiously purged and fanatically excommunicated for all time.

No-one ever came back from these purges and excommunications. No-one was ever forgiven for the sins they didn’t commit. Ayn Rand never really changed her mind about anyone. She knew of no “honest critics” of herself, neither philosophically nor personally. And in her adulthood she couldn’t recall a single person she ever seriously misjudged or wronged.

Almost all of her followers today repeat her sins exactly. Some of these malicious and bizarre robots, like Leonard Peikoff, Harry Binswanger, and Peter Schwartz, do so to an extreme degree. Not much discussion and debate is allowed in the world of Ayn Rand. Not many free and open exchanges of views take place.

Rand wrote great novels and magnificent philosophical essays. She entertained, inspired, educated, and uplifted the world fantastically. But she did – and continues to do – a lot of psychological damage. With the way Ayn Rand writes, talks, and approaches intellectual issues, she warps your mind, stunts your spirit, and blackens your soul.

Gibberish

It’s genuinely sad and harmful for humanity that intellectual and philosophical nonsense is considered seriously, and not just abstractly. Historically and currently, strong thinkers are often depraved and destructive. They frequently spout obvious irrationality which then gets taken seriously and is considered as possibly true. As Cicero noted two thousand years ago: "There is nothing so absurd but some philosopher has said it."

So many important and powerful intellectuals and philosophers say that the universe doesn’t exist or its nature is unknowable. They say that "god" does exist and his nature is knowable. They say mankind can’t soundly and surely refute Zeno’s paradoxes, Plato’s forms, Berkeley’s godly vision, or Kant’s things-in-themselves. They say Einstein’s relativity, Heisenberg’s uncertainty, and Gödel’s incompleteness prove that reason and science are limited and flawed. They’re weak and invalid tools of knowledge.

Many intellectuals say that particles which are quantumly entangled can transfer information faster than light, and that Schrodinger’s cat is simultaneously alive and dead. They say that there are many proofs that god exists and that the universe is intelligently designed, while there are many proofs that free will doesn’t exist and that the universe is completely deterministic.

Some of this vacuity and fatuity is worth thinking about to a certain extent. Reflecting on these issues theoretically, and rationally contemplating them in the abstract, may well be worth while. It might repay your dutiful and unpleasant effort by expanding your mind or deepening your understanding on issues of complexity, trickery, subtlety, and nuance. Studying such issues may be helpful and enlightening challenges to work with – even if all the claims are false, or misleading, or don’t go anywhere, or lead you badly astray.

But it’s not right for smart or good people to publicly argue that these nonsensical, irrational claims are somehow true or valid. As a human being it isn’t right to embrace or teach that which is intellectually, morally, or spiritually bankrupt.

This destroys reason and science. It devastates intellectualism and philosophy. It badly damages the search for truth and goodness.

When you put this rubbish and gibberish into the individual’s head – to confuse, confound, warp, and cripple him – you cause him to suffer badly. You poison his mind, break his heart, and blacken his soul.

Society suffers and declines too. The more truly and deeply people believe this nonsense and irrationality, the more the individual and all of mankind are made mentally incompetent and nonfunctional. Cultural wealth, social cooperation, and individual happiness die.

Icing on the Cake

 

Wealth, fame, and power are great hallmarks of success. But by themselves they don’t provide pleasure or happiness. To gain these, you essentially need to work hard and smart. Your life needs to be marked by continuous virtue and accomplishments. To feel strong pleasure and experience deep happiness, you need character and achievement. You need to be in some important sense great. But – there’s no substitute for money, renown, and influence. If you have significant amounts of these three, you add solidly to your pleasure and happiness.