Appeal of, by, to and for the Reasoning of Ayn Rand

[RascalPuff]

Dear Greg:
Please consider the following invocations and supplication.

"Ethics: a discipline dealing with good and evil and with moral duty, moral principle and practice. A system of right behavior, morals, morality, mores."
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Excerpt from Ayn Rand's 1974 address to the graduating class at West Point Military Academy:

Not all philosophies are evil, though too many of them are, particularly in modern history. On the other hand, at the root of every civilized achievement, such as science, technology, progress, freedom — at the root of every value we enjoy today, including the birth of this country — you will find the achievement of one man, who lived over two thousand years ago: Aristotle.

The best way to study philosophy is to approach it as one approaches a detective story: follow every trail, clue and implication, in order to discover who is a murderer and who is a hero. The criterion of detection is two questions: Why? and How? If a given tenet seems to be true — why? If another tenet seems to be false — why? and how is it being put over? You will not find all the answers immediately, but you will acquire an invaluable characteristic: the ability to think in terms of essentials.
Nothing is given to man automatically, neither knowledge, nor self-confidence, nor inner serenity, nor the right way to use his mind.

In your own profession, in military science, you know the importance of keeping track of the enemy's weapons, strategy and tactics — and of being prepared to counter them. The same is true in philosophy: you have to understand the enemy's ideas and be prepared to refute them, you have to know his basic arguments and be able to blast them.

There is a special reason why you, the future leaders of the United States Army, need to be philosophically armed today. You are the target of a special attack by the Kantian-Hegelian-collectivist establishment that dominates our cultural institutions at present. You are the army of the last semi-free country left on earth, yet you are accused of being a tool of imperialism — and "imperialism" is the name given to the foreign policy of this country, which has never engaged in military conquest and has never profited from the two world wars, which she did not initiate, but entered and won. (It was, incidentally, a foolishly overgenerous policy, which made this country waste her wealth on helping both her allies and her former enemies.) Something called "the military-industrial complex" — which is a myth or worse — is being blamed for all of this country's troubles. Bloody college hoodlums scream demands that R.O.T.C. units be banned from college campuses. Our defense budget is being attacked, denounced and undercut by people who claim that financial priority should be given to ecological rose gardens and to classes in esthetic self-expression for the residents of the slums.
Some of you may be bewildered by this campaign and may be wondering, in good faith, what errors you committed to bring it about. If so, it is urgently important for you to understand the nature of the enemy. You are attacked, not for any errors or flaws, but for your virtues. You are denounced, not for any weaknesses, but for your strength and your competence. You are penalized for being the protectors of the United States. On a lower level of the same issue, a similar kind of campaign is conducted against the police force. Those who seek to destroy this country, seek to disarm it — intellectually and physically. But it is not a mere political issue; politics is not the cause, but the last consequence of philosophical ideas. It is not a communist conspiracy, though some communists may be involved — as maggots cashing in on a disaster they had no power to originate. The motive of the destroyers is not love for communism, but hatred for America. Why hatred? Because America is the living refutation of a Kantian universe.
Today's mawkish concern with and compassion for the feeble, the flawed, the suffering, the guilty, is a cover for the profoundly Kantian hatred of the innocent, the strong, the able, the successful, the virtuous, the confident, the happy. A philosophy out to destroy man's mind is necessarily a philosophy of hatred for man, for man's life, and for every human value. Hatred of the good for being the good, is the hallmark of the twentieth century. This is the enemy you are facing.
A battle of this kind requires special weapons. It has to be fought with a full understanding of your cause, a full confidence in yourself, and the fullest certainty of the moral rightness of both. Only philosophy can provide you with these weapons.

I am confident enough to think that if you accept the importance of philosophy and the task of examining it critically, it is my philosophy that you will come to accept. Formally, I call it Objectivism, but informally I call it a philosophy for living on earth. You will find an explicit presentation of it in my books, particularly in Atlas Shrugged.
In conclusion, allow me to speak in personal terms. This evening means a great deal to me. I feel deeply honored by the opportunity to address you. I can say — not as a patriotic bromide, but with full knowledge of the necessary metaphysical, epistemological, ethical, political and esthetic roots — that the United States of America is the greatest, the noblest and, in its original founding principles, the only moral country in the history of the world. There is a kind of quiet radiance associated in my mind with the name West Point — because you have preserved the spirit of those original founding principles and you are their symbol. There were contradictions and omissions in those principles, and there may be in yours — but I am speaking of the essentials. There may be individuals in your history who did not live up to your highest standards — as there are in every institution — since no institutions and no social system can guarantee the automatic perfection of all its members; this depends on an individual's free will. I am speaking of your standards. You have preserved three qualities of character which were typical at the time of America's birth, but are virtually nonexistent today: earnestness — dedication — a sense of honor. Honor is self-esteem made visible in action.
You have chosen to risk your lives for the defense of this country. I will not insult you by saying that you are dedicated to selfless service — it is not a virtue in my morality. In my morality, the defense of one's country means that a man is personally unwilling to live as the conquered slave of any enemy, foreign or domestic. This is an enormous virtue. Some of you may not be consciously aware of it. I want to help you to realize it.

The army of a free country has a great responsibility: the right to use force, but not as an instrument of compulsion and brute conquest — as the armies of other countries have done in their histories — only as an instrument of a free nation's self-defense, which means: the defense of a man's individual rights. The principle of using force only in retaliation against those who initiate its use, is the principle of subordinating might to right. The highest integrity and sense of honor are required for such a task.

West Point has given America a long line of heroes, known and unknown. You, this year's graduates, have a glorious tradition to carry on — which I admire profoundly, not because it is a tradition, but because it is glorious.
Since I came from a country guilty of the worst tyranny on earth, I am particularly able to appreciate the meaning, the greatness and the supreme value of that which you are defending. So, in my own name: Thank you.
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http://www.serendipity.li/waco.html.

The reader will find that the firstly provided (above) url results in the notice:
"This Account Has Been Suspended".
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In order to access the suspended information the following url accompanies the 'cache'when you Google: 'Waco Massacre'.

Philosophical conscience and sense of moral duty obliged me to submit this post as a tentative beginning for a thread.
http://74.125.155.132/search?q=cache...&ct=clnk&gl=us
Best regards to you and yours, I am respectfully,
- Kai

[Graybeard]

Lloyd has posted this also in 'East V West'

greg

[RascalPuff]

Lloyd has posted this also in 'East V West'

greg

I am aware of that.
It has to do with the responsibility of authority (what Rand includes in the intention of her address), contrasted with the abuse of power (what I include in the intention of my application of Rand's address).

[Graybeard]

I don't see what it has to do with TOE ??

greg ??

[labelwench]

The spread of evil is the symptom of a vacuum. whenever evil wins, it is only by default: by the moral failure of those who evade the fact that there can be no compromise on basic principles.

Ayn Rand, Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, 1966

This quote will serve both of you, lol.......

A very interesting woman, Ayn Rand. Her book, Atlas Shrugged, is still immensely popular.

[RascalPuff]

I don't see what it has to do with TOE ??

greg ??

'Ethics' are not relevant to ToE?

Request that you defer to the accompanying thread: "Ayn Rand's 'Objectivism': reconsidered."
Please note the information in the provided url.
Best regards,
- Kai

[RascalPuff]

The 'spin doctors' have converted, for example, a case of high treason and murder, regarding the unsolved presidential assassination, into a matter of 'politics'. Indeed, 'conspiracy theorists' have been qualified as such and now the interest that any citizen may take in the specifics of the high treason and murder have been converted to a well worn category of derision against them.

Rhetorical question follows: are you familiar with former CIA Director, Allen Dulles', 'Operation Mockingbird'? It's the placement of bias journalists in key positions throughout the mass American printed and electronics media, and the 'recruitment' - by way of pay offs - of the journalistic elements that are already in place. It's been installed since 1953, six years after the formerly miitary OSS (as you probably know), became the CIA. Efforts to determine who murdered the president are popularly categorized as inititiation of ('kooky radical infested') undesirable 'political' issues; instead of legal and ethical American constitutional Duty (to protect the Constitution from all her foreign or domestic enemies, whomsoever).

Private investigation and political science, by any other name...

I have studied the case of the murder of the President of the United States since it occurred. I hesitate to publish any of it, due to the above described stigmas since attached to any such efforts.

[RascalPuff]

The 'spin doctors' have converted, for example, a case of high treason and murder, regarding the unsolved presidential assassination, into a matter of 'politics'. Indeed, 'conspiracy theorists' have been qualified as such and now the interest that any citizen may take in the specifics of the high treason and murder have been converted to a well worn category of derision against them.

Rhetorical question follows: are you familiar with former CIA Director, Allen Dulles', 'Operation Mockingbird'? It's the placement of bias journalists in key positions throughout the mass American printed and electronics media, and the 'recruitment' - by way of pay offs - of the journalistic elements that are already in place. It's been installed since 1953, six years after the formerly miitary OSS (as you probably know), became the CIA. Efforts to determine who murdered the president are popularly categorized as inititiation of ('kooky radical infested') undesirable 'political' issues; instead of legal and ethical American constitutional Duty (to protect the Constitution from all her foreign or domestic enemies, whomsoever).

Private investigation and political science, by any other name...

I have studied the case of the murder of the President of the United States since it occurred. I hesitate to publish any of it, due to the above described stigmas since attached to any such efforts.

Oliver Stone may be paranoid, but that doesn't mean they're not out to get him. ''Every paper and magazine in America,'' the director maintains, ''has devoted more space in the last three months to attacking my attack on the Warren Commission than they devoted in the previous 28 years to examining the Warren Commission.''
Stone is speaking with his customary hyperbole, but he does have a point. JFK, his three-hour, high-voltage inquisition into the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy, is the most controversial movie in recent history. Indeed, it was on its way to that distinction while the cameras were still rolling. Starting last May, when, on the basis of a first-draft script, The Washington Postskewered the film in an article titled ''Dallas in Wonderland,'' almost every major newspaper, magazine, and TV pundit has taken a swing at Stone's vision of a vast conspiracy behind the Kennedy assassination. Since JFK was released by Warner Bros. on Dec. 20, the fire storm has intensified, The New York Times alone has found room for at least 20 articles on the picture.
In Stone's view, there is something unfair, even insidious, about these attacks. He isn't above hinting that his critics are part of what he believes is a nearly three-decade cover-up. ''My question is, why are they so scared of this movie?'' he asks. ''What are they defending?'' In endless interviews, he has charged that ''the Establishment'' is trying to quash his film.
- Entertainment Weekly, 17 January 1992

[austintorn@aol.com]

It's a CIA secret.

Don't tell that I told.