Luckily that error–the error upon which we’ve built all societies so far–is much easier to see than the one addressed in “Meet the Third Thing.” However, because the two are related, I’ve decided to deal with first things first, and offer some comments on what I believe is the lesson of “Meet the Third Thing.” My analysis of this has not been endorsed, nor even verified as correct, by Mr. Swann.

A man is a rational, volitional being. This means that he is driven by his conceptual faculty. With the ability to abstract comes the ability to conceptualize that which isn’t. We can imagine things that never existed and never will…balls rolling uphill, unicorns, a Heaven with dancing virgins. You name it, and we can imagine it.

Among the more relevant things we can conceptualize are choices. We have the ability to imagine various courses of action and various likely outcomes from those actions. Indeed, once we raise ourselves above the level of purely perceptual animals seeking only physical survival, our ability to conceptualize choices is all we have. It is the cause of each and every action we take. There may be underlying instincts, and we are not immune from the animal drive to survive, but our exclusive causal factor is our own conceptualizing mind and the choices for which that mind decides to opt. We may do much of it out of habit, but it’s still volitionally motivated. A person who has no volition does not live as a person. We say “man qua man” and this means an animal driven by his conceptual, volitional faculty.

Ayn Rand addressed most of this. When officialobjectivism.com gets going, we’ll look at many of the things she said about this fundamental identification. But for now, we’re dealing with the misidentification most of us make, as we go about dealing with others. Like all mistakes, it takes the general form of “identifying a thing as it is not.”

A blade of grass is a very simple thing. Besides our advanced knowledge of the physics of its life-cycle, we also understand what it is and what it does. It’s a blade of grass; duh. However, we may treat a blade of grass as anything we wish. We could treat it as a pet…caring for it, protecting it, loving it. There is no limit to how we may treat a blade of grass, all the way up to and including taking it as God Himself. Like all things, this is a choice and there is not an entity in the universe that can literally stop you from treating a blade of grass as anything you wish. This is the wonder of volition.

But the point is obvious here. No matter how any person chooses to treat a blade of grass, it’s still just a blade of grass. It would be sort of silly to treat a blade of grass as a pet, let alone as some sort of god. Our treating something as what we choose, does not make it other than it is. This is the fundamental distinction between “X” and “thinking of X,” which I addressed early on, over on the Rational side.

If we pray to the blade of grass, we treat it as if it were a god. If we care for it as a pet, we are acting as if it were an animal that gives us comfort and loyalty. A horse is not a cow, but if you’re hungry enough, you will treat the horse as if it were a cow, slaughter it and live off the food it provides. This did not transform the horse into a cow, but you made a choice as if it were. We call this “justification,” and there could be various justifications for doing this, all of them driven by the underlying decision, “I wish to live, so I must treat the horse as if it were a cow.”

Now what of other humans? Ultimately, it is their nature that they too are volitional creatures, just like yourself. You can treat them as if they weren’t, but you won’t have changed them because of that decision…not any more than you changed the blade of grass or the horse. You can say you “justify” that decision, but it’s not a justification built of rational identification. Notice that the horse will end up providing you food, but the blade of grass won’t send you to Heaven. This is a very important distinction–the horse may not be a cow, but he did end up serving the purpose which you intended. The blade of grass did not end up serving the purpose for which you intended. We may call the first a sort of “rational justification,” while the second is an “irrational justification.” IOW, the blade of grass never provides what you wish, while in the extreme circumstance the horse does.

The fundamental decision you have to make with regard to other humans, is whether their presence helps you live, or inhibits you from living. The answer to this is, “They help.” You are better off living with the love and production of other humans, than without those things. Other rational beings are conducive to your own happiness—they offer rationality thereby increasing your own wisdom, as well as providing values for you to enjoy.

Many people like to say, “We are social creatures,” but that’s not technically correct. We are independent creatures who choose to interact socially. This is as opposed to strictly “social organisms” like ants or bees, that literally won’t live unless they all perform their respective tasks. Humans will live, even alone. We choose to be social, and that’s why it’s so critically important to correctly identify the others with whom we choose to live.

And ultimately, each and every one of those other humans is exactly like yourself in this respect—they too are conceptual, volitional creaturs driven exclusively by their own decisions. This is not the time to go into excruciating detail why the proper way to deal with a conceptual, volitional creature is through persuasion and not physical coercion. If it’s not readily obvious to you, then you can read Rand or just figure it out for yourself. I’ll address this very important issue, but not presently.

So here’s the point I take away from “Meet the Third Thing.” When you deal with another person coercively, you are treating him as he is not. Period. At this stage, I’m not talking about justice or self-interest or capitalism or any of that. I am speaking exclusively of the creature’s nature. The blade of grass is a blade of grass, the horse is a horse and the person is a person. There can be no rational justification for treating the blade of grass as a pet, because it won’t return to you the values that a pet does. You can still do it, of course, but it wouldn’t be rational. If you treat the horse as a cow, this can be rationally justified if you’re hungry enough.

So what of treating a person as a non-person? The simple fact is that no matter what the situation, the person will have more to offer you if you treat him as a person than if you don’t. Naturally there are very extreme situations where it might be justified to treat the person as a cow or, if the person chooses to act like a cougar, as a cougar. But absent these extreme situations, it is never justifiable to treat a person as a non-person. Simply put, he will always have more to offer you as a person than anything else; hence it is rational to treat him as a person.

Everything else is intellectual muck. We believe that a person acting other than we think he should, “deserves” to be treated as a non-person. This is false…he may deserve many bad things, but his poor behavior is not cause for you to treat things as they are not. Another person’s irrationality is never justification for your own irrationality. There is no such thing as “justification for irrationality;” the very utterance is oxymoronic. And ultimately, as Aristotle noted long ago, the hallmark of rationality is treating things as they are, not as they are not.

This POV is frequently misunderstood as pacifism, since the assumption is that the rational person would never use force against an entity whose nature he believes precludes coercion. This is false, and one has nothing to do with the other. Pacifism is itself a philosophy, which claims that the actor should never use force, period. Naturally this is not a rational take on the matter since if you’re never willing to use force, it’s only a matter of time until some nitwit comes along to set you down and take your stuff.

Egoism is not pacifism. Egoism is the understanding that your own life is the highest value you can rationally have, and that nothing can trump it except what you choose. An imbecile who threatens your life or property is destructive to that highest value, of course, and so must be dealt with. The thing is, this is an extraordinarily rare occurence and is not found in normal day-to-day living. What is found in normal day-to-day living, almost ubiquitously, is the idea that if a person chooses to act irrationality and not go along with the simplest standard of human decency, that he therefore deserves to be treated as other than a rational animal. This is seriously false from a genuinely egoist perspective. The only thing that could justify your treating him as other than a rational being, is an immediate real-time threat to your very existence or property. Otherwise, he remains as he is, a rational being who is choosing not to be very rational. His choice of this, is not cause for you to treat him as he is not. There is never a justified cause for treating things as they are not, even as there can theoretically be a justified cause for putting him down anyway. The two situations are not similar, and it’s a fundamental error to believe that with a series of words and/or thoughts, we can make them so. If you eat the horse, you are not really misidentifying the horse; you’re just making an exception in how you normally deal with horses. You treat it “as if” if were a cow, but you don’t convince yourself that it’s really a cow.

As we shall see as we move along, this is a recurring error among people…the belief that a series of “arguments” can literally change that which is, to that which it is not. For the moment, I rest only upon the point that a person is a person, and a person is ultimately a volitional being. As Greg writes, to believe otherwise is to stipulate some sort of “Third Thing” present, which transforms each of you into something that neither of you actually are. Obviously this is a fantasy, and it’s a fantasy that has led many men to act irrationally…primarily on the basis that if they can imagine what justice is, then they can therefore mete it out. As we’ll discover later, this is not the nature of justice and another man’s irrationality is not cause for your own irrationality.

In and of itself, this particular error would not be sufficient to cause the damage that it has. The problem occurs because of some of the irrational conclusions that derive from it, primarily the fallacy of Tu Quoque. This shall be dealt with in the near future, since it is this which has taken our societies down a road from which there seems no return. Once you believe that there is something–anything–which transforms other people into something other than people, then you have abandoned rationality. And once you abandon rationality, then you have chosen to take yourself out of the realm of “being human” and using your mind properly. It is this which is killing people, not the occasional thug or even statist who is ostensively the problem.

[...]

“Meet the Third Thing, gentle readers. A decidedly behind-the-scenes political operative. The man behind the curtain, so to speak.

“When I come to arrest you, there is only you and only me. I am like you and you are like me. We are equal as things, as equal as two rocks or two cans of soup or two kittens. You can jump a little higher than me and I can run a little faster than you, but these are merely differences of degree. There is no power or potential that you have that I lack, nor do I have any special capacities that you do not have. We are equal. If I have the right or power or capacity to do something to you, then you have the right or power or capacity to do it right back to me.

“So how is it that I have the right to use pain compliance on you and submit you to a cavity search, but you lack the right to do those same things right back to me?

“For this brutality to be justified, there must be some Third Thing present with us. There is you and there is me, and if we are alone, then we are equal. If we are not equal, then there must be a Third Thing in the room that confers upon me super-human powers and consigns you to sub-human responses.

“Before, there were two rocks, and they differed in color, weight, dimension, density and mineral content, but they were equally rocks. Neither rock was more rock than the other. They differed in measurement, but they were equal in their rockness. And then the Third Thing appeared on the scene and suddenly one rock was ultra-rock and the other became infra-rock.

“And where the gang-banger steals and sells your car and justifies it by pointing his AR-15 at your surrender reflex, the statesman steals and sells your car and justifies it by reference to magic or mysticism or undiluted insanity. The gangster acts like a savage, like a two-legged animal. But the statesman attempts to act like a god, like Dionysus drunk on the nectar of his own imaginary righteousness.

“This is important, perhaps the most important thing I have to say. We are not talking about what one can do; the gang-bangers are walking object lessons in what human beings are capable of doing. We are not talking about what one ought to do, not here. What we are talking about is what one can justify doing, the set of actions one can rationally defend taking with respect to other people. We are talking not just about human social interaction but about human social interaction that can be rigorously defended in persuasively valid terms.

“In other words, we are talking not merely about politics but about political philosophy. We are ignoring the savages and the gang-bangers; their political philosophy is nothing more than ‘might makes right’. We concern ourselves here with those political philosophies that presume to reject, to rise above ‘might makes right’. We concern ourselves with you gentle libertarian, with the charming little bungalow you’ve made into your ideological home.

“‘Might makes right’ is a crude attempt at a philosophical distinction. The argument runs, ‘I have martial prowess or superior weaponry, therefore I am different from you. My domination of you is justified, just as I am justified in the dominion I claim over my horse. Because I have the ability to inflict pain upon you, you are no more than a beast to me, without liberty, without rights, without autonomy. You are a thing, an extension of me, and I am fundamentally distinct from you.’

“We might wish that savages spoke and reasoned that well, but that’s what they’re saying, however incoherently. The distinction itself is idiotic; a human being is not changed into another thing by acquisition of a skill or possession of a chattel. And it’s worth pointing out that the savage himself does not believe it. He wouldn’t offer up his incoherent explanation if he did. We don’t dominate horses in the same way we dominate non-living things, but we do dominate them to a degree, and we don’t bother to rationalize our domination to them. The savage must declare that you are a beast because he knows you aren’t.

“And the statesman, although he is marginally more coherent, also makes philosophical distinctions that do not bear up to close scrutiny. For example, he may say, ‘My domination of you is justified because you have consented to it in every particular.’ He will hold up his empty hand and say, ‘See here? See this Social Contract? You’re committed. You’re obliged. I have your consent.’ Meet the Third Thing.

“Or he might say, ‘My domination of you is justified because I have been selected by god himself to guard you from the exponents of evil who falsely claim to have been selected by god himself to protect you from me. It’s the Divine Right of Kings.’ Meet the Third Thing.

“Or he might say, ‘My domination of you is the will of the people, the little people, the common people. The weak. The halt. The lame. The children…’ Meet the Third Thing.

“The zeitgeist, the spirt of the times? Meet the Third Thing.

“The practical benefit of uniform law? Meet the Third Thing.

“The individual’s natural right not to be injured? Meet the Third Thing.

“The consent of the governed? Meet the Third Thing.

“The purity of the race? Meet the Third Thing.

“The inevitability of one-world Socialism? Meet the Third Thing.

“And we can traverse our way down the tree of philosophy until we arrive at a pitiful little proto-statesman with a shaman by his side. He will tell us with a devout solemnity that he is justified in claiming domination over us because he alone possesses the sacred ceremonial amulet. Meet the Third Thing in its undiluted form…

“For the Third Thing, ultimately, is insanity defended with devout solemnity. There is no Social Contract imagined by you but binding upon me. There is no Divine Right of Kings. Every person is possessed of free will, but there is no accumulation of that will, and the voluntary support of many or even most people does not justify anything. There is no zeitgeist. Neither your convenience nor mine justifies our domination of our neighbors, or each other. You have the capacity to act in self-defense, but it absurd to argue that this somehow prevents future injuries. ‘The consent of the governed’ could only have meaning if the consent were explicit and unanimous. The ‘race’ has no rights. Neither Socialism nor any other creation of the mind of man is inevitable. And, finally, the sacred ceremonial amulet is just a rock suspended from a rope.

“These are all products of the imagination. They are wholly products of the imagination. They are all extremely elaborate, often very confusing, pantomimes of philosophy. They all concede that ‘might makes right’ is not a philosophical argument; it is brutal, unsavory, and, as above, idiotic. And the question that each one of these creeds — and many others — is an answer to is this:

“How can we dominate people without claiming that ‘might makes right’?

“It’s a good question. A noble question. And the people who have striven to answer it have been, for the most part, proud and noble people. The answers they’ve come up with have been demented, of course, but that’s unavoidable: the question is demented.

“When the gang-banger invites you to stand on the curb while he drives away in your car, ‘might makes right’ is his only justification. And when the cop invites you to grab your ankles so he can search your rectum for contraband, ‘might makes right’ is his only justification. No one volunteers to be pushed around against his will. ‘Volunteers against his will’ is a meaningless construct. And ‘dominate without ‘might makes right’’ is also a meaningless construct.

“The question the political philosophers don’t ask is: how can we elicit the cooperation of people? They don’t ask it because the answer is obvious; we all know how to elicit cooperation. The problem, they say, is: what about people who will not cooperate?

“Well, what about them? We’re not asking whether or not one has the right to retaliate — respond ‘like for like’ — to injury. We’re asking whether or not you have the right or power or capacity to dominate me, to break me like you’d break your horse to saddle. If you don’t, then we must either find a way to cooperate or part company. But if you do, then we are not the same kind of thing, we are as unlike as you and your horse, and ‘might makes right’ is the only philosophical justification for your actions.

“This is vital: one person cannot dominate another without deploying superior martial prowess, superior weaponry, or both. To dominate means to rule by force. There is no other way to rule, and there is no justification for ruling by force except force, ‘might makes right’. The Third Thing is the means by which philosophical proto-savages attempt to convince themselves that brutality-for-a-cause is in some meaningful way distinct from ordinary random brutality.

“The Third Thing is the thing that stands between the political philosopher and his own recognition that he has not renounced savagery, he has merely rationalized it.

“The Third Thing is the things that, you say, joins the two of us when you claim that you are right to do to me what you would insist would be wrong for me to do right back to you. If you can arrest me but I can’t arrest you, there must be some distinction between us, something that makes us not equal, and that distinction is the Third Thing. If you can imprison me but I can’t imprison you, there must be some distinction between us, something that makes us not equal, and that distinction is the Third Thing. If you can punish me — for my own good, to teach me a lesson — but I can’t punish you, there must be some distinction between us, something that makes us not equal, and that distinction is the Third Thing.

“In order for you to claim any justification for your domination of me, you must insist that there is some distinction between us, some right or power or capacity that makes you super-human and renders me sub-human. This distinguishing property, whatever it is, is the Third Thing.

“And, whatever it is, it is imaginary. It does not exist. We are equal. You are what I am and I am what you are. We are equally human, the same kind of thing, and there is no basis in evidence for claiming that we are in some way distinct.

“And where the savage says, ‘I am distinct from you because I have a weapon in my hand,’ the political philosopher insists, ‘I am distinct from you because I have nothing in my hand, nothing but an unreadable book and a sacred amulet.’

“The Third Thing does not exist. And because it does not exist, there is no defensible creed of the domination of one person by another. You can try to dominate me, but you cannot argue that you are justified in trying to dominate me. There can be no such thing as the just domination of one person by another.

“And our charming little bungalow turns out to be a house of cards.

“And our pithy little lectures turn out to be carefully crafted nonsense.

“And we have taken on that naked savagery and fought it by wrapping it in the raiments of our impenetrable verbiage. And the emperor is not merely naked, the emperor is just another naked savage.

“And I have seen the enemy and I’ll be damned if it isn’t us…

“Ayn Rand said that libertarianism leads to anarchism, and this is correct. If we adopt her own admonition that one must never initiate violence, we must conclude that every form of government is invalid, since every form of government is a coercive monopoly on the dispute resolution business. If instead we argue that each person owns his own life, then we must conclude that every form of government is invalid, since every sort of domination of one person by another is an attempt to express ownership — rightful use or disposal — of the person being dominated. And if we wander into my corner of the universe, Planet Third Thing, we discover that every form of government is invalid, because every form of government is validated in imagination alone, in dementia.

“Kind of a problem if, like Rand, like Nozick, you want a state at any price.

“But Aristotle said we must follow the argument wherever it leads. Well, what if we do? We arrive at anarchism, of course. Not for any affirmative reason, but simply by the process of elimination. There are good, sound, well-reasoned arguments for affirming anarchism as a political philosophy, but they’re beyond the scope of this essay. But we have kicked the stilts out from under two millennia of political philosophers, and their living exponents are probably not very happy about it. We have shown that their basic question — how can we dominate people without claiming that ‘might makes right’? — is nonsense. What can we say to them when they demand to know, as they will, ‘Well then, what does make sense?’

“What does make sense…?

“Rationality makes sense, of course. Claiming to have a different identity as a thing because you carry a weapon makes no sense, obviously, and there is no end of snickering to be had at the expense of those stupid, stupid savages. But claiming to have a different identity as a thing because you uphold a peculiar idea or carry a ceremonial totem also makes no sense, and we refrain from snickering only because the advocates of these sorts of positions are barely visible behind the fog of their rationalizations. But what makes sense, obviously, is acting upon things according to their own true, unchangeable identity.

“Anything else is insanity, and it is a testament to the foggy facility of the political philosophers that it is necessary to say that it is insane to attempt to act toward human beings as if they were something else.

“I am discrete, separate, detached. I am not a part of you and you are not a part of me and we are not together parts of something else. I am free. My actions are initiated and controlled solely from within my body, operating on the direction of my mind. There is no circumstance by which you or anyone else can assert control over my mind or my body. I am sovereign. My body is a dominion over which I alone am master — not as a matter of right, but as a matter of physiology. I have the capacity to defend my life from any peril that presents itself, and there is nothing you can do, short of killing me, to deny me the power of self-defense. To dominate me, you must use force, and your use of force is your admission that I am not your property to do with as you choose.

“And you are just like me. We are alike as things, equal in our separateness, our freedom, our sovereignty. We are alike in our equal possession of the power to act in self-defense, and we are alike in our ability to comprehend that we have this power. Considered as things, we are the same thing, and there can be no rational basis for concluding otherwise. We can conclude differently, or pretend that we have, but we cannot justify such a conclusion in reason.

“We cannot dominate people without claiming that ‘might makes right’. And we cannot rationally claim that ‘might makes right’. Ergo, we cannot in justice attempt to dominate each other. We can do it, if we want, but cannot justify it in reason.

“Trying to justify domination, trying to rationalize it with the Third Thing, has unhappy consequences, as we can see all around us. Again it is absurd that we need to say this, but we do: operating from insane premises results in insane conclusions. It’s not the gang-banger with the AR-15 who is crazy, it’s the political philosopher who stands on the curb sputtering, ‘Should not! Must not! Cannot!’

“Does.

“What doesn’t make sense is striving to contrive ever more absurd Rube Goldberg machines, senseless contraptions that enable you to drive away in my car but forbid the gang-banger to drive away in yours, all without anybody getting hurt. You can do this if you want, but it should surprise no one that the trousered, inhibited savages will lose every battle to the uninhibited, naked savages.

“And what does make sense is to renounce savagery. This is what the political philosophers has been aiming at for 2,000 years, and it’s no stain on them that they missed a target they couldn’t see and could barely imagine. Civilization is the slow march to the recognition that each of us is separate from all the others, that each of us is free from all the others, and that each of us is sovereign to rule over our own lives. We have risen from the animals, and the animals have never tired of demanding that we rejoin them. But we are human — unique among creatures — as we leave the savagery of the animals behind us.

“What makes sense is to acknowledge that we cannot actually dominate one another, that we stare tragedy right in the face whenever we try to dominate one another. What makes sense is to devote our incomparable minds to discovering ways to live together without attempts at domination. We can do this, of course. We already do it almost all of the time. And I can name dozens of simple and effective non-coercive ways of dealing with people who insist on attempting domination. That is also beyond the scope of this essay, but it is sufficient to say that it is possible for human beings to find ways to get along without pushing each other around at gunpoint. And again this is an absurdity that is necessary to state: we can live without killing each other. In peace, in harmony, in prosperity, in splendor…

The bay-trees in our country are all wither’d
And meteors fright the fixed stars of heaven;
The pale-faced moon looks bloody on the earth
And lean-look’d prophets whisper fearful change;
Rich men look sad and ruffians dance and leap,
The one in fear to lose what they enjoy,
The other to enjoy by rage and war:
These signs forerun the death or fall of kings.William Shakespeare, Richard II

“We rub our eyes at the dawn of a new millennium, and for this reason if for no other, people are awake to the possibility of new and better ideas. We have them — a nearly perfect roadmap to civilization — and we are skilled at conveying our philosophy.

“Our appeal as libertarians to the rest of the political spectrum is our immense consistency. They see us from a distance, and we appear to them to be monolithic in our advocacy of human liberty. Well we are, almost. But that little bit of corruption, that tiny little claim that force can sometimes be justified, will in due course destroy the rest. Just like the last time.

“Savagery does not make sense. The proto-savagery called statesmanship does not make sense. What makes sense is the renunciation of savagery, the renunciation of ‘might makes right’.

“We can convince them of what is right. Probably we can’t convert them by the busload, but they are listening to us, and they never were before. We can tell them about the Third Thing all day and all night, describe it in perfect and loving detail, and in short order they will stop listening; they’ve heard it all before, after all, and the competing brands of imaginary amulets are kinder, gentler and more forgiving. Or we can strive to convince them of what is really right. But first we have to discover it.”

Okay, not everyone is going to agree with everything. There are even some who say it’s debatable whether or not we’re even here. Joke’s on you…you pay some of them to teach your kids!

Still, everyone recognizes that everyone else has a Right to live. We don’t need to debate what a Right is, since it turns out that it’s only the recognition anyway. I am speaking, as always, of the class of humans. You acknowledge that the next guy, and everyone else in the absence of any direct cause to the contrary, ought to be allowed to live, at least as far as you’re concerned.

So let’s move on. Pretty much everyone–everyone normal and decent, that is–understands that Liberty is automatic too. They may convince themselves to do and agree otherwise, but it’s no secret any more what freedom and liberty are all about, and what they end up producing. Or should I say, what the entities that are alive and free, produce. If a billion Chinese people understand this, considering their “education,” then almost everyone understands it.

This leaves the last…”the Pursuit of Happiness.” Why the argument with that? What is there about that, that doesn’t ring quite as obviously true as the other two? It’s clearly anti-altruist, since one can only acheive happiness for one particular person, oneself. And it’s also anti-sacrifice, since happiness is nothing but a personal, selfish emotion.

But we’re taught, nearly from the moment we can form a word, that the measure of good is what we do for others and what we give up ourselves. So is this a fancy way of saying that the Founders had two right, but missed the boat on the last?

Or is the claim that we actually become happy by sacrificing ourselves and doing for others more than we would do for ourselves? What would that mean, anyway? How would one pursue it…would you try to figure out what the next guy wants and then try to do that? Seems kinda roundabout, just on a practical basis!

Yet usually it’s the practical basis that’s offered as the justification. “How else shall we be happy unless we control what everyone else does?” IOW if I don’t make others act as I wish, then how shall I be able to pursue my own happiness?

Whoops, but then we’re back around to pursuing our own happiness as the good. If it’s good, then why not acknowledge it in the first place? What’s the function of the altruism and sacrifice?

And so ’round and ’round it goes.

Maybe the Founders were right, and maybe this really means something. Maybe the pursuit of happiness is indeed just as self-evidently natural as life and liberty themselves. Quite obviously it was to them, so what’s the problem now?

“But when a long Train of Abuses and Usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object, evinces a Design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their Right, it is their Duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future Security.”

Hmm…sounds like an “ought” to me. Downright duty, they say.

And what’s the “ought”? Well, there’s “to throw off such Government” and there’s “provide new Guards for their future security.” But even Juvenal caught this paradox…

Sed quis custodiet ipsos custodes.

“But who is to guard the guards themselves?”

Get a grip; there is no paradox. Guards are hired to protect what their employers wish protected…maybe their property, their lives, their land, whatever. A good guard doesn’t need to be guarded; that’s why he’s a guard! If his employer wants him guarded, then he hires two guards, or whatever it takes.

Somehow when this gets institutionalized, the relationship gets twisted—it’s from the guard that the employer needs the most guarding. There are many reasons for this beyond the scope of this single posting, so suffice it to say that if an employer needs his  guarding from his guard, then he did a very poor job of hiring that guard!

So poor, in fact, that it’s completely obvious that he should have no say at all in helping you choose your guards. Indeed, he may be so stupid that he himself should be guarded against!

Now how big of an idiot do you feel like, knowing that quoting two sentences from the Declaration of Independence might actually be considered by some people, to be treason? What the hell sort of guards did you hire?

Here’s the secret of egoism. You don’t want to feel like an idiot, and you especially don’t want to be an idiot. The secret is how much effort it takes to make this happen, which is <1% of the energy it takes to eat a hamburger.  Just don’t do it, that’s all.

“There, done.”

“Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient Causes; and accordingly all Experience hath shewn, that Mankind are more disposed to suffer, while Evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the Forms to which they are accustomed.”

Yes, that’s correct, isn’t it?  Experience hath indeed shewn that, has it not?  It’s true to this day, nearly everywhere in the world.  How insightful they were.

In fact, while we’re still on the Rational side, please note the verb tense used with “Mankind.”  And far more importantly, please note exactly what they said had to be righted.  That too is true to this day, and virtually all of our errors are caused by a failure to understand this.  That’s why I’ve got the Egoism side here, so that we may go from “is” to “ought.”

Whatever else you take from this, please don’t forget what it is that has to be righted, for this is the reason that it can be done.

What makes vonvegas different, and most of the people I admire most, is his ability to think with his own mind…to come up with things that no other mind has ever thought before. And I mean things that actually say something, that actually understand something, that actually identify something. That’s why I don’t know whether he’s completely right or not; I don’t pretend to understand everything he says. And on ethics, I’m not even close to understanding or agreeing, but there too I know I haven’t found any mistakes.

Ultimately creativity is what we’re about in many different ways, but if that were all there were to this, I’d post it under “Rational,” for epistemology. But then I started thinking about the sort of person von must be. We’ve never met. We’ve exchanged a few EMails and been involved in several lengthy (endless?) discussions on hpo.

So really, I know nothing about him, in a way. But in another way, I know enough about him that I could trust him. IOW were we to meet, I wouldn’t have to take precautions that he might try to rob me, or set me up for a scam, or something like that. I know little of his likes or dislikes, and I don’t really care except for what they might mean to him. It would be interesting to learn, but whatever they are, they’re no danger or threat to me. I know this up front.

The guy down the street is the same way…only he’d say that all this mental bullshit about epistemology is a total waste of time! And he’d have reasons too, some good ones—for him. That’s cool. I don’t talk philosophy with him; we talk about or do other stuff. But like von, I know that he too isn’t out to “get me” or hurt me, or want anything bad for me.

The other guy down the street too, and the people I see all the time at stores, or gas stations or restaurants…back when I used to eat out! None of these people seek bad for me, nor I for them. Most would help each other out in a pinch, or maybe not. Doesn’t matter, really, since none of us, as strangers basically, would ask any of the others for some giant favor or anything like that.

So the Big Secret should be obvious. You’re like that too, along with about 99% of the people out there. So is your neighbor, and the guy in the next block, and the next town and the next state. You get the idea. And yet, when you imagine people being free, you imagine a wild orgy of savagery and brutality. You imagine this because of an implicit premise that you’ve been taught…that people are basically evil and if left to their own choices, will run rampant.

That would be another of those “convenient beliefs” for you to have, if one were trying to convince you that you couldn’t live without being ordered how to live.

I’ve used the same response for years—”So would you be like that?” Would you be running out to steal other people’s stuff and molest others? How about your family…would most of them? Your friends? Neighbors? Co-workers? But somehow, this is what you imagine when you hear the word “anarchy.” That’s why I don’t like the word at all, even though I learned long ago that the very, very brightest people are, to nearly a one, anarchists. I was pretty surprised when I learned this decades ago, but I never lost my distaste for the word. This is why I’ve concluded that it’s a false concept anyway—the idea of “absence of something governing you” is sort of absurd. Naturally anarchists are only saying “the absence of something else governing you,” but I still think “indarchist” is highly preferable on many fronts.

So that’s the secret, as if every American shouldn’t know this anyway. The overwhelming majority of people just want to live peaceful lives with as much happiness and comfort as possible. They’re not out to hurt other people, or control other people…at least they weren’t until they learned that they ought to be that way. When freedom and liberty are ubiquitous, then societies do as this society did for quite a while. As freedom and liberty get choked out of existence, a society looks like ours does currently. When it gets to full strangulation…well, I think we have enough knowledge to know what happens then.

But I suppose there’s not much point in chasing that, until we have “Rational” nailed down. Because one thing I figure is that if you really saw what was happening before your eyes, then you’d do what you could to stop it. Decent people couldn’t do otherwise, and I’m 99% sure that you’re a decent person.

That’s how I know that you don’t really see what’s happening before your eyes, at least those of you who aren’t doing anything to stop it.

“Perfect” doesn’t mean “perfect in all respects irrespective of what I am.” Of course you can’t fly to Mars and back. But that would make you imperfect if you were a spaceship! “Perfect” means “ultimately proper as X.” The /perfect/ spaceship would not only fly to Mars, but into black holes as well.

I guess. It doesn’t really matter because I’m talking about perfection as a human. AS a human. Qua human, if you prefer. That doesn’t mean in physical form, because your physical form is not something you control AS a human.

Well, much of it you can…your fitness, your strength, your stamina. But much of it you can’t…the size of your frame, the color of your hair and skin, how fast your fingernails grow. Stuff like that. Or, there are deformities…some people are missing arms, or are paralyzed, blind, diseased, etc., etc. None of that says anything about them AS a human; that’s about their condition as a physical animal.

Humans are different, and they CAN make themselves as they wish, in all relevant aspects. This is the result of being able to abstractly conceptualize alternatives and choose from among them. Able to make goals, understand tomorrow, reminisce of yesterday…these are things other animals can’t do. They may have a form of memory, sure, but not the ability to abstractly represent those memories and work with those abstractions in creative ways.

Humans do things–effectively everything–with their /minds/. Even the physical stuff is pursuant to a decision, which is an abstractly volitional event.

So if that’s how we make ourselves as we are, AS humans, then what possible excuse could there be, for being as we wish we weren’t?

There can’t be a good one; that much is obvious. Indeed, what is being sacrificed for the choice not to be as you wish you were?

I think we’ll have to take a look at that sometime!

For now, I’ll just declare my usage so that you may understand what I mean when I use the word. Recall that “X” is the fact and “thinking of X” is the truth, on the assumption that the thinking of X is correspondent with X.

Simply put, in my lingo, “Context is a species of fact, not truth.” IOW, the context is not the thinking of the context, even as it takes thinking to delineate the context.

The context is the fact, or a set of facts. A context is “part of reality but not all of it.” It is a subset of existence, but not all of existence. It is NOT the thinking of the context.

“But doesn’t a context require thinking, for it to even be a context?” No, it does not. It requires thinking to be “picked out” from all other contexts, but choosing X is not X itself. X itself is that, as it is with all facts. And a context is just that too.

There will be more on this later, maybe when we can see it in action.

Potatoes & Concepts

Your potato is the Frenchman’s pomme de terre. These two mean the same thing—they reference the same X. Here’s the X in this instance: “the set of all potatoes.”

What if you call a particular crossbreed “a potato” that the Frenchman wouldn’t call “une pomme de terre”? Then you’re not talking about exactly the same X and they are not the same concepts.

Here’s one confusing part. They are never the same concept, literally. No two concepts are ever the same concept literally, not even when you think the same concept twice. A concept–the concept as a fact, as an X itself–only occurs in individual instances pursuant to a series of cognitive events.

No, that doesn’t say much and it leaves us with little purpose for the concept <same>. Still, it’s important–most important–to understand the facts of the matter. Just as no two anythings are literally identical (a thing is identical only with itself), so no two concepts are literally the same.

What’s the same is what they mean, and what they mean is what they reference. “The red potato is on the table” and “La pomme de terre rouge est sur la table” mean exactly the same…they are both describing the same potato on the same table (assuming they are, of course). X is the same…exactly the same, identical. But the “thinking of X” is never the same literally, and this is a very important thing to keep in mind.

The Truth of Potatoes on Tables

In my lingo, truth is “the recognition of a fact.” That is, it’s the product of an epistemological event. No mind, no truth. What’s still there, are the facts.

In our current terminology, it’s the “thinking of X.” Well, thinking of it doesn’t make it true, of course; correspondence is what does that.

Correspondence is a fact. It’s an X, unlike truth which is the thinking of X. The meaning is what’s being referenced; the truth is the referencing in a correspondent fashion. If the potato was referenced as being on the table when it was actually under it, then the statement is false, owing to a lack of correspondence. In this manner we may say that the correspondence determines the truth of a given statement. But the correspondence is not the truth itself. This usage is contrary to most current usage, but I don’t use redundant concepts, at least not about important stuff.

It must never be forgotten that the thing being determined to be correspondent or not, is a singular event, an idiosyncratic product of an idiosyncratic mind being made at a particular moment.

When we say we mean the same thing, or that a concept means such and only such, we are talking about the X being referenced, not the concept itself. No two instances of any two concepts, are literally the same. This will become critically important later, when we start talking about the good.

Concepts versus Words

In our normal travails, the difference between these two doesn’t matter so much. I use “concept” to denote that aforementioned product of the epistemological event, and will often denote it thusly…<thisconcept>.

The word is the phonemic–which is to say, audibly perceptible– representation of the concept. They’re both representational, or abstract (indirectly abstract in the case of the word), and this is why the distinction is not too critical on most issues.

Technically, the concept means the thing and the word denotes the concept.

Attributes

Did you notice the “versus” in the previous post title? This is very, very important. Because it turns out that the manner by which we reference abstractly, is really only a very fancy classification system. Much like a computer, for any X and Y, they are either “similar with regard to …” or “dissimilar with regard to …” It is upon this that our entire conceptual hierarchy is built.

Ayn Rand made a few minor errors on this stuff, interestingly by forgetting that our classifications are classifications and not the things themselves and thereby believing that there’s some hard existential line between sensation, perception and conceptualization…but that’s relatively trivial in the whole scheme of this topic.

That’s why if you’d like to understand in a general way how we form our concepts, you are strongly recommended to read “Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology,” where Rand lays out a very correspondent paradigm for how it is that we think.

The reader may ask, “But what about the ‘…’ by which they were similar or not?” Well, that’s an attribute or a characteristic or a property. It’s something about the thing, without being everything about the thing. Besides, no two things can be similar in all respects; that would be identity and hence be the thing itself. An attribute is an X; we identify attributes.

The thing itself, the whole X, is its attributes…it doesn’t “have” attributes, nor are they a “part” of it. The blueness of the ball is not “part of the ball;” it’s an attribute of the ball, one of many. The ball doesn’t “have blueness;” it just “is blue.” Fully reduced, “attribute” translates to, “X as it is, with regard to particular functions about X.” For us, the relevant funtions, or attributes, are those which impart sensory data to us that we subsequently classify. But “particular functions” are not “all of the functions.” I will address a drop of this in the next post.

What is a part of something is this—the attributes we abstractly distill out to classify as similar or dissimilar, are not all of its attributes. They are something about X, but not everything about X. IOW we are identifying “part of the class of attributes” as epistemological identifications. This does not imply that we are only identifying “part of the ball.” We are identifying something about all of the ball.

This is the grand confusion of epistemology, fairly well addressed by Leonard Peikoff in the same book with the essay, “The Analytic-Synthetic Dichotomy.” IMO, this essay is the most important formal epistemic point brought forward in the entire so-called Objectivist Corpus. But for a general understanding of how concepts come to be, and how we think at a very basic level, ITOE generally is a wonderful resource.

So for the moment, I’ll focus on the cement.  Oops, I mean the concrete!

There is X, and there is thinking of X.  I have a particular lingo, just as you do, and in my lingo this is a very important distinction.  Indeed, it’s so important that I won’t even address “thinking of X” right now.  I address only X—whatever X is, however it is, as it is.

Obviously I can’t think of X without having the X of “thinking of X.”  But that’s just another X; that’s why I was able to reference them distinctly above.  By thinking of X, I didn’t change anything whatsoever about X, even as I created another X, the “thinking of X.”  Why this has caused such a problem for so many millennia is quite a mystery to me.  It’s so straightforward that one could almost conclude it was for nefarious purposes that the confusion was propagated for so long.

I’m inclined to think not.  The most obvious of things in retrospect were completely hidden before they were thought; this has been the wonder of the progress of Man.  Almost anyone will acknowledge the difference between the territory and the map, but about one second later they’ll explain why this proves that having the map is a necessary requirement for having the territory, as if they never saw the distinction at all.

When we stop and think for just a moment, we see this is ridiculous.  But most of the time, speaking philosophically, we don’t stop and think for that moment.  We assume without even saying, “There’s only what we see,” or “It all depends on how you look at it,” and so on and so forth.

This shall not be addressed at this site, because it’s not worth a moment’s thought.  We already agreed that a moment’s thought shows how absurd such catch-phrases are, owing to the obvious difference between the map and the territory.  Nothing depends on how you look at it, except the looking itself.

All of this is my way of saying I use the word “fact” to denote something, and that something is NOT the “thinking of X.”  It’s X itself, irrespective of anyone doing any thinking about it.  That there are Xs that exist because of thinking–”epistemic existents,” I call them–has absolutely nothing to do with X being as it is, as a separate X from all other non-Xs (including the non-X of “thinking of X”).

That’s all; this is just pinning down a reference I make.  When I say “the facts,” I mean the things as they are.  A fact is a state of reality.  It may be the case that we can only discuss facts that we think about and denote, but this is a separate issue from what the fact is, or what the facts are.

So now we have the concrete…the facts.  Soon we’ll focus on one particular kind of fact, the one that involves the recognition of facts.  Me, I call that “truth,” but being an epistemic existent, it’s not quite as simple as facts.