306:28 PM, 28 March 2006 by The White Moniteo What do I believe in? What is my philosophical outlook on life? Everyone has a set of core beliefs. These core beliefs determine how the person behaves.
Human Phenomena Obey the Natural Laws of Power
"There is only one natural right: the right of the superior to rule over the inferior." -Leo Strauss
Human interaction can be understood in terms of power structure among individuals. A family can be understood by seeing the parents as having power of the children. Every government is different, but government is defined by power structure as well. The same is true for a corporation. If there is no power structure, we might as well ignore it because it is nothing. For example, some people talk about race as if it were an important concept. Some black people say, "We black people are…" as if they are the leaders of the black race. Do they have power over everyone of the same skin color? Unless they do, then who are they to talk as if they are leaders of a group? They have no power and thus their words are just fantasy.
The only groups that matter are economic classes: the elites, the masses, and so on. Power defines groups. Power defines peoples and nations. Everything else is a smokescreen. When you work for a company you see that your boss controls you. If you are to believe in a smokescreen group you would believe that what is important is not that the executives or administrators have control over you but that you belong to the set of, say, people who are tall. Obviously being tall doesn't really mean much. It doesn't have much to do with the behavior dynamics as much as power does. This is exactly how the concept of race works. That someone has black or white skin is completely trivial compared to the fact that the powerful have the ability to coerce the powerless. This in fact seems to be compatible with the Marxian idea of false consciousness and class consciousness.
Since power gives freedom and choice to do what you want as well as protection from other people, then power is happiness. Having power also allows you to influence other people. You can abuse your power by making other people who are victims of your power suffer but you can also make them happy perhaps because that pleases you.
There is no Morality
"The good news is there is no devil. The bad news is there's no heaven. There is nothing." -Kerry Packer
This is perhaps the hardest thing I've ever had to accept, and I can certainly understand why many other people would not want to believe it. In fact, I don't want other people to believe it, but this is a truth that I cannot deny. I know there is no morality because I have believed in many things before that I have later realized are just abhorrent if viewed from another perspective and another point of view. I suppose this is moral subjectivism, but that implies that morality is just a personal thing, and me personally, I don't have any morality, which I guess makes me a moral nihilist.
Some people like C.S. Lewis believe that the "fact" that there is objective morality is the evidence that God exists. The problem with the morality argument is the premise that there is objective morality. It is argued that morality comes from God, but I believe that a person's sense of morality is just a product of indoctrination. Anyone can believe in anything with the right propaganda. Since morality is nothing, trying to verbalize the concept of morality as if it were real, leads to a situation in which any morality system can be made to sound right.
Morality, like religion and patriotism, is another tool that the elite can use. The spreading of the idea that power is evil, that wealth is evil, and so on, seems suspiciously like something someone with power would say to someone without power to stop the person without power from trying to steal the power that the person with power has.
If you hold on to a belief that something is right, then all you need to do is simply to search on the Internet and find arguments against the idea. You will find it and if you're open minded and read it you'll notice that, yes, those argument sound good as well. Anything can be made to sound good, even killing and murder. It's okay to kill and murder for your country. It's okay to kill and murder for God. Anything can say anything, but at the end of the day, nothing exists, and words are just words trying to approximate this thing called morality that does not exist.
Don't be Patriotic or Religious
"Just in terms of allocation of time resources, religion is not very efficient. There's a lot more I could be doing on a Sunday morning." -Bill Gates
I don't think patriotism is wrong is any moral sense. How can it be when I believe that there is no right or wrong? Since there is no morality, then a person being patriotic is not right or wrong, just a person being patriotic. While I observe other people being patriotic and can to a degree understand why they do so, I am not patriotic myself. I think that the way people turn towards patriotism is similar if not exactly the same as the reason why they turn to religion. They want to believe in a higher power. Some people might argue that patriotism is not the same as religion because patriotism involves love and worship of a country, not love and worship of a spiritual being. But I seriously doubt that a patriot loves the government. Why would anyone follow the government whether they are right or wrong? If patriotism is simply doing whatever the government says then most people would agree that facilitates totalitarianism.
I am certainly not patriotic. The government might start tolling a highway and rather than doing the patriotic thing by supporting whatever the government does, I may just be annoyed that I have to pay more to drive there. Some patriots say that they don't love the government but the people. This, in my opinion, requires a leap of faith because you are assuming that this group of people are more than the sum of their parts, that they are more than just an aggregation of individuals. I believe that a group of people within a political border are just a group of human beings. I believe that a country is simply an establishment of an entity or organization with a monopoly on coercion. This entity (known as the government) rules over the people with force supposedly for the good of the people. That is it. A country is simply a power structure. The elites rule over the masses just as a boss rules over his or her subordinates. It's not the prettiest picture, but it sure does yield the most accurate results in terms of explaining the behavior of government. Patriotism and religion seem like fantasies most likely developed by the elite for the masses (supply side) or developed by the masses because they want to believe it (demand side). Patriotism and religion distorts the cold and harsh reality of the natural laws of power and turns it into something more palatable.
I am not patriotic in the same way I am not religious. I have loyalty to absolutely no group. I think it is foolish for me to even think about doing so or to even practice it at football games. It is training for a live of slavery or blind worship of aesthetically pleasing symbols. I don't need a group to define myself. I don't need to show other people that I belong to something. I am not that weak and insecure that I need to attach myself to something greater.
Someone once said that if you don't believe in God you will believe in anything. I say, if you believe in God you may as well believe in anything. If man created God then surely man can modify God.
For Most People, the Meaning of Life is belonging to an Attractive Group
"The desire to be a person in his own right, to be noticed in the world he lives in, is shared by each of the men on the streetcorner. Whether they articulate this desire … or not, one can see them position themselves to catch the attention of their fellows in much the same way as plants bend to catch the sunlight." -Liebow
For most people, what gives them essentially most happiness and pleasure is belonging to a group that they perceive looks good. I am past this stage and suppress any group desire except that desire for power because I believe this gives not superficial things like a sense of belonging but real things like the ability to influence others. Unfortunately, most people know deep down that power is the primary divisor of humanity, which is why most people try to allocate themselves into the group of rich and powerful people. That is why many people buy Mercedes, Lexuses, mansions, and other status symbols. I believe that, according to the Oxoby model, people who don't have the ability to gain power substitute by doing something else. They focus more instead on having fun, on being of a particular religion, and so on. I.e. they seek smokescreen groups to attach their sense of self and identity to.
To give an example, if you have the intelligence and ability to become rich and powerful, you will do so, and you will be proud of yourself because you know that other people value power and money and see you as belonging to the group of people who have power and money. But if you don't have the intelligence and ability to do this, you will seek something else such as having fun. You will take away from your mind the default idea that groups are based on power and money (rich and powerful people versus poor and powerless people) and replace it with some other smokescreen group (people who have fun versus people who have no life). You will now try to have fun and put down those who don't have fun. Since you have fun, you feel good about yourself. You try to spread this smokescreen group and persuade other people into thinking that this smokescreen group is the true and real one. It may not be relative effort you chose to maximize but degree of religiosity or degree of patriotism.