From: Valuemetaphysics@aol.com
Date: Fri Jun 11 2004 - 02:08:38 BST
If you want this translated into simple language, it would read:
1. “Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed” or “Wishing won’t make it so.”
(Metaphysics: Objective Reality. Objective reality, to be commanded, must be
understood without Subjectivity. Wishing is Subjective. This is SOM which
recognises subjectivity as something which is irrelevant or must be nullified. In
MOQ terms, Social and Intellectual values are reducible to Objective states.
This is in clear contradiction of the MOQ.)
2. “You can’t eat your cake and have it, too.”
(Epistemology: Reason. This is a simplified assertion of the logical
necessity of A = A.)
3. “Man is an end in himself.”
(Ethics: Self-interest. The self in the MOQ relies on more than one level of
evolutionary related patterns of value. Therefore, what is good for
Intellectual, and Social patterns must by necessity be good for all Intellectual and
Social patterns. Any narrow notion of a Cartesian Self, as is the case with
Objectivism, is incompatible with the MOQ.)
4. “Give me liberty or give me death.”
(High Quality Liberty in the MOQ is provided by the social approval and
enforcement of Intellectual ideas which maximise freedom. Any Social patterning
which deters Intellectual ideas, such as the idea of democracy for example, is
not Liberty in the MOQ sense.)
If you held these concepts with total consistency, as the base of your
convictions, you would have a full philosophical system to guide the course of your
life. But to hold them with total consistency — to understand, to define, to
prove and to apply them — requires volumes of thought. Which is why philosophy
cannot be discussed while standing on one foot — nor while standing on two
feet on both sides of every fence. This last is the predominant philosophical
position today, particularly in the field of politics.
My philosophy, Objectivism, holds that:
1. Reality exists as an objective absolute — facts are facts, independent of
man’s feelings, wishes, hopes or fears.
(In the MOQ, 'man’s feelings, wishes, hopes or fears' are patterns of value
which may be assigned their appropriate evolutionary level, and are just as
real as atoms. Objectivism does not recognise this as is clearly stated by its
author.)
2. Reason (the faculty which identifies and integrates the material provided
by man’s senses) is man’s only means of perceiving reality, his only source
of knowledge, his only guide to action, and his basic means of survival.
(The MOQ totally rejects this assertion; Quality is the primary empirical
reality.)
3. Man — every man — is an end in himself, not the means to the ends of
others. He must exist for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor
sacrificing others to himself. The pursuit of his own rational self-interest
and of his own happiness is the highest moral purpose of his life.
(The MOQ expands beyond the narrow limitations of Ayn Rand's Objectivism
making the above conclusions of Objectivism redundant.)
4. The ideal political-economic system is laissez-faire capitalism. It is a
system where men deal with one another, not as victims and executioners, nor as
masters and slaves, but as traders, by free, voluntary exchange to mutual
benefit. It is a system where no man may obtain any values from others by
resorting to physical force, and no man may initiate the use of physical force
against others. The government acts only as a policeman that protects man’s rights;
it uses physical force only in retaliation and only against those who initiate
its use, such as criminals or foreign invaders. In a system of full
capitalism, there should be (but, historically, has not yet been) a complete separation
of state and economics, in the same way and for the same reasons as the
separation of state and church.
(On it's own terms this ideal is good, as are all ideals by definition. It is
as good as the ideal of Karl Marx or Christianity for example; the very
postulation of an ideal state negates deviation towards the non-ideal. Neither
Marxism nor, 'a complete separation of state and economics' is possible, only an
approximation. It must be understood that ideals are intellectual postulations,
and as such bare no relation to other levels of values - this is to say,
ironically, that ideals are wishful thinking in the same sense that one may
postulate that 'everyone should love and respect each other in all situations and at
all times.)
All the best,
Mark
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