Reflections on Death

Recent events have me thinking about my own death, or more rightly about the ceremony and social norms surrounding death, and I've discovered I don't much care for them.


Watching a good friend be buried and watching the dynamic of two families each grieving in their own way and witnessing the inevitable conflict created by such raw emotions, and of contrasting traditions, ideals, beliefs and perceptions has brought me to a solitary salient point.  I will not die without leaving specific and exacting instructions as to how I am to be laid to rest.

These instructions (which I will later formalize and place with my final Will and Testament) will be my final act of rational selfishness.  I will design the service and procedures not only with absolute adherence to my beliefs and ideals, but also with an eye to lessening the suffering of those closest to me.

The friend we buried this week was the wife of my best friend, and I watched him go through the hell made up of our societies standard rituals of death and burial for five days.  There was the viewing and the funeral, the burial and a reception, and from start to end a long procession of people showing up on his doorstep to offer their sympathies to "see how he was doing". 

The entire process seemed to me to be a tortuous pouring of salt in a fresh wound.  It demanded all his strength and all his attention, so that he might (perversely) stand straight and tall while people reminded him that he was hurting and that half of his life had been taken from him.

With this in mind I would save my loved ones such a drawn out process. 

I would disallow any sort of visitation.  I will not make my wife or children sit in the same room as my dead corpse while people wander past to do little more than convince themselves that I'm dead, or worse yet to satisfy a morbid fascination of seeing me so.

I would eliminate the funeral service.  The useful parts of it will be handled during the burial and I see absolutely no reason to have someone who doesn't know me lead my friends and family in remembrances of my life.

At the funeral I will act (in absentia) as the one leading the ceremony though a chosen voice, most likely a close friend who will read my final statements.  People will be asked to form a procession and say their goodbyes at this point over my grave and then the entire funeral party will retire to a selected location for a reception party where I, through my eulogizer would encourage everyone to really, truly and irreverently celebrate my life/what I meant to them.

They say funerals are for the living, but from what I have seen they are certainly not for the dearly departed's closest survivors, but more for those people on the periphery.  A death and all that surrounds it should, in my view, be a short, sharp, shock that will bring all the emotion to the surface, yet be over and done with as soon as practical.

Epiphany

Yesterday was my birthday, and it went by almost unnoticed.  Not on the part of those around me, many wished me all the best, but rather on my part. 

You see, I have taken to not celebrating my birthday.  Seeing it as being a “little thing” I have largely ignored it for years, after all a birthday is just another day, you aren’t really a year older, just a day.  I didn’t give it much thought at all. I went to work, didn’t mention it, came home and had a normal unremarkable day.

Then it hit me, spurred by a comment made by my Sister-in-Law who, when I remarked that I had received no birthday gifts and had no plan to celebrate at all, commented that she “hated that”, meaning the trivialization of such celebrations.  At the time I didn’t think much of it, but this morning I realized just what I was doing. 

The Strikers Oath states in its first sentence “I swear by my life, and my love of it”, well this apathy toward my own birthday was not showing my life (Me) the ‘love’ it/I deserve.  Too easily we reduce our lives to indistinguishable days, each following in bored procession one after the other.  This is the antithesis of the Objectivist philosophy.  Objectivism teaches us that we should celebrate our lives, that it is the end of all our means and that it is worth and worthy of any and all tributes we can heap upon it.

Having had this sudden realization I began to see the other ways I had been trivializing my own existence.  I had let others that I value, specifically my wife view her birthday in the same fashion.  Thus I was robbing myself of an opportunity to express with complete selfish satisfaction how much I value her.

Hell the day itself does not need to be important at all.  The mere act of living my life in my own way, however small, is worthy of complete mindfulness, a conscious joyful acknowledgement of life, my life and my living of it.

My birthday has come and gone, but its passing, as unremarked as it was, has left me with this thought… Today, and every day is the first day of the rest of your life.  Live it, consciously, actively, viscerally, fully.

I Wish.

I find it really hard to care about Canadian politics these days.

The same old parties are ranting along the same old lines about the same old things. Not a one of them offers or even wants any change to the system. Sure they gripe and moan about how "they" would do it differently, about how "they" are the only ones offering any new this or that, but the fact remains that if you look at it really hard you can see that all you need to do is change the faces, and the rants spewing forth across the house could come from any party at any time.

We don't have political parties we have pragmatic collectives who feed, vampire like off the votes of those who they dupe into their ideological lairs. Conservatives sell their souls in the hope that their particular status-quo will be maintained, Liberal voters pant and repent at the altar of progressive reform while the Dippers don the revolutionary garb and wave the red flag of socialism. All, in the end, get exactly nothing.

Our politicians word is written in water and nailing down any ideal (other than their prime directive of "thou shall get re-elected") is like nailing jello to the side of a battleship in a North Atlantic gale.

The best-worst thing is I can see an end to it, but it relies on the end of the entire system, which is to say a political or social or economic apocalypse the like of which has never been seen.

I imagine an Atlas Shrugged type collapse, a greatest depression, widespread social chaos spread across the entire planet. I see an unstoppable absolute and irretrievable end to the world as we know it and think...

I wish.

Objectivist Round Up #185

The Round Up is up at Three Ring Binder. Go have yourself a rational read.

The Canadian Farce of Rights and Freedoms #2

Rights and Freedoms Permissions in Canada.

If you are a classically liberal thinker like myself you probably believe in the notion of unalienable rights, which is to say Rights as a precondition to living ones life as a man; To me and those like me rights are an intrinsic necessity to living as opposed to merely existing in this world.

Well, the talking heads that wrote and lawyered the Charter don't believe in Rights like that. As a matter of fact I don't think they believe in Rights at all, only the power of the state.

The second sentence of the Charter is called "Rights and Freedoms in Canada" now that is a tall order, or at least you would think it would be a hard thing to cram into a single solitary sentence but the sentence really has nothing to do with Rights and freedoms and everything to do with who will allow you, and when you will be allowed to have rights and freedoms.

It states in full; "The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantees the rights and freedoms set out in it subject only to such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society."

This is the first of many caveats in the Charter, and like all the others it is strategically placed to nullify any statement that could give the impression that Rights and Freedoms are a part of human nature as opposed to a permission granted to men at the whim of the state/government/some random constitutional lawyer.

Read that sentence. If you do so without mincing words you will immediately recognize its intent. Were you to simplify the sentence , boiling it down to its absolute meaning it would read... The Government has decided exactly what permissions you have to act and live your life and it will also decide when you will be permitted to do so.

In other words... your rights are what we say they are when we say they are.

So much for the "Guarantee of Rights and Freedoms".

The Canadian Farce of Rights and Freedoms

The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms is a document that chains the people of Canada to a contradiction riddled and unapologetically statist perversion of the concepts of individual freedom and liberty.

"Whereas Canada is founded upon principles that recognize the supremacy of God and the rule of law:"

This is the first line of Canada's Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

So, in a document that claims to innumerate and codify the rights and freedoms of the people of Canada the first sentence contains a statement which, if examined rationally and without compromise, would lead to such a host of contradictions that the whole thing ought to have been thrown out of any 1st year law class.

Principle is defined in part as; a fundamental, primary, or general law or truth from which others are derived:

If it is true that Canada recognizes the Supremacy of God then which God?

No, there is no scope here to quibble and claim as many progressively minded people do that the statement is a generalization regarding the spiritual nature of any and all belief in a supernatural deity or notion, because to claim that is to allow a multitude of contradictions.

Remember the word "principles"? Well religions in Canada - which are the earthy manifestation of "God" - who according to our charter is "supreme" - don't recognize or even allow the same principles to be exercised. While some sects of the Christian religion recognize in principle (and action) the right of two men or two women to marry, the Catholic God most certainly does not; and that is one of the more benign contradictions of the notion of "principle" that this fallacious statement incurs.

Who's principle wins?

What sort of principle (fundamental, primary, or general law or truth) if any is upheld?

If you claim that the sentence is merely a recognition of spirituality what principles do we hold as true and which ones are the ones our nation is actually founded upon?

If we as a society get to pick and choose which "principles" we allow our nameless, faceless, secular Deity-thing to actually count as our founding principles why do we bother even trying to shroud the first sentence of this aberration of Rights in a spiritual cloak in the first place?

As for the remainder of the sentence, I have no complaint with the principle of "the rule of Law". That is not to say that I don't have issue with the things that we have been saddled with as "Law" but I'll get into those points as I delve further into this despicable document.

Objectivist Round Up - The New Years Edition!

Welcome to the New Years Edition of the Objectivist Round Up.

In this season of celebrations, parties and other festivities I'm reminded of the passage in Atlas Shrugged where Dagny talks to her Mother after her coming out party...

When Dagny turned, Mrs. Taggart saw only puzzled helplessness in her face; the face was calm, but something about it made Mrs. Taggart wish she had not wished her Daughter should discover sadness.
"Mother do they think its exactly in reverse?" she asked.
"What?" asked Mrs. Taggart, bewildered.
"The things you were talking about. The lights and the flowers. Do they expect those things to make them romantic, not the other way around?"

That sort of emotional abdication, of relying on the moment instead of what we as individuals bring to it is especially prevalent the holiday season. But as we enter a New Year we ought to remember that every day, every hour, minute and second is like that... worthless, unless we put our soul into it.

Happy New Years everyone!

Now without further ado, The Objectivist Round Up!

Kate Yoak presents Abortion: Making the choice posted at Parenting is....
Saying... "Drawing from my recent personal experience, I have decided to brave the subject of pregnancy termination and the principles in making that decision. "

Zip presents UNCOMMON SENSE: The Face of Anarchy posted at UNCOMMON SENSE.
Saying... "A post prompted by the excess of violence perpetrated by Anarchists at the G20 meetings in Toronto this summer."

Diana Hsieh presents Announcing Colorado's March MiniCon: SnowCon! posted at NoodleFood.
Saying... "Front Range Objectivism will be hosting a weekend conference in March in Colorado! Come join the fun!"

Kelly Valenzuela presents The Racist Roots of Anti-Immigration Activism Part III: Lies, Damn Lies and NumbersUSA posted at Mother of Exiles.
Saying... "Santiago Valenzuela finishes up the three part series."

Rational Jenn presents Rational Jenn: Parenting Principles posted at Rational Jenn.
Saying... "My favorite post of 2010. This post represents the culmination of years of thinking about and practicing applying Objectivism to parenting. And it's only a start, really, at outlining the premises and principles that my husband and I are raising our children by."

Kelly Valenzuela presents The Racist Roots of Anti-Immigration Activists Part I posted at Mother of Exiles.
Saying... ""Best of" post from Mother of Exiles by Santiago Valenzuela."

Kelly Valenzuela presents OCON on the Cheap posted at Rant from the Rock.
Saying... ""Best of" selection: Whether you go for the conference or to vacation and socialize with like-minded people or all three, you can do OCON on the cheap!"

Miranda Barzey presents Myers-Briggs Personality Types as a Tool for Introspection and Extrospection posted at Building Atlantis.
Saying... "How learning about Myers-Briggs personality types improved my understanding of myself and others, thus improving my relationships."

Benjamin Skipper presents Divorcing Time from Work posted at Musing Aloud.
Saying... "Have you ever thought that there isn't enough time in the day to get things done? Maybe it's because you're viewing your days in isolated chunks."

Benjamin Skipper presents Garbage Writing posted at Musing Aloud.
Saying... "A somewhat common occurrence for me is that sometimes I'll run into an article where I simply cannot do any brainstorming. Out of frustration I oftentimes go ahead and work to construct the piece anyhow, much of the time knowing I'll just destroy it immediately, and in this I have accidentally discovered the technique of writing "garbage copies.""

John Drake presents Developing habits, part 2 posted at Try Reason!.
Saying... "In this post, I detail some virtues/habits for cultivating in the new year. "

Gene Palmisano presents Sacred Cows posted at The Metaphysical Lunch.
Saying... "The place to cut government spending should start with foreign aid. This blog was written prior to the WSJ article exposing the Afghanistan government for funding the Taliban with American foreign aid dollars."

Jenn Casey and Kelly Elmore present Cultivating the Virtues Podcast #2: Temperament posted at Cultivating the Virtues.
Saying... "This is one of our favorite podcasts of the year."

Noah Stahl presents Out with Denial, in with Adult Conversation? posted at The Undercurrent Blog.
Saying... "Should the government treat Americans as independent adults with the freedom that entails, or should we be treated like children and forced to support one another through taxes and debt imposed upon us by Washington?"

Jason Stotts presents Best of 2010 posted at Erosophia.
Saying... "This post contains 10 of my best essays from 2010. There were a lot of good options this year and I think these represent the best of the best. I hope you enjoy them."

Kelly Elmore presents Thoughts on the Hierarchy of Knowledge posted at Reepicheep's Coracle.
Saying... "I often hear that unschooling, free-schooling, and life-learning violate the hierarchy of knowledge. This post looks at what the hierarchy of knowledge is (according to Ayn Rand and to me) and answers these objections to child-led learning."

Ari Armstrong presents James Discusses New Mars Novel posted at Free Colorado.
Saying... "Thomas James discusses his new hard sci-fi novel about Mars, 'In the Shadow of Ares.'"

Christmas

I think too many people expect "Christmas" to have some sort of profound effect on people as if the day has some sort of intrinsic spirit, when it is just another day, and the only "spirit" the day can have is a direct reflection of the spirit we give it. But having fostered completely unrealistic expectations people end up pissed off and disheartened that "everyone" is still exactly what and how and who they were throughout the year.

Here is my advice on Christmas... Use the day and the season to celebrate those people who you value. Don't worry about all of mankind... we are not all in this together. We are all individuals and as individuals we have to make rational value judgments about the people in our lives. That means the ones you deal with every day, your loved ones as well as that "idiot" that bumped into you without an apology when you were shopping.

Remember, you will have no more in common with the drug addled thief downtown on Dec 25th than you did for the rest of the year, and just because its Christmas it does not mean that his evil actions deserve to be forgiven, nor conversely do they become more evil because of the season.

It's Christmas. Buy something nice for someone nice, spend time with the people you love. Be good to yourself.

You want to know the best part about that idea? If everyone did it, if everyone rationally and selfishly chose to celebrate the people and things in their own lives that made life worth living (every day and all year) then there really would be peace on earth, and we'd get it without anyone telling us the way we got it was wrong or evil.

"Hey Buddy... Wanna buy a procedure?"

Why is this a surprise to anyone?

Take any good or service, regulate or prohibit it* and you will end up with the "criminal" element providing, for a price, that which the government can not or will not. From alcohol prohibition to prostitution, marijuana and soon MRI's...

When you think of it though, what this woman has done is not so far removed from what has been going on for years. Those with the money have been skirting the system by travelling to other countries for treatment, its the new millennium's version of crossing the border for a drink. Now they have just found an easier way, good old-fashioned bribery.

How perverted and absurd is it that supposedly free people have to resort to breaking the law in order to have the possibility of saving their own lives, or the lives of their loved ones?

What this country needs is free (unregulated) health care.

* In the case of medical services in Canada they have done both - it is regulated in the sense that the government controls nearly all aspects of our actual physical health care and it is prohibited because anyone providing health care outside of the system is breaking the law.

Destroyer.

I haven't been writing much lately, and although the new job has something to do with that I'm beginning to recognize the other main contributing factor, and that is what I'm focusing on today.

Basically I'm feeling politically disenfranchised, which is to say that the harder I look at society, the accepted system of morality and state of government the more it upsets, disgusts and alienates me.

As much as I believe that a properly constrained government is achievable, I am more sure each and every day that such a thing can not be created within or upon the current framework of any western democratic state. The Keynesian economic morass, corrupt political principles, moral bankruptcy and culture of entitlement both within these governments and within the general population makes the dream of building a laissez faire "purse" out of this "sows ear" a practical impossibility.

The whole mess needs to be destroyed, wholly and utterly destroyed. But more than the real and actual act of destruction is required, it must all be tied explicitly to the flawed premises that predicate the need for destruction.

In economics the boom and bust of our Keynesian economies must be explicitly tied to the idiocy of fiat currency and deficit spending, while at the same time the strength and self-correcting nature of a free market must be championed. The lunacy of handing economic control to elected but clueless officials or government bureaucrats should be writ large in the blood and sweat of the failures of that system. The businessman should take his rightful spot as the champion of the economic world and the politician and the bureaucrat should be relegated to purely political issues.

In politics we must kill the idea that government is an institution responsible for providing anything except a framework within which our individual rights (life, liberty and property) are protected from the initiation of force. It can not accomplish that goal by promising to serve any but the interest of the singular individual. No man, no group and no interest, however seemingly noble can ever be championed over the individual. There can be no law upholding the "rights" of women, or gays or consumers or blacks, or the poor, as each and every one of these demographic groups is explicitly consumed by the term "individual" and to rule in the favour of a single group is to destroy the rights of every individual outside of that group.

Our morality needs to be tied to this world, to our lives and to our purpose. This world is where we need our morality and what we need our morality for is living, not some absurd promise of an afterlife, or as some cosmic balancing act. Once that simple principle is recognized it is quite easy to see that the moral object of our lives is in the living, and that living with joy, and purpose is the good. All moral acts are those that serve us individually in the true achievement of our own happiness and our own goals and our own purpose.

Morality is not a floating abstraction that can be summarized in a few simplistic edicts. We exist as thinking rational individuals and as a result our morality must be based on the situations we find ourselves in. To declare "thou shall not kill" as a moral imperative, is an abuse of thought that demands that every moral man submit and become subservient to any immoral brute.

Perhaps the cornerstone of all of this is the need to recognize that the mere act of mortal existence, which is to say, drawing a breath as a human being entitles us to nothing. Even the unalienable rights of life, liberty and property must be secured somehow. Nature does not grant the right to live, only the ability to seek to live, nature will not give us liberty, only the ability to create liberty and nature will not bestow upon us property of any sort, only the will to create it in our own name for our own use.

The world as it is, as we have made it (thus far) is one hundred and eighty degrees out of phase with reason, nature and the facts of reality. Our current societies (all of them) are a perversion of misguided morality, incorrect economic theory, corrupt politics and undeserved rewards. It all needs to be destroyed. It must be destroyed, before it can be replaced with;

• a moral code based on mans life and the living of it,
  
• an economic system based on and working in coordination with markets and market forces,
  
• politics based on and in service to individual rights and only individual rights and,
• the rational and selfish rejection of entitlement in favour of self-reliance and productive effort in all aspects of our individual lives, whatever our ability.
  

Objectivist Round Up # 173

The new job is keeping me quite busy so I've not been blogging (or much of anything else this week), however, my friends have been and this weeks Round Up is having a ball over at The Playful Spirit... Give it a whirl!

Objectivist Round Up #172

This weeks Objectivist Round Up is punched and filed over at 3 Ring Binder.

Check it out!

Objectivist Round Up #171.

This weeks Objectivist Round Up is at Reepicheep's Coracle. Check it out!

Hope? Nope.

Though I would hope that Op/Ed's like this would become more and more prevalent in the face of the petty tyranny governments today are subjecting citizens to, I'm pessimistically certain that they will not.

Only By Permission #9

"A right is the sanction of independent action.
Only a slave acts on permission."
Ayn Rand

Where soap bubbles breaking on the skin of a police officer constitutes assault.



There is a legal right in this country to demonstrate, it's nothing less than a hallmark of a modern liberal democracy. I personally disagree with the reason for the G20 demonstrations I believe that most of the people doing so are on par with loony conspiracy theorists. The right to peaceful protest aside, I absolutely believe that anyone destroying property or actually and physically assaulting a police officer (or anyone else) in the course of any demonstration ought to be thrown in jail. Full stop.

But... assault by soap bubble?

And now there is this... The Officer in question has launched lawsuits aimed at people who commented on the YouTube video for defamation of his character, something he ought to realize he did all on his own with his ridiculous overreaction.

Let's Forget.

With the news that the Afghanistan Government is in secret talks with the Taliban to end almost 10 years of war it seems like it is time to find out what went wrong.

Could it be (as I’m sure some are going to claim) that our failure in Afghanistan is the karmic result of the “fact” that our presence there was not predicated on any reason, moral right or principle at all?

Let’s examine that idea.

Let us disregard for a moment the reason we went there in the first place, forget that the terrorist attacks of 9/11 ever occurred, that almost three thousand innocents died, certainly that is no reason to go to war.

Forget that once we found ourselves in that medieval throwback of a nation, that we tried to give them the benefit of every advancement in social theory from the time of the Protestant Reformation to The Women’s Rights movement. On what principle do we call for a separation of church and state? What ideal underscores the equality of men and women? Surely there is none at all, and this sort of trifling issue could never be worth the blood that has been shed.

Let’s overlook that once committed to the task, that we wanted Afghanistan to evolve from the politics of the feudal state to a modern liberal democratic republic. Surely there is nothing they need to learn from us. Look at the ideas forwarded by the Magna Carta, The Declaration of Independence, Charters and Bills of Rights, certainly none of this is worth fighting for!

Yes, let’s ignore all this and examine for a moment the possibility that our failure is some sort of mystical retribution for the arrogance of assuming that our culture, or the rights we enjoy, or our form of government or our secular laws were ever worthy of protection or of being spread.

Objectivist Round Up #169

The Objectivist Round Up is over at Sacred Ego.

I am sure you will enjoy it.
I think it's going to be great.
I will go and check it out!

Only by permission #8

"A right is the sanction of independent action.
Only a slave acts on permission."
Ayn Rand

Where stopping a criminal becomes a criminal act.

Objectivist Round Up

The 168th Round Up is up over at Rational Jenn

Utilize your faculties and take a look!

A Tale of Two Moralities

A Judge in Ontario recently struck down the laws concerning keeping a Bawdy house, and communication for the purpose of prostitution. Predictably the religious and other moral busy-bodies have come out in opposition to the ruling and are promising an appeal.

With the voices raised in "moral" opposition to the ruling calling for the reinstatement of the old laws, this article is calling for us to leave morality out of the prostitution debate... and that is wrong.

Prostitution is a degrading, dangerous and often demeaning profession. I can’t for the life of me think of one single reason why any person who has the least bit of intelligence, self respect or personal integrity would want to be a prostitute. In my opinion, the person who seeks sex for hire is a lonely, miserable creature seeking to ameliorate some personal psychological defect, and the person supplying it is most likely equally as damaged.

But that moral judgment on the physical and psychological act of prostitution is an issue separate from the meta-ethical assessment of prostitution as a profession. By meta-ethical in this instance I mean how we support or defend our ethical judgments.

Ayn Rand said “Morality ends where a gun begins”. Not only does this mean that one can not be commanded to act “morally” (as one would in normal circumstances) when confronted with the choice of life or death through force but also, and more importantly, that the initiation of force is itself immoral.

For me the question of meta-ethics rests on one thing the initiation of force (or fraud). It is the initiation of force against a human being that is immoral. So meta-ethically speaking something which does not initiate force is not immoral. Since prostitution, (the exchange of money for sex) as defined does not involve the initiation of force it is not immoral meta-ethically, and for this reason morality must remain a part of our current debate about prostitution.

While anyone and everyone has the right to pronounce moral judgments on the nature of the world’s oldest profession these are personal judgments only, and can not be ripped out of our minds to be used as an ideal which we then impose upon all people. This is true no matter how many (or few) of us may believe in that ideal.

The only meta-ethical reason for the prohibition of prostitution or any other act is the initiation of force against another human being. As defined, prostitution is a contractual agreement and is fundamentally no different than the purchase of any other tradesman’s labour and skill.

What we need with regard to this issue (and morality in general) is not to forget about it, but to discover it, and to differentiate between its personal and meta-ethical applications in our lives and in our governance.