THE TRUE NATURE OF ACTUAL
AND ETHICAL REALITY

One area that I’d like to get into now that we’ve covered the basics is whether there is such a thing as “enlightened self-interest” that can serve mankind. As you know in the “Dune” movie she asked, “Are you a human or are you just an animal?” What’s wrong with this is that animals are not altogether devoid of such “human” traits such as self-sacrifice for the benefit of the whole, or “democracy”. Today Thom Hartman was thumping one of his favorite melons. He was saying that corporations aren’t people and that they shouldn’t be accorded the rights of human beings. There should be an unlikely ally in this from the words of Rush Limbaugh in his having said, “an animal has no rights because he can’t contract together to obtain rights like we did with the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Man is there accorded certain “inailiable rights” and also is regarded according to Randall Terry of “being accorded certain divine grace, and also subject to divine laws”. But even the Calvary Chapels, whom I don’t like, can be said to have been accorded “certain inailable powers - - by God”. Because they are what they are and have the power they have because of God’s providence, and I or anyone is a fool to deny this. How you ask can an objectivist deist believe in things like “God’s laws” or “God’s graces”. That’s simple. Because in the words of the Document itself, such things are “Self Evident” and as such exist in this reality and we, be we friend or foe, have to deal with the awareness of that reality. But someone like Captain Piccard would argue that Business Corporations are not “Sensient Beings” and as such should not be accorded the rights of Personhood (although Piccard has at times accorded these rights to things that were clearly just machines) I learned as far back as my senior year in high school in business law that corporations had the rights of persons. But now Thom Hartman says that corporations lack these rights and should under the “death penalty” after a certain set time. According to Hartman, corporations used to need to have a “Reason for being” or a Charter, which explains all the altruistic functions of the corporation and why society would benefit by having them exist, somewhat akin to the Fairness Doctrine of the FCC. But now we learn that according to modern law that a corporations Primary purpose must be to make a profit. And this could become a problem in the area of health care where the primary purpose should be to insure and restore health to the public they serve. If only- - . It is pointed out that in all of Europe including Switzerland, that no for profit corporation is allowed to participate in the health care process. In England the government owns the hospitals and pays the doctors. In Germany and France these are private, but the insurance plan is provided by the government. Last week I heard a guy on the internet talking how single payer health plans could never work, but that doctors would only charge fees for unnecessary care and bankrupt the system. I cannot agree with this assertion. Like teachers, I believe most doctors would be happy just to be insured a decent income and they would give the patient all of the medical care that he deemed that he needed. It’s a question of who you trust. Do you trust the doctors more or the HMO insurers more? This question is virtually self-answering. The question is whether doctors can practice medicine in their own “enlightened self interest” and still provide the amount of medical care necessary and most expedient to the patient. I think it’s an experiment worth running. It’s a solution we have not yet tried in this country except on a much smaller scale. Let’s try out the system they have in France and Germany. In utilitarian terms it will benefit the increased health and “general physical welfare” of society. As such we will get better human beings, because things like mental health and the issues thereof will also be attended to. If you catch a condition in time it will not mushroom into a far more serious medical condition that requires a long, expensive hospitalization. After all we do have police and fire protection and nobody doubts that these things are part of “the commons”. It’s kind of a basic problem that you can’t turn back the hands of time to the 1950’s where the average person could easily afford a doctor. There are times in life where you have to account the past as so much “water under the bridge” and deal with the realities of society that we face now.

Let’s talk about objectivism today. The Wickepedia has a nice article on the subject. This article is closer to representing my own ideas of truth than just about any other writings I have come across. You’ve heard me state the truths in my blogs that the reality is in the thing being under scrutiny and not in the mind or “perception” of the viewer. There are at present completely unknown truths out there and this things are just as real as the things we are aware of, and once we learn of them we need to employ conscious, meaningful, rational terms to describe them. But of course one must have a rational, cognative mind devoid of any misleading engrams for this to be realized. Apparently Descartes speaks of a “veil of perception” and the claim is made that natural science believes in “representational reality” as its philosophical axiom. What is wrong with representational reality is- - we all know that a tree falling in the forest makes a sound, and this can be measured with sound waves. But one might say “suppose you were some as yet unknown and undefined organism and you perceived the sound of a tree falling as that of someone puking on the floor. Would this not be a valid “representation”? The problem is there is an axiom that you are your best source of information. It’s a bit akin to what some defence lawyers do in murder cases saying that someone else must have broken in and did the deed. You then run into the problem of what was in the mind of some imagined hypothetical suspect. The motive here is not to find reality but to deny it. It would be as if one of Phil Specter’s murdered victums went to some cosmic therapist in the afterlife who told them “You don’t know what was in Phil Specter’s mind” and then go into some rambling attack on the person’s character flaws and how they are not qualified to pass judgement on others. This thinking is off the mark. Whether Phil Specter uses and abuses women is not a subject of how I or anyone “feels about it” any more than my evaluation of Calvary Chapel theology and actions of its members is a function of how I “feel about it”. The truth of what Calvary is exists independent of whether I even exist. If I didn’t exist at all the truth of their character or the lack of it would remain unaltered. In like manner if I’m driving in the rain to a party and I get there and it’s pouring rain, coming down in buckets, and I remark to my wife, “boy, it sure is coming down now” this statement is true regardless of for instance a fish in the ocean who might protest “I’m surrounded by more water than you are so don’t complain”. It’s not a tribute to reality to deny the obvious. Likewise I would pose the question “Who is more qualified to say what a block of wood is. A theoretical scientists who specializes in subatomic particle physics, or a life long carpenter?” I give the nod to the carpenter. Because half of the things the scientists looks at and otherwise “deduces the existence of” with his electron microscope or cloud chamber- - half the things he observes are hypothetical constructions to begin with. Some may say that God has to exist because morality exists. But they don’t care to point to any rational scientific evidence that he actually does exist, they merely infer it. Certain aspects of morality are "self evident". But some people in order to hide their charished moral flaws would invoke an alltogether imaginary God and ascribe to said God certain "secret knowledge" about themselves and others that only they alone are privy to.

In the area of ethics, I believe that “enlightened economic greed” might work if everybody plays by the same rules. Of course people like Ronald Reagen and Bill Clinton changed a lot of established economic rules. Utilitarianism may well work- - provided everybody understands the rules and are not just “using the rules” to manipulate the situation to his own greed. Likewise, communism might work- - if people strictly adhere to it. But as David Duke or Tom Metzker may well point out- - it’s this mixing of messigenation of philosophies that gets you into trouble. Because you have separate philosophies designed to work unto them selves, getting all mixed up together creating only a big mess. Adam Smith's economics is a sound theory, in a vacuum. When you play a video game the assumption is made that it's played in the abstract and that no other realities are to be assumed, except the ones presented in the game. An important axiom in playing any game is you don't change the rules in the middle of the game. Human nature loves to change rules while a game is in progress, and the vast majority of the time they do this out of corrupt motives.