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Individualism and the Folkish State
by Dale Peterson
August 13, 2002
Preface
If, for no other reason than for my own kindness of heart, I explain this to
eyes whose capacity for reading rational sentences and reasonable paragraphs
is strained at best (such people are a bromide in today's world), I should
insist to the bearers of such eyes close them now, lest they be damaged.
Unfortunately for them, though, my capacity for kindness towards them is
strained at best.
I will therefore not go into tedious explanations of minor details here,
rather I will outline the general principles and core concepts
behind my thesis because I am writing to the man who can understand the
fundamentals and in his own mind can extrapolate the reasoning behind
details on his own. If you cannot comprehend these principles, if you expect
me to justify what is self-evident to a reasonable mind, or if you require
the 'proving' of such superfluosities, it would then appear that you are not
he.
Part I
Rationalism and Individualism
Any man who tells you that logic and reason are flaws of the mind is telling
you that he lives in a universe of infinite contradiction, and you should
take notice of such men, for their numbers on this planet right now are not
few, but many. He is not telling you that he is unintelligent, nor is he
telling you that his knowledge is lacking, but he is telling you that his
capacity for thinking alone is diminished. He might hold a Doctorate, he may
even be a Nobel Laureate; but you bear an honor which today is rarer and
more valuable to you than any that a dynamite inventor or professor in robes
could ever bestow: an intransigent mind. That is, a mind which thinks for
itself, though it might have only just realized that. You are the rational
intuitive, you think in a logical fashion, and you will reject a proposal
that is not conformant to that fashion no matter how many others accept it.
You are an individual, but your asset is that you realize it. You live in a
rational world. This does not benefit you any more than it does the
brillo-haired, radio-brained, 75-IQ 'equal' who might be flipping burgers
beside you, but once again your advantage is that you realize it -- Tyrone on
your right never will.
Though you may well possess an intransigent mind, and the chances of that
are higher than average if you're reading this right now, you may not have
realized something that multiplies the value of your already-precious mind
exponentially. That fact is that life, your life and my life, and the lives
of all the lemmings out there are ends in themselves. They can, however by
your or their or my choice, be made ends to the lives of others. The pursuit
of your happiness is the goal of your life, whether you find that happiness
in driving high-performance cars, firing off guns, collecting stamps, or in
experiencing the joy of raising children -- you seek it nonetheless. Nobody
else can experience it for you. While Bob gets a kick out of screaming down
the highway on his new Ducati, or Leroy does snorting shit out of a crack
pipe, their attainment of happiness does not make you any happier. Buying
Bob a new motorcycle or Leroy a vial of crack cocaine will benefit you in
absolutely no way. On the other hand, the attainment of happiness amongst
those you care about - your son, your daughter, your wife, your parents --
can in turn make you happy through their expression of that happiness and
your knowledge that in the contract of these people who have desired your
happiness and perhaps helped you attain it, that you have satisfied your
debt to them and performed likewise -- and are therefore happier in the
knowledge of your independence.
Sacrifice for another can take many forms, but the fundamental sacrificial
act is to, by your own volition, give up your life or a part of it to
another for a value less than its worth to you. Where is the reason in
willingly giving up something that is yours for the enjoyment of another who
will not give you enjoyment in return? There is no reason in such an
action -- a sacrifice is an act of irrationality. Though, I believe it is
important to clear up a common misunderstanding before I proceed. Rational
trade is undertaken where one man values something of another's, and seeks
its acquisition by the exchange of goods or services which the second man
values in an amount agreed by both parties depending upon how much they
value each other's objects of trade. When one man voluntarily sacrifices
something that he values, however little, to another man who may value that
same object or service more or even less, he is not participating in a
rational trade, but a fraud. Perhaps he was motivated out of pity -- but that
he should feel sorrow for the plight of another whose plight pains him none
defies reason. Perhaps he was motivated by charity, the idea that it is
better to give than to receive. But if this idea were true, who would we all
give to, for surely if it is immoral for you or I to be in receipt of
things, why is it not for others, so to whom shall we donate our valuables?
There is no sense in such ideas, ideas which have only come about through
mystics who through the centuries have built their gold and stone temples
and altars through convincing others of the virtue of sacrifice (usually on
their altars) and that greed was a flaw to be condemned. Those centuries of
conditioning have stuck in the paper moralities of the populace,
particularly of White peoples around the world, and it is now generally
accepted that it is better to be selfless than selfish, and better to be
charitable than greedy. There is no inherant evil in those mystics, not even
if they sincerely believed the destructive mysticism they preached from
their pulpits, and in fact the most rational people in the whole play would
of course have been the Machiavellian tyrants who knew what they were
preaching was patently false, and continued to do so in order to enrich and
empower themselves.
Sacrifice, as I stated before, is the voluntarily giving of your life or a
part of it (this of course includes things you have worked hours or minutes
of your life to acquire) to another for little or no benefit, but in any
case a benefit totaling less than the value of whatever it was you donated.
It is possible to give your life or a part of it to a cause, perhaps for no
tangible benefit, but a benefit all the same, if you feel the benefit
justifies the sacrifice. Justifying the sacrifice is the job of drill
sergeants and Army recruiters, as well as propagandists and politicians, and
the dead of many wars are as such not because of their lack of reason, but
because of their trust in leaders who lied to them, hence justifying the
trade of their physical life for a value in which they believed was greater
than it, but was in fact not. A man who enlists in an army in order to fight
for a cause in which he believes is worth dying for - and is. If the man
dies doing such, he is not the victim of fraud - it is slander on the mind
of the man to call such an act sacrifice - he is a man who traded the
remainder of his life for the lives of those he cares about which will be
benefited, however slightly, from his death. He wasn't a lamb to the
slaughter, he was a trader doing business. A woman who starves during a time
of food shortage in order to feed her son about whom she cares, is not
making a sacrifice. However if she starves such in order to feed the son of
the woman next door for whom she feels sorry -- or some Negroid savage in the
cannibal Congo who she saw bawling through fly-specked eyes on the
television -- it matters not, and in so doing allows her own son to starve --
that is making a sacrifice. In the first example the woman benefits in no
way, in the second she benefits from enjoying time with her son, and
enjoying the knowledge that her progeny will live a better life because of
her. Her actual benefit is therefore proportionate to her cost, unlike in
the former example where she was told her benefit would be proportionate to
her cost, but clearly is not. This is misrepresentation, and its
perpetrators, whose aims may be selfish or not, are making the woman a victim
of their fraud as are the men who send a man to die in war knowing that his
death will not benefit the cause they told him it would.
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Peterson's writings are archived here.
DALE PETERSON
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