Movie of the week: Evangelizing egoism, abortion and the prudent predator, more on the subjunctive and the works of Richard Mitchell.

This week’s video and podcast are linked below. The headline summarizes the content fairly well. With respect to the subjunctive, I’m hitting four ideas fairly briefly: Wanting, dreading, fearing the disapproval of other people and trying to have efficacy in the past. I mention a post I wrote at SplendorQuest.com called How you came to be enslaved — and how you can free yourself:

You live your life cowering in terror of one imaginary catastrophe after the next, but every one of those supposed disasters really is the same one fear: You live in horror of being on the wrong side of someone else’s bad opinion of you. You can come up with as many names as you like for that horror — shame, guilt, fear, embarrassment, mortification — but these all come down to the same thing, to be the object of public opprobrium — any disapproval at any time, from anyone or any group of people. Your only real hope for safety is to become one with the group, whichever group you happen to be in at that moment. If the massed force of collective scorn is to be deployed, your furtive hope is to be among the folks doing the sneering or snickering, not the poor sap being held up to public ignominy.

Here are links to other posts cited in the video:

Evangelizing egoism.

The morality of abortion. There is a link within that post to a google search of “prudent predator” arguments.

The works of Richard Mitchell.

And with that, on to the show. The audio-only version of this video is lined below, or you can find it on iTunes.

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