SelfAdoration.com

In one of the links back to 2004 I cited when we illustrated why putative-liberty-lovers always side with their Marxist slave narrative-masters when it matters, I take apart the indefensible idea that human life begins at some arbitrary event – conception or birth, depending on the indefender.

As I argue at some length in Man Alive, humanity is an easily-identified objective condition that obtains in most but not all genetic Homo sapiens – for most but not all of each one of those individual people’s lives.

If not-defined-as-human tissue and organs are fair game, there’s a ton of dialysis relief down at the head-injury hospital. Ah, but we talk ourselves out of those sorts of opportunistic murders, don’t we? Mostly. For now. But once the principle is established that some Homo sapiens can be slaughtered on a pretext…

The actual political purpose of abortion-as-politics – the underlying Marxist strategic objective – is to cultivate a population capable of both effecting and surrendering to genocide.

As we see in this example – for all I know a temperature-taking trial balloon from Marxism Central – it’s working.

Yesterday was not the first time I heard about harvesting body parts from aborted babies. It was more than a decade ago, on an official-Objectivist weblog, that I first encountered this gruesome ideal. I ended up getting banned from the site, the normal case when I comment anywhere, and my remarks are long-since lost. I saved some of my thoughts at my own internet home at that time, and you can see them here, here and here. The Cliff’s Notes: Abortion is philosophically indefensible regardless of your objectives – and I can prove it.

But as with gay marriage, virtually all libertarians and Objectivists are on the wrong side of this issue. They insist that both are somehow context-free political matters, conveniently ignoring their own putatively-steadfast claims that individualism is the politics of egoism. That might not even matter, though, since their conceptions of egoism are so stunted and crippled as to be little more than laboriously reified whims. Accordingly, their defenses of these and other modern atrocities turn on utilitarian claims (just like the Supreme Court!), putting them squarely on the Marxist side in virtually every pubic debate.

The problem, thoroughly explicated in Man Alive, is that your rational self-interest consists of the rational interests of your self for your whole life – not just your appetites right now. Indulging a whim is not a self-loving act, it is carving a permanent scar into your self-image – an ineradicable mental wound that your memory will recall to your conscious attention again and again, for the rest of your life. To call anything like this a manifestation of egoism is a hideous – and obvious – philosophical error.

Here’s how to fix that error in your thinking, if you’d rather (more…)

From September of 2012, this is me at Richard Nikoley’s FreeTheAnimal.com talking about abortion in the context of nominally egoistic moral philosophies.

Quoting a comment from Richard:

Greg Swann has the best and only valid argument counter abortion: you have to live with yourself. Can you? Are you going to celebrate that act? Are you going to adore yourself over it?

I was half-disappointed that the big-O Objectivists at the 21 Convention did not attend to me. My assumption is that they simply had no idea who I am, although it’s plausible that Diana Hsieh or someone has spread the word about me. But I was only half-disappointed because, as we both know from days of yore, some big-O Objectivists can get ugly when they’re cornered. This is not a criticism of the specific individuals there. Eric Daniels seemed like a sweet guy, and Yaron Brook was quite a bit less of a True Believer than I was expecting. Even so, I was happy to do my stuff unmolested.

But my argument about abortion is something the big-O Objectivists need to address:

Politically, as a matter of human liberty, other people’s families — or pets or property — are none of my damn business. But having an abortion, performing one, encouraging one or paying for it are all morally-reprehensible acts. They cannot advance or enhance your own self-adoration, and, necessarily, they must retard and diminish your self-love, in the immediate moment and enduringly thereafter. It is not even necessary to look for real-life evidence of this argument, but, of course, that evidence abounds.

Do you want to dispute this? If one abortion enhances your self-love a little, will six abortions cause you to love your self a whole lot more? How about strangling kittens? Whether you like it or not, seeing your self committing atrocities is abhorrent to your mind, and no amount of rationalizing self-destructive behavior will turn vices into virtues.

You could argue that abortion or exposure can be exigently necessary — as, for instance, in extreme emergencies or when your family is already starving to death. But even then, the action cannot make you love (more…)

Rethinking your stand on abortion today? That seems wise to me. This is me in April of 2012 demonstrating why being involved in an abortion is necessarily self-destructive. –GSS

I have written a ton of polemical essays in my life, but I’ve never written an argument about abortion. Given the method for evaluating values in Chapter 7 of Man Alive, it’s not very difficult to work out.

That’s funny, isn’t it? The most contentious political issue in modern-day America, and I can address it in a way that seems to me to be incontestable in just a few lines. That’s the power of working from the right map of the universe.

Politically, as a matter of human liberty, other people’s families — or pets or property — are none of my damn business. But having an abortion, performing one, encouraging one or paying for it are all morally-reprehensible acts. They cannot advance or enhance your own self-adoration, and, necessarily, they must retard and diminish your self-love, in the immediate moment and enduringly thereafter. It is not even necessary to look for real-life evidence of this argument, but, of course, that evidence abounds.

Do you want to dispute this? If one abortion enhances your self-love a little, will six abortions cause you to love your self a whole lot more? How about strangling kittens? Whether you like it or not, seeing your self committing atrocities is abhorrent to your mind, and no amount of rationalizing self-destructive behavior will turn vices into virtues.

You could argue that abortion or exposure can be exigently necessary — as, for instance, in extreme emergencies or when your family is already starving to death. But even then, the action cannot make you love your self more and must make you love your self less. Again, existentially, in real life, there are no counter-examples. Too much the contrary.

Obviously, I am arguing from my own ethical system, but since that system is based in (more…)

It’s absurd to try to hold Marxists accountable to their claims. They’re out for power, not justice or mercy or fairness. But you can have a little fun with them by hitting them with the arguments in this week’s Church of Splendor homily: “Gun control for free men: Disarm the Feds!”

I made a series of videos in 2014 for The 21 Convention on love, sex, marriage and family. Anthony Johnson dissolved our affiliation after I spoke at his event last fall in Tampa, in the process blocking access to the videos I had produced for him. I had most of these, all but the earliest few. Anthony restored the last of those few to me this week, and I could not be more delighted.

The videos I got back this week are the first three I made, in January and February of last year, and the three together are a nice clinic on my ideas about marriage, including early forms of many of the arguments than made it in to Father’s Day.

Here are the three videos in chronological order:

1. How to make love like it’s New Year’s Eve every day.

2. The Runaway Minivan: Families fail when fathers won’t lead.

3. Do you want to end the day married? Start the day married!

There are two kinds of people in the world. The other kind is not me.

I love that joke, but only because it is so riotously true – of everyone. We are each one of us in an empathy of opposites with everyone else, and the hardest job for any of us is to acknowledge that simple fact.

I have things better than anyone else, I think, because I am apparently 180° opposed to everyone. Almost no one sees the world my way, nor I theirs. That might make me wrong. It might make me crazy. Or it might mean you’re getting a whole lot wrong. Guess which way I’m betting?

Here’s the good news: If you are ass-backwards about everything, this is an easy malady to mend. All you have to do is turn around…

And so to Church:

With a glance back to The Desperation Waltz, we take on the aftermath of the Charleston shooting and sundry other cargo-cult rain dances, illustrating why you are wise to focus on those values nearest and dearest to your self.

I love the human mind, but there is a certain dismaying irony to telling living organisms that being alive and loving it are not just appropriate but completely normal and natural.

How screwed up is your thinking? When I say that my best advice to any organism is “look out for your own” – you want to argue with me.

Keep your own counsel – oh, yes, do. But the survivors of these messes will have lived my way. If you don’t look out for your own, it will be swept away in the maelstrom.

How’s that for church?

“Can the bacteria in your gut explain your mood?” It’s dancing microbes all the way down in Times Square, which is why you need the intestinal fortitude Man Alive provides:

As a sort of pocket-reference to the kinds of bogus arguments made about your mind – claims you will see everywhere if you look for them – take note of these three general categories:

1. “We now know we know nothing!” Either your mind is inherently unreliable or the world outside your mind is fundamentally incomprehensible.

2. “Your good behavior is not to your credit, but at least your bad behavior is not your fault!” The actions you think of as being morally good or evil are either causally unavoidable or are caused by something other than your free will – hormones, brain chemistry, genes, brain defects, drugs, diseases, your upbringing, your environment, your wealth or poverty, memes, etc.

3. “Dancing bears are just like us!” Either animals such as apes or dolphins (or even “artificially intelligent” computer programs) are just as smart as you, or you are just as flailingly ignorant as an animal.

Note that all three of these categories are self-consuming: To uphold them, necessarily, is to deny them. If we know we know nothing, then we must know at least that one something – begging the question of how we can know even that little bit of nonsense. If the human will is not free, I cannot will myself to persuade you of this claim – nor even simply to make it – and you cannot will yourself either to accept or reject it. And if your mind works “just like” an animal’s brain, then you cannot discover anything at all about how your mind works, nor record or communicate your findings. Do you doubt me? If so, please have your pet or your software project write a peer-reviewed paper denouncing my egregious intellectual arrogance. No one believes this hogwash. They just want for you to believe it – or at least not dare to challenge it.

Satire is maledy in my formulation: Regardless of the jokes, the action of the story will move from better to worse. To make this fly with audiences, satirists will affect to inject a creamy filling into the bitter pill, but the objective of the work is not to illuminate pain’s relief but, instead, to make the agony even more excruciating.

Another way of saying the same thing: Satire is a public Loki joke. A joke has a seller and a buyer, a comic and his audience. But a Loki joke comes with a third party, the target. The buyer will laugh, but the target will not, and the target’s pain makes the joke that much funnier to the buyer. In private, a Loki joke can be affectionate, play-fighting in the form of teasing. In public, a Loki joke is almost always aggressive. Satire is always aggressive, and the risk of retaliation to the satirist becomes part of the joke, too.

I punished you with brutal satire this week, and I haven’t punished you nearly enough with the guitar lately, so for my Father’s Day Church of Splendor service, I elected to do something different: A Father’s Day card.

Here’s to the man with a plan:

#RachelDolezal and #CaitlynJenner are softening up black voters to accept #MichelleObama as America’s first tranny #POTUS. Is that true? Who knows? But it sure is funny…

Sunday at The Church of Splendor:

Killing a man slowly is no kindness.

After mocking the left for their creepy embrace of the man formerly known as relatively dignified, I take up the black bug of libertarianism: What to do about the poor?

I think the post-Randian dodge – private charity – is beyond stupid, but even then it is not so stupid as the political proscriptions of the risible Dark Enlightenment.

Here’s the hard truth: What happens after the Federal Reserve Bank bounces its last check may turn out to be very libertarian. As we discuss in the video, I expect it to be very Hoplite in its politics, for the same reasons the Hoplites were Hoplites. But as for what happens to the vast hordes of tax-payer dependents – the news is not good.

Cited in the video: The essay Meet the Third Thing and my anarchism FAQ.

This week’s Church of Splendor homily is an extension of that FAQ, the answer to what is seemingly the most difficult question libertarians face – and the one they are most disingenuous in answering.