My answer, always: Live for your own sake, in pursuit of your own values, in behalf of your own loved ones – starting with yourself.Photo by: Kalyan Chakravarthy
Here’s why: Because there is no good side to his arguments. To be anti-family is to be anti-humanity. I don’t waste time on people who are wrong at the second value in the hierarchy of human values – and wrong in the way that best destroys the first, self-adoration. Stefan Molyneux could not be better news to Marxists if he were in their pay.
I am amused to discover that I’ve been an anti-Molyneuxvian for decades without even knowing it. For example, what should you do about your obnoxious relatives? Defoo them? Kill them before they kill you? Or simply take them as they are?
Cultivate indifference. I will not make the world more beautiful by making my own soul ugly. If I don’t care for the turn of conversation at the dinner table, there is always something fun to hear about at the kid’s table.
What will your life look like in fifty years as a result of the choices you’re making today?
How can you begin to heal the wounds you have inflicted upon yourself and the people you love?
All of this is all the same thing to me: Cultivate indifference and press on regardless. What matters is what matters to me, and if I am too busy living my life to attend to yours – that’s what your life is for. Meanwhile, if my crate is always all-the-way full of my oranges, there is no way for you to stick me with one of your lemons.
Building on that argument, consider the problems of the practical anarchist. You will note that I don’t talk much about anarchism. Why is that so? Three reasons:
1. I’ve already done what I need to do for now.
2. I don’t need to worry about adding more until someone makes it through Chapter 11 of Man Alive without gagging, retching or otherwise displaying the dismaying inability to accept facts as facts.
3. I don’t need to, anyway: Everyone who understands my moral philosophy will be, in consequence, a lot more of an anarchist than any of the people who call themselves anarchists today. So long as any political theory is devoted to the idea of other-control, you can know with certainty that that theory – whatever it is – is extra-ethical, since morality consists solely of self-control. (Every sort of faux-ethical argument that proceeds from the outside-in, instead of the inside-out, is similarly erroneous as such.)
More questions:
How does an anarchist change things?
If your freedom requires that everyone else wake up to the promise of liberty, you’re doomed. It won’t happen. The closest we ever got was 1776, and that was dead 13 years later. But you don’t need a massive worldwide epiphany. All you need to do is to structure your life so that the shark would rather not eat you.
Two words: Pursue indestructibility.
I’m asking how you, Greg Swann, exercise this truth in a system designed to thwart you at every turn.
I don’t let it. That’s all. I don’t live for pain – for suffering, for doubt, for any sort of negative value. I just don’t.
Be who you are. Do what you want. Have what you love.
If some bad person tries to stop you – whether that bad person is a statist thug or just a freelance criminal – this does not actually matter, no more than it matters that a moth might try to eat your sweater.
And here’s the best news of all: No one is actually trying to stop you. Freelance criminals mainly prey on each other, and statist thugs are lazy slugs. Their hope is that they can induce a fear in you that is great enough that you will enslave yourself. If you choose not to do this, no one will know, no one will care, and no one will do anything about it.
But: You will not rid the world of cannibals by eating them. If you choose to become a bad person – as a twisted route to what you perceive as being the good – no one else will become a good person in consequence. You will have increased – not decreased – the quantity of endemic, epidemic, systemic crime.
My answer, always: Live for your own sake, in pursuit of your own values, in behalf of your own loved ones – starting with yourself. You owe nothing to other people – and they detest, abhor and will rebel against what you’re proposing anyway.
Short of killing me, no other person can stop me from being who I am. But I can do that, or pretend to do it, as a matter of choice. But, if I do, I will have annihilated the only human life I can have – for no reason whatever. Other people cannot control me, no matter what, even if I affect to pretend that I have surrendered myself to their control.
How can you be free? You already are free. You cannot be anything other than free. Stop telling yourself lies. That’s all.
