Immigration Policy

While I favor a welcoming and less expensive immigration legal process than the one we have, it is important that the individual rights of Americans and those in the USA legally as residents or visitors be protected. The context of individual rights requires that those who would enjoy them must also honor the right of others to enjoy them. People known to have acted in violation of others individual rights in other countries should be culled from the pool of those allowed to immigrate to the USA. They have no right to expect the rights we Americans are supposed to protect for one another. The legal process for immigration that the Constitution wisely assigns Congress to create in law is a rational recognition of this context for individual rights. We have a legal process created by Congress and flawed as it is, it should be enforced as the Rule of Law requires. I would like to see many improvements in the immigration laws, but it is important that government review the character of those wanting to immigrate to the USA for the worst misfits for a society that values individual rights.

Context should also be applied to the anchor baby issue. The Constitution both states that Congress will create immigration laws and that those born in the USA are citizens of the USA. Congress having established a legal immigration policy and the federal government having enforced it in accordance with the Rule of Law, there are not supposed to be any illegal immigrants in the USA. The writers of the Constitution no doubt made those born in the USA citizens in that context. Making children born to illegal immigrants citizens violates the context and creates the horror situation of legally having to deport their parents even as the children are incorrectly deemed citizens. Context properly held, those born of illegal immigrants should not be considered citizens.

Context is again critical to the issue of Muslim immigrants. For those Muslims who believe that the use of force to make others practice Islam or to prevent those born into Islam from leaving is a requirement of their religion, the context of freedom of conscience is violated. Freedom of religion is a subset of that broader freedom of conscience. As with every right, the right can only be claimed and enjoyed by those willing to allow all others that equal right to freedom of conscience. It is entirely rational to prevent the immigration of those who practice the religion of Islam and who believe that it requires them to use force to prevent others from enjoying their equal right to freedom of conscience. Doing so is not an infringement of freedom of religion as it is often claimed to be, but a recognition of the critical context in which all individual rights can be exercised.

What is a Strong Man?

The trait I am talking about is one of character, not of physical capability. A physically strong man is still a weak man if he cannot wisely direct his strength to achieve the goals appropriate to man. The key to providing that direction to action lies in our minds, in particular in our commitment to rational thought. The man of real strength thinks independently with his own mind nearly constantly in gear. He busily examines the physical and the societal events going on about him and he is a careful observer. He assesses and evaluates what he observes to make as much sense of it as he can, taking care to learn from his past experience those principles which will make it possible for him to quickly and efficiently identify the actions he will need to take in the present filled with new events. These events always do require the strong man to take action to deal with them. If a man has not learned the necessary principles from the past and his personal experience correctly, then he cannot assert himself appropriately in action. The strong man has developed good principles for action, while the weak man either has no principles or has chosen his principles with insufficient attention and rational thought. The weakest man is that man with no meaningful principles.

So, the strength of a man is critically tied to his principles and also to his commitment to preserving, protecting, and defending those principles. You might note that I have borrowed the exact phraseology here in the oath the inaugurated President of the United States takes with respect to the Constitution of the United States. A weak, unprincipled President is one who does not share and then act decisively upon the remarkable principles of the Constitution. The strong President does. But every man is given the choice to be strong or to be weak, not just the President. Every man must formulate his principles and must be willing to stand by them and promote them. If he does not, then he is a weakling. Then he is not manly, or we might say that he is not a man.

What are the principles that a strong man holds? First, he is very strongly committed to thinking for himself and performing his own analytical assessment of history and making his own critical evaluations of his personal experience. He knows what he knows and he knows what he does not know. He is careful to make the distinction between the two and he seeks to reduce the realm of what he does not know constantly. On the basis of what he does know, he acts decisively, with commitment and energy, to manage his own life. He respects that others must do the same with respect to their lives. What he does not allow is that others use force to make him manage his own life according to their values. He asserts his own chosen values as the goals in his own life. He does not require others to take on his values, but he does not allow others to assert that they have the right to impede him in his pursuit of his values, so long as he does not initiate the use of force against them. If others initiate the use of force against him to impede him from pursuing his values, then he recognizes those who have initiated the use of force as his enemies and he will fight them as best he can to protect his greatest value, his own life.

It is very common to hear weak men assert that the strong man must submit to the will of the majority. They, having no rationally determined principles and being clueless in dealing with reality because of it, will commonly bend to the majority, who themselves may have no rationally determined principles for managing their own lives. They feel so uncertain in the process of their self-management, that they simply wish to consign that responsibility elsewhere. In medieval times, they consigned it to the local strongman, who may have consigned his own life to that of a king. It has always been difficult for the strong man of principle to get others around him to agree that he should be allowed to manage his own life. In fact, the weak men, who in most societies through most of history, have been the majority, are envious of the strong man and his ability to manage his own life in accordance with his self-determined principles. Commonly, such men are hated.

In the 18th century, a great phenomena occurred in a few geographical areas of western Europe and in a part of North America. As a result of thought during the Age of Enlightenment and the work of some thinkers first in England, Scotland, and France, it became recognized that man needed the freedom to think for himself and to manage his own life on the basis of the principles that he formulated himself. There came to be a new recognition of the individuality of man and of his individual rights. In the 13 colonies of North America which became the United States of America, particularly large numbers of men who had long had to rely primarily upon themselves to conquer the wilderness and who had long been able to enjoy a state of minimal government intrusion upon their lives, became enraged when England from so far away tried to impose a heavier hand of government upon them. They were not used to being forced to bend to the will of others and being forced to deny their own values for those chosen for them by others. They rebelled and after a long and brutal struggle against the most powerful military country of that time, they became independent. After some experimenting with a national government, which they initially did not get quite right, they instituted the constitutionally-limited federal government committed to the defense of the rights of the individual. This was the start of the greatest experiment ever conducted by man in all of man's history.

Could a people highly committed to not using force as the means to achieving their values succeed in achieving those values? The great lesson of the 19th century was the incredible growth of the United States of America under a constitution which the people largely lived in accordance with. The one great problem was the ongoing existence of slavery in America, which had been characteristic of all prior human experience and was still very common in most of the world when Americans threw that yoke off their necks in the Civil War. The country, largely minus the South, then surged forward with huge numbers of people living better than any people had ever lived before. The great experiment that people could live in a society without using force to take the income, wealth, and labor of others by force to do the will of a majority, or some minority, or some powerful tyrant, proved to be an obvious huge success. Men were generally expected to be strong and most were. The free market where men could voluntarily exchange ideas, labor, and capital worked marvelously to allow many individuals to define their own values and to pursue them in a uniquely harmonious way.

In the 19th century, men in many countries in Europe, where many fewer people had ever come to believe that societies could refrain from the constant use of force to constrain others to live in accordance with the values of the rulers of those societies, there were increasing numbers of people who were dissatisfied. Many of them emigrated to the United States, or to Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, or Latin America to escape their lowly station in Europe. Periodically, there were rebellions in Europe by many of the people, but they were always put down with brutal force. Among the confused people, socialism more and more began to take hold. Bismarck bent to the pressure for socialism and began implementing it in Prussia and then in the German states influenced or controlled by Prussia. In the early 20th century, the socialist Woodrow Wilson had even become President of the United States, and he was followed by the socialists Lenin in Russia, Mussolini in Italy, Hitler in Germany, and Franco in Spain. Lesser socialists held power in the United Kingdom and in France at times. Totally unsurprisingly, the men of these societies were soon at each other's throats, since there is no way for socialist societies to allow individuals to pursue their own values and there is no reason for the various destructive states to stop at chewing up the lives of their own people when they can chew up the neighboring people. This allows these regimes based on envy and the destruction of wealth and the human mind, to prolong their inevitable collapse. The 20th century was an often brutal century, which the people of Eastern Europe were particularly able to attest to when they finally emerged from the collapsed socialist paradises there.

The great lesson of the 20th century was that the free market and political systems which recognized the rights of the individual worked much better than did socialism. This was an experiment which should never have had to be performed. The reasons for socialism's failure are as clear as those against rule by an inherited aristocracy. The framer's of the Constitution could easily have explained to Marx and Engels, Lenin, Mussolini, and Hitler why their ideas of political rule were despicable and unworkable. But, huge human misery was endured to perform this very unnecessary experiment. Germany and Italy collapsed in World War II, Franco lingered on and Spain fell into constant despair and ruin, and most dramatically, the Soviet Union finally collapsed and was found to be a hollow shell. Even the socialist state of Sweden found it necessary to greatly reduce its taxes and to make it easier for businesses to survive, to stem the flow of capable people out of the country.

So, at this point, one might think that men of strength would predominate. Strangely enough, the newly freed countries of Eastern Europe have moved to dismantle their welfare states and have lowered taxes and other forced takings from the people greatly. Their economies have boomed and men have become much stronger in those countries. This has put pressure on many countries in western Europe to reduce taxes. Ireland and Iceland have greatly reduced their tax rates. Strangely enough, those countries which have reduced tax rates have actually greatly increased government revenues, as their economies surged ahead. Many Europeans are becoming stronger, after a century of weakness.

In the United States, we have decided that we want to ignore this great victory of the free market and limited government. We have decided that the envy that powers socialism to destroy human ability and long built-up wealth is somehow the moral way to feel. Americans have decided that the individual must give up his rights, which they have been reducing by emasculating the Constitution for a very long time. We just elected a President whose one central principle is his commitment to the destruction of individualism and the rights of the individual. He calls it selfish to be an individual. He claims that there is no reason in the nature of man for a man to have the right to manage his own life. He believes that no man has the right to personal convictions, but must receive and accept the values and goals given to him by some group consensus. Flying in the unforgiving teeth of history, Obama wants to force America into the socialist experiment which failed so utterly in the Soviet Union, Germany, Italy, Spain, Cuba, China, North Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Honduras, Venezuela, and all of Eastern Europe. Make no mistake, this very weak man is leading us into a repeat performance of the total failure of socialism.

In foreign policy, he will perform with the same strength of conviction in America's individualistic and free market heritage as Jimmy Carter did. The bullies of the world will rejoice and will be certain to take advantage of the American weakness. We will beg them to like us by giving them handouts of the wealth which Americans worked hard to build. The socialist and bully governments will use the handouts, as they always have, to squeeze their people tighter and suffocate them controls and propaganda. Will Ragnar appear when we need him to prevent this nonsense? Countries will shoot at our military again, they will hijack international trade, and terrorists will have many safe havens. Obama will be a slave to what he thinks World Opinion is. An early show of this is the announced closing of Guantanamo Bay. He cannot release the prisoners there and will not do so, since they are too dangerous. Many prisoners already released are still there because they will not return to their own countries for fear of prosecution there. All Obama can do is set up special courts to consider each prisoner, but those courts will wind up functioning very much like Bush's military tribunals, so this entire act is the pretense of a weak man. It is a fraud, which much of world opinion will be happy to lap up because much of the world thinks he is the Messiah.

One of the most common themes of the weak man is that America does not have the right to force other people to be free. Indeed, they claim that others have the right to choose to be as unfree as they want to be. This utterly neglects the fact that in all geographic regions of the world there are some men strong enough that they wish to be free to manage their own lives and to pursue their own happiness. However few there may be, they have the right to do so and those, however many there may be, who insist on initiating the use of force to prevent them from managing their own lives, are performing the ultimate evil act among men. The few men who wish to be free have every right to oppose those who are trying to suppress them with force. They also have every right to accept the help of others who wish to help them to be free. Francisco's blazing weapons would be rightly welcomed by many throughout the world.

The U. S. government is not obliged to help everyone who wishes to be free to become so, but we are not performing an evil deed by doing so, unless the cost is too great for the American people to choose to be of help. They have that choice. They may make it because they value their right to trade freely with other free people in the world. They may make it because they know that unfree countries are often security threats or may be havens for terrorists. They may choose to help because every free mind is an innovative mind and will add to the general advance of knowledge. Of course, they are allowed to consider the costs of fighting those who wish to impose their tyrannical will on others in their geographic area. The weak man usually argues that the tyrannical majority in that area have the right to impose their will by force upon those who would be free and we are wrong to impose our will that they not use such force upon them. They try to frame this as a moral equivalency, though clearly it is not. It takes little to make a weak man happy with his rationalizations for failing to assert his independence of mind and action!

On the more important home front, Obama will eagerly continue to gobble up as much of private enterprise as possible. He will reduce the sphere of voluntary trade between Americans and replace it with political power plays. It has already become very clear that his economic czar has been acting very much like a despot already as a lower official under Bush in picking which big political contributor companies will receive government bailout money and which will be taken over by others or allowed to fail. The complaints in the banking industry have been loud and with great justification. It has become clear that bailouts go to those who have the best political connections. The general welfare is clearly not of primary concern. The only reason to bailout the Big 3 automakers is the political decision to continue the benefits and power of the auto workers unions. Rationally, these companies badly need to be allowed to fail. But, the weak men who ran the Bush administration, the still weaker men of the Obama administration, and the weak men of the Congress, do not have the priniciples men need to live independent lives and to maintain respect for the rights of the individual. They have pushed us into the failing world of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. We are living in a nation of group think, which is, of course, an oxymoron.

Obama attended church with the Rev. Wright for 20 years and clearly had to have bought into the low group think of that church, in which the black American was a long suffering victim oppressed by the evil white man. Instead of seeking what black Americans could readily take for themselves, control and the management of their own lives, they sought special favors and reparation payments for the wrongs of southern slavery. They sought these handouts from the ancestors of the northerners who expended their lives in the hundreds of thousands to free the slaves, from the ancestors of the many Americans who first came here after the Civil War, and from people who never discriminated against anyone except on the basis of their individual character. The Rev. Wright demanded respect for every black American based not on their individual character, but on the fact that they belonged to a group as identified by their skin color. Obama bought into this nonsense. Now, he says he is a post-racial President.

We will see. But what we know for sure is that he is a group thinker who believes that harming the most capable and responsible men by transferring their income, wealth, and time to those who are less capable and responsible is a good thing. This is the form that slavery now takes in the U.S., where we no longer enslave men based on their skin color, but we enslave them instead based on their ability and responsibility. The more able and responsible a man is the heavier his chains. This viewpoint is anti-American. The great American principle is that each man has the right to think for himself, choose his own values, manage his own life, and pursue his own happiness. His obligation is to respect this same right of others and he does that simply by not initiating the use of force against them.

These are the American principles that Obama wishes to overthrow, along with the Constitution which supports them, by instituting socialist government. Socialism cannot allow individualism. It must suppress it. This means that it must wrest control over a man's life from him and substitute group control. It must do all it can to keep a man from thinking for himself and provide him with the substitution of a stream of group-thought propaganda. This is the world of weak Obama men. The strength of the American man is to be immasculated as our freedom of action in transportation, financial investments, medical decisions, energy use, food consumption, home buying, and an endless stream of other choices are wrenched away from us with the brutal threat of force if we resist. Socialism is wedded to the replacement of voluntary action with forced response. This is un-American and it is the weak man's heart of evil.

Obama - "A is not A."

The President is the executive in our Federal Government whose job is to Constitutionally execute the laws Constitutionally passed by Congress. Great care was taken in formulating the powers of the office, because the Framers of the Constitution were acutely aware that tyrants had arisen throughout history to take over governments. They feared tyrants about as much as they did anarchy. They were also very perceptive in understanding that the passions of men caused democracies to frequently become tyrannical or turn to or fall to tyrants. They therefore feared democracy and took great pains to set up a Constitutionally-limited Republic which would resist both tyrants and fickle, fragile democratic fads and fancies.

Previously, the greatest threats to the rights of the individual which the Constitution was constructed to preserve and defend, were the presidencies of Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Each of these men was at once a self-proclaimed pragmatist and an admirer of socialism. On the one hand, their viewpoint was commonly guided by a socialist's outlook and view of history, while on the other hand, they frequently eschewed ideas and ideology in favor of the idea that they could make things work, without having to clearly state the criteria for when things worked and without principles to guide them to the actions that were likely to work.

Roosevelt, with his combination of uncritically analyzed socialist preferences and lack of principles, madly experimented with massive transfers of manpower and wealth from the private sector to government and from the able and responsible in the private sector to the unable and the irresponsible wherever they were to be found. In the process, he created huge uncertainty. He also raised tax rates to very high levels for those able enough to maintain good incomes, thereby causing many of them to work less hard to create jobs. He raised wages for some (usually union workers) so high with mandates, that many others could not be employed at all. His socialist viewpoint and mad pursuit of unprincipled experimentation, deepened and greatly lengthened the Great Depression.

Yesterday, Barack Hussein Obama took the oath of office for the presidency, by swearing to "preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States." This was a blatant lie. He is on record with his belief that the Constitution is highly defective because it does not require or even allow the redistribution of wealth and income which he believes is essential to "social justice." The only justice that actually exists is individual justice, just as the only human rights that exist are individual rights. Obama's so-called "positive rights", which require some men to serve others. Positive rights and his idea of social justice, are the means to allow and enable the tyranny of a socialist leader at the expense of the individual citizen. To gain support for a tyrannical socialist rule through his creation of positive rights and social justice, he calls upon us to be selfless. He calls upon us to forget the individual nature of our minds, bodies, and souls. He calls upon us to forget our individual values and life goals. When we have given up our selfish claim to our minds, bodies, souls, values, and goals, we become putty in the hands of the tyrant. This is especially the case if he has a mesmerizing voice, which appeals to the mindless passions of many.

We are asked to give the new President, if a man bent upon the destruction of the Constitution can be called the President, a chance to succeed. This sounds like a call to fairness. It is not really. It is a call to allow him to get fully up to speed in his efforts to trample the rights of the individual.

We are generally told that we should respect others and often even to respect their values, no matter what their character may be. Frankly, this makes the concept of respect meaningless. Respect only exists as a recognition of good character. What we should do is to give every individual in civilized society the benefit of some provisional respect while we are in the process of evaluating their character. When their character is sufficiently assessed, then the respect may become more solid or it may have to be replaced by disgust and disdain. We are obliged to weigh a person's character, not to approve of it no matter what.

I have had months to weigh the character of B.O. and it is fundamentally lacking in gravitas. The gravitas suggested by his voice is a fraud. This man consistently leads the attack on the rights of the individual. The battle for the preservation and defense of the rights of the individual is now and has always been the overriding moral issue of anyone's time. Because it is specifically the duty of the President of the United States to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution, which is the primary instrument for preserving, protecting, and defending the rights of the individual, it is crucial to evaluate the character of each President before he might become President. Obama is clearly committed to socialism and to tyranny. Their pursuit nullifies his claim to be President or the man who sees that government operates Constitutionally. He claims to be A, but he does not have the nature of A. His character is such that he belongs in the lowest levels of hell. That is my studied evaluation of this man.

It is most unfortunate that the first African-American elected President is a man of such abominable character. The man who one wishes might symbolize the rise of African-Americans from slavery to acknowledged respectability, is the would-be tyrant our Constitution was supposed to protect us from. This is a man who would enslave every American, not a man who will celebrate the freedom of each and every individual. This is a man who celebrates the incompetent, the irresponsible, and the corner-cutter at the expense of men of good character who are competent, responsible, and hardworking. This man weighs everyone's character and then most enslaves those he finds to have the better character. Good character becomes a fault in the eyes of Obama's government.

Those of us who love the rights of the individual have no obligation to give this would-be tyrant a chance to succeed as President. When he pursues a socialist goal, he is wrong and he should be immediately stopped. He should be given no grace period. This is the fight of our lives. If and when he should do something right, we will recognize that. Given his grotesque character, we cannot expect that he will do much right. It is a tragedy whenever an American President does not understand his job and is not committed to the values recognized by our Constitution. They are all failures as President. It is unfortunate that we can already tell that our first African-American President will be a failure, barring a miracle of self-resurrection on Obama's part. Such a self-resurrection would ironically partially justify his Messiah image, though it is clear that those who think of him now as the Messiah would be disillusioned if he did come to understand the critical nature of the rights of the individual and the virtue of selfishness.

Individuality and Loneliness

There is a constant tension between asserting one's individuality and feeling welcome within a group. In fact, we are all very complex and differentiated individuals and we are also mostly social animals. Many of the most difficult choices we make in life are the result of a tug of war between our desire to be ourselves and our desire to be well-regarded and welcomed by others. In a rational world full of benevolent and tolerant people, the tension in this rope would be reduced, but it would always still be significant with most of the people who may hold the other end of the rope. Of course, they will be different in their capabilities, interests, and values in most cases from ourselves. This is simply a consequence of the complexity and the many differences that exist among people.

To start life, we are different in many ways at birth. We are so complicated at the level of initial biochemistry, that many differences exist between us already. Then, we start experiencing the world and interacting with other people and we each have a unique experience with unique exposures to stimuli from reality. Then, we each make a constant stream of choices in our thoughts and in our actions which have consequences unique to our own life. In the end, there can be no question but that each of us is a highly complex and differentiated individual. This in turn means that if you put any two people on the opposite ends of the rope, there will be tension in that rope. Two sisters at opposite ends of the rope will find times when the tension is great, as will two lovers, two scientists, two farmers, two historians, two philosophers, two friends, two bloggers, two unionists, and two businessmen. The tension is always present at some level.

If we consider even just fairly common traits, we do not find it easy to match two people up on any fairly substantial, yet quite finite set of traits. People have a tendency to be distributed across wide ranges, often along a bell-shaped curve, for given traits. Of course, many people may be close to the maximum of the curve for a given trait, but any two people who are close for that trait may be far apart on the distribution curve for another significant trait. For instance, suppose you are trying to match two people for intelligence, talkativeness, energy level, political beliefs, religious beliefs, and sexual preferences. As we know, it is difficult even with such a limited set of traits to find someone who matches any given individual. In real life, especially if one is looking for a marriageable mate, the number of traits that may be of importance is much greater. We would have to add such items as desire for children, manner of handling money and finances, preferences in homes, driving technique, sharing versus specialization in chores, how to entertain friends, how to interact with each other's family, and how to respond to each other's career needs. Bringing any two lives together is a very challenging task. This is true in many realms beyond that of two marriage partners.

The rope is always under tension. Yet, we are social animals. We want to receive and give affection, we want to exchange ideas, goods, and services, and we want to enjoy and appreciate others who are goal-directed living beings faced with many of the same challenges in life that face us. So, we want to find those to hold the other end of the rope who will not yank us off our feet and will allow us to be the individuals we are. At least, this is what we do if we are rational, because we realize that it is important to also be the individual we are. Less rational people will often try to diminish their individuality to belong comfortably within a large group of people, so they can have any number of people from that group at the other end of the rope without being yanked off their feet. In the Northeastern US and California, many people looking for some large group to belong to will decide to share in the socialist and Europeanized vision of government and society. In the heartland, many people will seek this common ground in a Christian community. In India, they seek it most commonly in Hinduism and the caste system. In Northern Africa and parts of southern Asia, they find it in Islam. Of course, this and other aspects of the common culture in these areas are only a part, though a substantial part, of an effort to reduce the tension in the rope. Most of these efforts involve a considerable sacrifice of individuality and with that a pain of its own.

How much pain there was and how much people had a need to express their individuality has been made very clear by the advent of the Internet and the now widespread communication channels opened between countless individuals seeking to find those who lie on the bell-shaped curve for a given interest or trait near them. For instance, maybe as many as 0.01% of Americans consider themselves to be Objectivists. Despite this small number, there are at least a dozen forums for Objectivists to discuss ideas, each with its own unique flavor. Or, consider the general distain for explicit sex and its public discussion. Yet, the internet is heavily trafficked with hordes of people trying to express their individuality in sexuality which they would never express within their local community. The Internet has become a tool also for finding that mate who might best be a match for marriage. It provides a means to filter through far larger numbers of people than one could ever meet in one's local community or travel to see and it allows people to assert their individuality without as great a risk that it will be discovered at their church, their workplace, or by their political henchmen. So, the Internet has done wonders to redress the constraints put on a person's individuality by the desire to fit in with some group of people without totally suppressing their individuality.

But, there is still that tension of having one realm in which one can be an individual and another in which it is hard to assert that individuality. Yet, oddly, very many of those who try hard to conform in their local community are the individualists of the Internet. Many of them have now been exposed to a higher level of personal expression and therefore freedom on the Internet. As they turn back into their communities, the benefits and the knowledge that have come about other people and their yearnings are bound to have a big impact on the level of benevolence toward individuals and tolerance toward the idea of individuality. This effect will be greater on younger people who came of age on the Internet. Community conformity will be almost certain to diminish over the next couple of decades as a result.

Among many other things, this opens the door for a philosophy for living which stresses individuality. It is also a very strongly positive development because it allows those few people who are willing and able to sustain their end of the rope, when it is under the greater tension characteristic of a little-shared philosophy of life, to meet one another. We Objectivists can at least be a part of a society through the Internet. This Internet society will grow if we practice our rational philosophy rationally. As it does, more and more people who can sustain rope tensions in their local communities of smaller magnitudes will be enticed to become Objectivists. The cost of membership will have to be brought down before a substantial fraction of even the American population will be willing to become Objectivists. If we want Objectivism to become a powerful force in our local world, we must practice both Internet and local community benevolence and toleration. The activation energy for becoming an Objectivist must be decreased, or there will only be a very few Objectivists and too many of them will simply be masochists and contrarians, who will be poor representatives.

Even with the Internet, being an individualist and an Objectivist is a lonely experience. You really must be a strong and resilient person. You must have the strength to bear some rather serious loneliness. Some of that loneliness is the result of already generally being a particularly intelligent person with a strong commitment to understanding reality. That already places you far out on some bell-shaped curves. Then on top of that you reject all the popular philosophies and causes of our time. You reject religion, socialism, environmental animism, tribalism, racism, and simple-minded, relativistic diversity/multiculturalism. You stand out like a sore thumb. You seek company on the Internet then where you can search the entire world and still you find only a small number of individuals you can really admire and whose friendship can be treasured. The cost of loving reality is only exceeded by the cost of acquiring a club to join by denying reality. It remains a fairly lonely business to be an individualist and even more so to be an individualist Objectivist.

Of course, the only real Objectivist is the individualist who expresses his individuality, thinks for himself, lives a productive and creative life, and seeks his own happiness. The orthodox, the cultist, the contrarian, and the masochist do not live the philosophy of Objectivism. They are pretenders or in some cases those who would be carnivores. Life is short and there is much to do. This imposes an economy that dictates against wasting one's time in endless debates with those who will not be convinced by rational argument. One must identify those who treat reality with total respect and ignore those who have other primary allegiances. There are some who distort the findings of science, pick them selectively and in as out-of-context a manner as do the environmental animists while claiming to respect science. This is actually a very fundamental attack on science, one which will totally discredit it, if allowed to go unchallenged.

This attack on science is being carried out very broadly by those environmentalists who falsely claim that there is a scientific consensus that the recent global warming is caused primarily by man rather than by a natural increase in radiation from the sun. But, in some Objectivist forums, there are other attacks upon science. Some are attacks upon quantum theory, which while not yet a completed program, is nonetheless not at fault for the reasons often claimed. Another is an attempt to claim that science has proven that all operations of the mind are now understood in terms of classical physics, classical thermodynamics even! This argument is viewed as a keystone argument that man lacks volition and the mind is really just a very complex program that makes choices. How these choices differ from simple conditional branching in a computer program has not been explained, but these claims have met with widespread acceptance on one major Objectivist forum.

The battle to be true to reality is a never-ending battle and I wonder if I will ever find a reasonable and sustaining number of friends to join me in these battles. If I should not carry the day, at least I will never be defeated! I will be true to my own individual nature and to my primary respect for reality whether I fight alone or with a few magnificent friends. Those who fight under the banner of individuality and reality beside me, I will love.