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Rugged Individualism vs Human Nature

Rugged Individualism vs Human Nature

"Rugged individualism" is actually a euphemism for Thomas Hobbes' baseless concept of man's natural condition as a war of everyone against everyone else. Even different species of wild animals (each of which has its own group soul, as opposed to humans, which have individual souls) cooperate with one another for their mutual benefit, so Hobbes would have had us believe that mankind is inherently more bestial than the beasts, perhaps explaining the name of the pop "music" group known as the Beastie Boys.

In his attempt to "justify" iron-fisted oligarchical rule (which maintains it power through its fundamental "divide and rule" strategy, of which Hobbes' fantasy is the ultimate expression), Hobbes mentions only one pole (fear) of of the duality which most succinctly expresses mankind's psyche, and conveniently forgets to mention the other: agapic love. (For more on "agape," see the pertinent section on my "Hobbes" page, which contains excerpts from works of LaRouche and Steiner.)

Ayn Rand's "heroic image" of each person being complete unto him/her self, is intended as another means to con us into accepting Hobbes' ultimate divide-and-rule scheme as the basis of social policy. Rand was one of the more blatant purveyors of this cartoon, and at least one of her books hints that it is intended to contribute to the collapse of industrial civilization.

In an acticle entitlted Greenspan and the Cult of Ayn Rand: Don't Reappoint the Undertaker by Kathy Wolf, which appeared in the October 29th, 1999 issue of Executive Intelligence Review (see larouchepub.com for subscription information), Wolf wrote that "Since 1952, Greenspan has been the leading disciple of the Russian-born Hollywood writer Ayn Rand, whose 1957 novel Atlas Shrugged presents a detailed blueprint for slowly and silently tearing down the industrial plant and infrastructure of the United States, in favor of a 'post-industrial' society." As a result of Greenspan's fanatical faith in Rand's fantasy-religion, Wolf states that "behind [his] mild mannered Wall Street suits and quiet tones lurks the deranged mind of an economic terrorist." He's the natural heir to the Fed, whose former chairman Paul Volker instituted the CFR's "controlled disintegration of the economy" program (see my True Establishment Confessions page).

Elsewhere she relates that former Secretary of Labor Rober Reich, in his book Locked in the Cabinet, wrote that the Clintons came to Washington, full of optimism that they could do great things for the common good, only to have their hopes dashed by Greenspan.

Rand's "justification" for destroying industrial society is that it supposedly stole the ideas upon which it is based, from those who brought the ideas into the world, who alone deserve all benefits resulting from those ideas. This in itself reveals Rand's philosophical bankruptcy. In fact, no single person can claim complete responsibility for any idea, since they "stand on the shoulders" of those that got them to the point of having the idea, and in some cases, events are orchestrated by spritual beings to create conditions favorable for a discovery. Sure,the discoverers deserve a certain amount of consideration for their abilities and effort, but not to the point of denying everyone but themselves the benefit of those ideas as Rand would have us believe.Furthmore, according to Wolf's article, Rand's work was a "straight plagiarization" of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, and she considered agapic love to be nonexistent. But this is the implication of Hobbes' "each against all," who in the same book, Leviathan, duplicitously criticized the "kingdom of darkness" as "nothing else but a confederacy of deceivers that, to obtain dominion over men in this present world, endeavour, by dark and erroneous doctrines, to extinguish in them the light... by mixing with the Scripture diverse relics of the religion, and much of the vain and erroneous philosophy of the Greeks, especially of Aristotle." So, once again, Hobbes indicts himself as a member of that shady group.

The mantra of Establishment "free-trade" advocates is that competition will magically solve all of society's ills, even while the Establishment feverishly works behind the scenes to grab total control of key areas of the economy which they don't already control. As is so typical of this "confederacy of deceivers," the ever-increasing cut-throat competition for the bare necessities of life is not a solution, but one of the intended consequences of their "controlled disintegration of the economy." By creating these conditions, they provide themselves with the "evidence" to support their Hobbesian dogma, which "justifies" more of the same kind of policies, leading to a downward spiral to Hell on Earth.

This, I contend, is also the reason they foisted the prevailing mode of transportation upon us - to pit us all against each other in "road warfare," while car commercials constantly drum into us the fantasy that the purchase of a new car entitles us to the road as well.While on the subject of transportation, I would like to point out that it doesn't have to be this way. As part of LaRouche's Eurasian Land-Bridge project to save human civilization, we would build new, smaller cities, instead of constantly adding onto existing decrepit cities (which is what creates such heavy traffic).We could integrate an almost totally automated light-rail transportation system into each of these new cities; such a system would in my opinion revolutionize society.

For example, compare the difficulty which a mother with young children would encounter in purchasing groceries in the existing Hobbesian road-warfare hell, with that which she would encounter in a city with this proposed light-rail system. In the latter case, she could order the groceries over the internet, and they would be delivered in a refrigerated car by the rail system. Not only is this far more convenient, but also far safer and far more efficient, and it would generate appreciation for society instead of anger at it.In fact, this last point supports what Rudolf Steiner taught about human nature, which is diametrically opposed to Hobbes' baseless assertion, and the basis for his proposed Threefold Social Order: that the wellbeing of a community will improve as individuals claim less of the proceeds of their individual efforts for themselves and have more of their needs satisfied by the community. However, he insisted that membership in such a society must be voluntary.

Naturally, shortsighted and/or greedy people with vested interests in the exisiting system (which would still exist in a scaled-down form) would fight such an advancement, and the Establishment would fight it tooth and nail since road warfare is such a crucial ingredient of their Hobbesian scheme of things. Steiner taught that the proper sphere for competition is in that of ideas, but under so-called "free trade," there is, as LaRouche has noted, even less freedom in this sphere than existed in the Soviet Union! Both he and Steiner state that in the physical realm (which, contrary to Hobbes, does not include ideas, or God), cooperation is the key to a happy society.

Rugged Individualism vs Human Nature

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