by Kluwe, Chris
All we have are the people we spend our lives with.
Good luck.
All Your Bases
The core of a stable society is a tripod, the legs of which are the following:
Empathy—Without its people possessing a fully developed sense of empathy, a society has no freedom. It is only through accepting the differences of others that a stable polity can develop, and any attempt to marginalize or discriminate against minority groups will lead to conflict farther down the road as they agitate for equality wrongfully denied them.
Logic—The ability to reason and make decisions free of fear and ignorance is the only way to create beneficial long-term growth in a society. Coupled with empathy, logic allows individuals to make altruistic choices that benefit the many over the few by promoting an atmosphere of equality—as life gets better for everyone, opportunities for conflict diminish.
Enlightened Self-Interest—The drive to constantly improve, but not at the cost of long-term harm to the society, is the core of enlightened self-interest. Combined with logic, this leads to the understanding that short-term gains are never prioritized over long-term consequences; the citizens understand that the society will endure after an individual passes on. Coupled with empathy, enlightened self-interest will never cost another individual his rights, as that leads inevitably to conflict.
The rights of individuals in a stable society are:
The Right to Free Will—Whatever actions consenting adults take that do not deprive other individuals of the opportunity to exercise their own free will are nobody’s goddamned business but the people’s involved. Live your own life and let other people live theirs.
The Right to Knowledge—All individuals must have access to the fundamental basics of education and all information available in the society. The only way for a person to make rational choices is to have all the information in hand so he can weigh the potential benefits and consequences. Ignorance can be only a personal choice, not the enforcement of others. All requests for information will themselves be a matter of public record; a truly free society has no need for privacy laws because everyone knows who is watching at any given time.
The Right to Humanity—Any individual, regardless of race, gender, species, or origin (biological or nonbiological), who can demonstrate empathy, logic, and enlightened self-interest shall be regarded as human and benefit from all rights and protections afforded thereof. Appearances don’t mean a thing. Actions do.
Who Is John Galt?
So I forced myself to read Atlas Shrugged. Apparently I harbor masochistic tendencies; it was a long, hard slog, and by the end I felt as if Ayn Rand had violently beaten me about the head and shoulders with words. I feel I would be doing all of you a disservice (especially those who think Rand is really super-duper awesome) if I didn’t share some thoughts on this weighty tome.
Who is John Galt?
John Galt (as written in said novel) is a deeply flawed, sociopathic ideal of the perfect human. John Galt does not recognize the societal structure surrounding him that allows him to exist. John Galt, to be frank, is a turd.
However, John Galt is also very close to greatness. The only thing he is missing, the only thing Ayn Rand forgot to take into account when writing Atlas Shrugged, is empathy.
John Galt talks about intelligence and education without discussing who will pay for the schools, who will teach the teachers. John Galt has no thought for his children, or their children, or what kind of world they will have to occupy when the mines run out and the streams dry up. John Galt expects an army to protect him but has no concern about how it’s funded or staffed. John Galt spends his time in a valley where no disasters occur, no accidents happen, and no real life takes place.
John Galt lives in a giant fantasy that’s no different from an idealistic communist paradise or an anarchist’s playground or a capitalist utopia. His world is flat and two-dimensional. His world is not real, and that is the huge, glaring flaw with objectivism.
John Galt does not live in reality.
In reality, hurricanes hit coastlines, earthquakes knock down buildings, people crash cars or trip over rocks or get sick and miss work. In reality, humans make good choices and bad choices based on forces even they sometimes don’t understand. To live with other human beings, to live in society, requires that we understand that shit happens and sometimes people need a safety net. Empathy teaches us that contributing to this safety net is beneficial for all, because we never know when it will be our turn.
If an earthquake destroys half the merchandise in my store or levels my house, that’s something I can’t control; it doesn’t matter how prepared I was or how hard I worked. Trying to recover from something like that can cripple a person, both financially and mentally, unless he has some help from those who understand that we’re all in this together, we need each other to function as a society, and the next earthquake might hit one of our houses.
If a volcano erupts and takes out vital transportation and infrastructure, should we just throw our hands up in the air and say, “Not my responsibility”? No, because it is our responsibility. It’s our responsibility as members of a societal group to take care of the underlying foundations of peace and security—to ensure that the roads and rails are protected because they provide a collective good.
To be fair to John Galt, though, the safety net cannot be a security blanket. If you hand one person everything in life by taking it away from someone else, then the will to succeed rapidly fades on both sides; why work when it doesn’t matter? Look at any of the idle rich, the spoiled children of privilege, the welfare collectors who churn out babies because it means another weekly check to buy shoes or purses. Ayn Rand got it right up to that point but fails to make the next logical step.
If you want to get rid of the moocher, you don’t do it by excluding everyone you think could be a moocher, by building your own private jail with yourself as both warden and prisoner. No, if you want to rid yourself of the moocher, you do it by focusing on and teaching rational empathy. If you treat other people the way you want to be treated, you’ll never want someone else to live your life for you, because shackling others means you’ve chosen to shackle yourself. We’re all free, or we’re all slaves.
No one wants to take care of someone who does nothing in return, provides no value for society (I’m ignoring babies and children here, because they’re kind of necessary to the long-term survival of humanity), and so the corollary applies—if you feel that everyone should be free to live his or her own life, the safety net can never become a permanent solution, because if you rely overmuch on it, then you’re no longer living your own life.
Just as you don’t want other people to be an unnecessary burden on you, you should desire just as much not to be an unnecessary burden on others. If you take handouts when you no longer need them, you’ve turned yourself into a slave to someone else. If you think that other people have to take care of you but that you don’t have to take care of them in return, you’re trying to enslave those who would provide for you. If you make people dependent on you by limiting their opportunities for education and work and requiring them to subsist on a dole, you’ve taken away their chance at free will, at making their own lives.
John Galt as written lacks this rational empathy. John Galt is brilliant but doesn’t have the long-term vision to maintain the society that allowed his brilliance to flourish. John Galt is self-motivated but has no concern for the effects of his actions on other people. John Galt is a lone individual living in a world filled with countless teeming masses, and just as John Galt plants his feet on the backs of all those who came before him, he must provide a surface for future generations to plant their feet as well, not through sacrificing everything he owns but by realizing a stable society is ultimately a productive society.
But that’s not John Galt. A world full of Ayn Rand’s John Galts is a world that will eventually consist of only one person, and then none, once his lifespan concludes. Jo
hn Galt doesn’t care for the disasters that affect his neighbors—they can sink or swim on their own (and they’ll sink). John Galt doesn’t care for the public good, because all he can see is his own good (and he’ll wonder why it gets harder and harder to get the resources he needs). John Galt doesn’t recognize that genius arises under any circumstances (and he’ll never know how many geniuses he excluded from paradise because their parents didn’t fit his ideals, or why the population keeps shrinking).
John Galt is a remorseless shark feeding on those unable to get out of his way, the blood-churned waters boiling around him as he takes in everything he requires for his own happiness without thought of the cost to others, rending and tearing the stability of social interactions until his once-teeming world is barren and lifeless, collapsed under the gluttonous appetite of self.
Then he starves, and no one is left to mourn his passing.
Are you John Galt?
Incorporation
I’ve been doing some serious thinking lately, and I’ve decided I’m going to take the plunge. There’s no reason not to—the benefits are quite substantial, and there’s really no downside to doing it. Frankly, the more time I spend in the modern world, the more surprised I am that someone hasn’t figured it out earlier.
I’m talking, obviously, of registering my body as a corporation, with my mind as a limited liability representative.
All the important components are already in place, so really all that’s left is the paperwork. I have a board of directors (they’re quite argumentative at times, especially when Rationality and Emotion start going at it, or when Primal Urge feels unfulfilled), and they all have local addresses and can be easily contacted (except when they don’t feel like it). I’ve issued stock to various outside investors, letting them dictate how much value they own (because money, after all, is merely the abstraction of time spent performing a task). My wife and football are the majority owners right now, but the kids are starting an aggressive buyout, and I think in a couple years they’ll have almost full control. There’s also a list of corporate bylaws that I made up myself and follow when it doesn’t inconvenience me, so I don’t foresee any legal holdup.
Once I register, I think the benefits are really going to be worth it. My taxes will be much lower than they are now, so that’ll definitely go over well with the shareholders, and having limited liability will make certain functions of life a lot easier. If I ever kill someone, or steal a bunch of money, or bribe people to get a more favorable outcome on something I want, I’ll just pay a small fine and not even have to say I did anything wrong. It’s awesome! I couldn’t even be charged with a serious crime, unlike you silly normal people. I could literally walk down to the local Federal Reserve and take a couple billion dollars, and as long as I paid back several million and promised never to do it again (not that I did anything wrong in the first place, of course), there’d be no problem whatsoever. Everyone’s a winner!
(By everyone, I obviously mean “my board of directors,” because that’s all that really matters. Why should I care how other people are affected by my body’s actions? Not liable, remember?)
There’s also the environmental aspect to think of. Once I declare my body a corporation, it’s not my fault if what I do harms the world around me. I have to look out for my shareholders, so if that means I run over a couple pedestrians to get to work faster or throw a bunch of dirty diapers in my neighbor’s backyard rather than take the time to go put it in the trash, they can rest assured that I’m working for their best interests. The more time I spend with them, the more value they get, and, frankly, that’s the only guideline I have to follow. You can be damned sure I’ll be talking to policy crafters accordingly. Luckily, I’ll be able to use as much money as I want to influence their decisions about what to set into law, so, thanks, Supreme Court! Thanks, Washington! Appreciate the assist!
Now, don’t get me wrong, there are a couple downsides. First off, to get that preferred tax rate, I’m going to have to base my corporation in the Cayman Islands or some other business-friendly nation, so that’ll necessitate a couple copies of myself to act as shell companies. They don’t really have to do anything, just sit there and provide the polite legal fiction that I’m actually residing in that country, so I’ll probably just get a couple of Fatheads or something and glue them to the side of a local strip mall. They won’t even need to pick up the phone if someone calls (which is a good thing, since inanimate objects traditionally struggle with phone-answering etiquette), but those shipping costs are going to set me back at least twenty or thirty bucks. Hopefully I’ll save that much with the tax laws.
Second, I can’t do anything totally shocking or horrendous until I’m so big that everyone in the world would be devastated by the mere thought of losing me.
Obviously, I’ll need to start a reality-television show or something similar to ensure that everyone who has time invested in me will be completely unable to function in any way, shape, or form if I disappear. Even the possibility of not having me around should be enough to drive the world into such a panic that otherwise completely rational people will mortgage away their future for the totally essential services I provide (chiefly: being me), but the only way to make this happen is for me to repeatedly tell people just how necessary I am to their well-being. Remember: You need me. I complete you. If I’m not here, your life is meaningless, and you’ll probably end up starving in a gutter somewhere. I can’t really prove this in any substantial way, but I know I’ll be adversely affected if I’m dissolved or broken up, so just trust me on this one. I’ve repeated myself so many times, there’s no chance it’s a lie.
Finally, I’m not sure how I’m going to deal with the perpetuation of my corporation once those on the current board of directors decide to call it quits, but to be honest, I’ve offered them some pretty big bonuses to stick around for as long as possible (no matter how they perform), so I’m not too concerned. There’s no way my board would ever do anything not in the best interests of the corporation and purely for its own selfish benefit, so once I finish my seventh shot of tequila and do this line of blow, I’m going to drive on down to the local chamber of commerce and get the ball rolling.
It’s time to start living life the way it was meant to be lived—as a soulless conglomerate of ideas and desires whose only concern is to make as much profit as possible regardless of harm inflicted on those surrounding it.
It’s time to incorporate.
Elementary
Today I had the most intriguing case. It all started when a rather portly gentleman entered my office after hesitantly pushing the glass-paneled door aside. Sweat stains marred the underarms of a wrinkled three-piece suit while his hands nervously clutched at each other like writhing snakes. The top of his scalp glistened in the overhead light, and a thinning fringe of hair ran around it like a monk’s tonsure—referred to in current street slang as a Republican mohawk, I believe. He smelled vaguely of hemp and whiskey.
I leaned back in my chair and crossed one foot over the other atop my battered desk, carefully avoiding kicking my laptop onto the thinly carpeted floor, and waited for whatever it was he had to say.
“Sir,” he began, tremulously, “I wish to hire you to find something for me, something that I appear to have mislaid. Countless groups claimed they could help, but they all contradicted each other, and, frankly, I’m in such a deplorable state now that I’ve nowhere else to turn. I heard about your skills of deductive reasoning from the Internet pages, heard about your reputation for honesty and forthrightness. I’m desperate at this point, sir, and you appear to be the last option available to me. You have no idea how hard it is to find an honest man these days…”
He trailed off into silence, head down, eyes staring vacantly at the floor. His hands had grown still throughout the impassioned plea and now hung loosely at his sides. In all respects, a picture of utter and abject despair.
“Why should I help you?” I asked him bluntly. I do not suffe
r fools gladly, and his foolishness was beginning to irritate me. “What reason is there for me not to simply tell you to be on your way, along with your obsequious whining?”
“Why, sir, because it is the decent thing to do!” He drew back, affronted. “Do you feel no moral obligation to help those in need? Have you no charitable instinct toward those less fortunate than yourself?”
“I do,” I replied, “but that still doesn’t answer my question. You said you needed my help finding something you misplaced, yet if you but simply retrace your steps, you shall be sure to find it. Tell me again: Why should I help you when I do not feel particularly inclined to do so?”
“Well, I can pay you, pay you vast sums of money; you’ll have more wealth than you could ever imagine.” He squinted narrowly as he peered at me. “I happen to be one of the wealthiest people in the world, and I’m sure I could make some of that lucre trickle down into your coffers.”
I laughed. “Nonsense. You don’t have an actual penny to your name. Try a different tack.”
His face grew flushed as he clenched his fists. “How dare you say that to me, you insolent little brat!” he bellowed. “Where do you get off making such a preposterous claim?”
I raised a hand and began ticking points off on my fingers. “One: Your suit. It’s of a fine make, but that style hasn’t been worn in at least fifteen years, which means it’s from either the back of your closet or a thrift store. It hangs comfortably on the shoulders and neck, which rules out thrift store, but it’s a little tight around the waist, which tells me you got it when you were younger. It was probably a celebratory outfit, based on that particular cut, which is too formal for everyday wear. You’ve worn it often since then, as the shinier patches on the elbows and knees attest, but not recently, which I deduce from the unmistakable aroma of mothballs that even now hangs in the air, and since my office is definitely not the site of a debutante’s ball or any other celebration, that means you’ve pawned off everything else of value that could possibly impress someone.
