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Friday, November 9, 2007

What is Spiritual Materialism?

Spiritual Materialism is a philosophy that holds man to be a combination of spiritual and material factors. These factors are only conflict when the principles behind them are improperly understood. When properly understood and combined, they lead to a general state of happiness within one's life.

Spiritual Materialism understands reality in terms of individuals, as opposed to groups. Groups are simply collections of individuals usually working to achieve a particular end. Personal values must be understood in relation to one's own rights as an individual.

The first and primary right is the Right to Life. You have a right to live. In being conceived, you had a right to be born. Your right to live is based solely on the fact that you exist. As funny as it might sound, in order to accept your rights, you must accept that you exist - "I think, therefore I am." You would not be reading this blog if you did not exist.

From your right to life follows your right to secure your right to life. From this follows many other rights - a right to property, a right to self defense, a right to free speech, a right to be secure in your person, etc. You have rights by nature - no government has bestowed them upon you. Likewise, in recognizing your own rights, you must acknowledge that others have the same rights. To deny natural rights to others is ultimately to deny that they belong to you as well.

What follows proceeds from my post in Defense of Capitalism. Your rights necessitate the existence of laws, which in turn necessitates the existence of government to make, enforce, and judge according to those laws. There is no legitimate means by which a government can violate the rights of some citizens to give "extra" rights to others. Governments do not have a right to take extra amounts of tax from certain citizens whom are wealth off to pay for social programs that are beyond the scopes of those governments. Social betterment proceeds from individual efforts, not government social programs.

When we look at ourselves as individuals, we find two principles at work - the spiritual and the material. The spiritual is that which is inside of us. It is what we think, what we feel, what we desire to create. It exists at our innermost core. The material, on the other hand, is the outer world around us, that context in which we interact with other individuals. It is literally matter. Where the two meet forms our waking lives, where we have a chance to manifest the spiritual into the material, through which we create. All which is created is a manifestation of the spiritual into the material, bestowing a spiritual nature upon material things. A great painting, for example, was the product of one's inner spirit manifested onto a material canvas. When men create, they bestow a spiritual quality into that which is, by nature, material.

This spirituality does not presuppose theism, although one might add that it does not exclude it either. It is better understood in the traditional sign of the sun, which is a circle with a dot in the middle of it. If you take a pencil and compass, place the needle on a fixed dot, and proceed to rotate the compass, you create a circle. The dot is its spirit, its essence, while the circle is its manifestation. Whether you are a theist or an atheist, you most certainly have that inner core from which all that you do manifests. This is spirit - it is your essence.

The proper manifestation of your spirit into the material world makes your spirit stronger, through bettering your material wealth. If you create something of value, you will make money, which in turn will allow you to live well physically. If you manage your wealth well, you will be able to create a better life for yourself and give yourself both the times and means to create far more. Your spirit and your material self play off of each other to determine you as a person. There is much esoteric meaning behind this interplay, which I will not divulge here. It is safe simply to say that this is all worth meditating on. Outer reality and inner reality merge to create YOU.

The wealth enhancement aspects of this blog exist to encourage you to seek the progress of which I speak. The political aspects are but a means to examine the world and safeguard that which you create. The spiritual and philosophical postings are meant to encourage you to seek the spiritual aspects of the material life around you, that you might be more fruitful. These all combine to produce this blog.

Notice: Most Wise Scribe Moved to Weishaupt Wealth!

This is just a note that I've decided to consolidate both of my blogs, due to a change in direction I have decided upon for Weishaupt Wealth.

A wider assortment of posts shall be available here in the future!

Moved: Weishaupt's Defense of Capitalism

Capitalism. The word evokes different thoughts to different people. Some view Capitalism as akin to fascism, where corporations own and run the government through a concentration of wealth in the hands of stockholders. Others, such as myself, take a far more benign view, seeing it as a system of opportunity that rewards the diligent and punishes the incompetent.
Capitalism itself is a very simple concept. The core concept involved in a capitalist system is the freedom of property. Property should be owned by those whom have the means to acquire it. When one owns property, it is theirs - governments have no right to tell individuals how they should or should not use the property that belongs to them.

Capitalism assumes certain fundamental rights of individuals. One cannot truly own property without having other rights. Individuals have a right to their property. They have a right to their own lives, as one cannot truly own property if one can be deprived of one’s life at a whim. In the right to dispose of one’s property as one sees fit, one has a fundamental right to free speech to protect it. One also has a right to protect one’s property through physical means, if such be necessary. And so forth.

Laws exist to protect these rights, which is where the concept of government comes into play. A government in a truly capitalistic nation exists solely to protect the rights of its citizens, from both domestic and foreign threats. In order for a government to protect the rights of the people it must first represent them, which is why representative governments always arise where capitalism is found. Capitalism, then, is a matter of letting individuals do as they will within a definite framework of laws.

Capitalism is total market freedom within a context of laws. Without those laws, total market freedom would be impossible, as rights would be impossible. The alternative to market freedom is market control. Market control can be seen in many economic systems, including feudalism, mercantilism, imperialism, socialism, fascism, and communism. All of these systems, when tried in the past, have hampered economic progress.

There are many reasons for this. First off, economic controls imply a sort of omniscience in those that control the economy. Greater amounts of control imply greater levels of knowledge pertaining to a variety of particulars. For example, when the government runs a nations industries, its ability to regulate those industries effectively depends largely on its knowledge of the particulars which pertain to those industries. The government has to calculate the amount of raw resources the industry will need to create the output of goods required. It has to understand the costs present in a particular location and correlate them to output. It has to understand workers’ issues. It has to understand levels of consumer demand. It has to understand these and a multitude of other variables if it can even hope to operate in an efficient manner.

When this type of system is extended to an entire economy, the level of knowledge required by the government to properly plan everything to perfection approaches infinity. This was the case in the former Soviet Union and played a large role in its reason for collapsing in the early ‘90s. The system was inefficient by nature. These inefficiencies were combined with waste which resulted from the needs of the massive bureaucracy required to administer the government - bureaucrats don’t produce anything but forms, and those tend to be useless.
The same is largely true for countries with less regulation than the Soviet Union. Insofar as those nations are less regulated, their economies operate much more smoothly, to be certain. Unfortunately, ultimate growth potential is hampered by the control which their governments exercise over their economies. Workers might have more vacations and shorter work days than what is found in the US, but economic growth in those countries simply cannot compete. China, with one of the fastest growing economies in the world, is growing economic strength in light of its relaxation of regulations and in spite of communism.

Where capitalism is implemented, economies prosper, while where socialism is implemented, economies falter and fail. This is not due to some “capitalist conspiracy; rather, it is the nature of economics in itself.

Capitalism rewards the capable while punishing the incompetent, much like nature herself. It is a natural system of economics in the most pure sense. Capitalism allows for ANYONE to succeed, if only they have the intelligence, ability, and drive to do so. A capitalist society has no laws saying you cannot find investors, start your own business, and make your own fortune. On the contrary, capitalism encourages you to do so.

I’m going to let you in on a secret. Those of us whom are “wealthy capitalists” don’t want to keep you down. We don’t want to see you impoverished and enslaved. We know that systems with control are far less efficient that systems based on freedom. We WANT you to succeed and do something with yourself. Today’s factory worker could be tomorrow’s great inventor who makes factory workers totally obsolete and increases production ten fold. We want that individual to be successful - not because we want to put millions of factory workers out of the job, but rather because we know far more can be manufactured so that our goods are available to a greater number of people. We’d be more than thrilled if the individuals whom constitute “society” would pick themselves up and make something of their lives. Great intelligent individuals benefit everyone.

We don’t want 95% of the world’s wealth concentrated in our hands. We’d be more than satisfied with half a percent if it kept us living the lives we were born to lead. Unfortunately, the masses don’t seem to agree - they insist on living lives where they ignore their financial health and expect us to pick up the pieces.

Has it ever occurred to you that the reason less than 1% of the world’s population possesses 95% of the world’s wealth isn’t because the system is rigged against the masses, but is rather because the masses refuse to do anything worthwhile with themselves?

Moved: A Proud Defense of President Bush

I am a proud conservative Republican. I will readily admit that I voted for President Bush twice and that I stand by his presidency even today.

Many of you out in the blogosphere are probably stunned by that admission. I want to explain to you why I so readily stand by my choice.

President Bush took office in the aftermath of the tumultuous elections of 2000. Most presidents receive a period of leniency known as a “presidential honeymoon” when they take office, so that Americans might have a chance to see whether that president’s policies will work out for better or for worse.

President Bush received no such honeymoon. He was attacked right out the gate by his political opponents, whom were all but frothing at the mouth. His opponents believed that they could render him a lame duck president within the first hundred days or so of his taking office. The problem was that they could never find anything they could make stick to this president... he said what he would do and he did what he said he would do. The best that the media and the liberals could do was accuse him of being a “cowboy” for precisely that.

President Bush took the reigns of government at a time when the economy was moving towards a down turn. He realized that any policies he pushed forward to fix the looming economic disaster would be blamed for that which they were intended to thwart. Despite this fact, he moved forward. President Bush pushed forward with dramatic tax cuts to give hard working Americans the opportunity to keep their own money.

You see, President Bush subscribes to a line of thought that holds dearly the idea that the money a person earns belongs to the person in question and not the government. Liberals and their enablers cried foul. Liberals are of the opinion that money ultimately belongs to society as whole, to be distributed by the government in the form of various failed social services. Liberal ideology holds very close to heart the fairy tale of “From each according to their ability, to each according to their need.” They hated President Bush even more for kicking out one of the legs upon which that platform stands.

So they blamed President Bush’s tax cuts for the economic failures that were already at hand. Over the years, their tireless litany that the tax cuts have caused our current economic problems has seeped its way into the mass consciousness of hard working everyday Americans. Sadly enough, many are starting to buy into the notion that the government knows how to spend their money better than they do.

Then, out of the blue one fateful September day, President Bush was confronted with the greatest disaster of our generation: the attacks of 9/11.

9/11 was a long time in the making. In order to understand the events of that day, one must understand the political history of the Middle East. Traditionally, the Middle East was united under a single banner - the Ottoman Empire. Islam was the unquestioned ideology of the empire, guiding the daily lives of all its inhabitants. Two world wars later, the Ottoman Empire was effectively destroyed, the lands once under its control reduced to protectorates of European nations. This turmoil led to a westernization of the region, spreading once taboo ideas like liberty and secularization where they were for a long time forbidden.

This threatened many of the more fundamentalist minded individuals that lived in the region. They saw the west as “corrupt” and viewed westernization as an attempt to destroy their beloved Islamic culture. The Islamic concept of freedom is very specific - it is only “freedom” to do Allah’s will according to the Qur’an. This does not mesh particularly well with the western ideas of freedom.

The discovery of oil in the Middle East made it a focal point in the second half of the 20th Century. In short, America and the rest of the Western World had a vested interest in preserving the free flow of oil from the region. This was coupled with the return of the Jews to their holy land of Israel, in which they set up the region’s only stable democracy. These two forces were a threat to extremists whom desired to restore the prominence of an Islamic empire that would span throughout the world. They thus began to lash out against those that stood in their way - the United States, Western Europe, and the Soviet Union.

Oil is a vital resource. We use oil products without even thinking. The free flow of oil is essential to the preservation of our way of life. Whomever controls the flow of oil holds incalculable power over the world as a whole.

America does not desire to control the world’s oil. Imperialism is an outdated economic model and has rightfully been replaced by notions of free trade. America gains very little by occupying the Middle East or divvying up its oil. Far more is gained through democratization of the region and the advancement of free market systems.

Part of this process involves the destruction of insurgent terrorist groups that threaten to destabilize any progress in setting up representative governments in the region. This is the heart of the War on Terror.

The introduction of representative governments in the Middle East is essential to the War on Terror, as is the implementation of policies designed to thwart attacks before they can even occur. President Bush has done a fine job on both accounts. Democracy is spreading in Afghanistan and in Iraq. We have not had a second series of terrorist attacks after 9/11. The Bush’s government has accomplished both of these goals in the least intrusive manner possible: civil liberties are alive and well here in the US, despite what the radical left and the conspiracy theorists want to believe.

The worthy accomplishments of the Bush Administration are far too many to detail in a single essay, but I promise that this is a topic that will soon be revisited.

Moved: 9/11 Was NOT A Government Conspiracy, People!

As I had alluded in my last post, there is a strange line of thought that seems to be gaining prominence in certain circles, involving a conspiratorial theory of history. Most of the media wisely ignores this as the rantings of lunatics whom believe that their movement is far more widespread than it is because all of their Internet buddies believe in it too. Let’s face it - sometimes refuting a view gives it a level of respect it does not deserve.

Yet I believe we are reaching a point where it might be folly to maintain silence in the face of this movement. Conspiracy theorists are goofy, and it is natural to laugh at that which is goofy. On the other hand, there was a group of German conspiracy theorists back in the 1920s and 30s who believed that a secret Jewish cabal was plotting to dominate the world through banking and the media at the time… and I am certain we can all remember how that turned out and what the solution proposed by those people turned out to be.

By the time anyone stood up to refute that gang of thugs, it was much too late. I’d much rather stand up against these people now and risk being wrong than to remain silent and witness the second coming of the “Final Solution” against the “Hidden-Powers-That-Be”. Yes, I believe there is potentially a very real parallel developing and I believe firmly that it is our responsibility, as Americans, to stand up against these folks before they get out of hand.

Flashback: 9/11/2001 - the day that was destined to define the course of the 21st Century for both America and the world at large. Four airliners were hijacked by 19 fundamentalist Islamic zealots hellbent on causing massive chaos in the United States. Two planes were responsible for the destruction of two major New York landmarks, one plane did considerable damage to the Pentagon, and one plane met a tragic end after passengers heroically gained back control of the cockpit. Over 3,000 lives were lost in the wake of the atrocious events of that day, and six years later the country is STILL trying to pick up the pieces so that the American people can carry on with our lives.

The terrorists have been clear regarding their purpose in launching the attacks - Al-Qaeda does not like America. Al-Qaeda does not like the American people, nor does it like the American form of constitutionally representative government. Al-Qaeda does not like the fact that Americans support the only true democracy in the Middle East - Israel. Al-Qaeda does not like the fact that Israel is populated by Jews whom refuse to kow tow to Islamic law. Al-Qaeda does not like the fact that the United States has actively maintained a presence in the Middle East to prevent terrorists and other warlord thugs from gaining dangerous levels of control over the most valuable resource of our time: oil. Al-Qaeda certainly does not like the fact that the United States of America stands as a beacon of republican freedom in the face of theocratic dictatorial rule.

The terrorists lashed out at us, and now we are striking back. We are engaged in a frightful battle against an enemy whom will not be satisfied unless we convert or die. Our only chance for survival is to spread democratic forms of government to promote freedom among those whom the terrorists wish to rule in their struggle against us.

Yet, in the face of such a monumental and potentially catastrophic struggle, a struggle which threatens our freedom, our culture, and our lives, we still have groups and individuals whom prefer to hide their heads under the sands of ignorance and promote the notion that our own government was evil enough to do this to our own country. Such an idea is beyond sickening.

The people whom advance these claims want to live as though we did not have war declared upon us by forces outside our country. They want to believe that life in the world is much the same as it always has been, and that everything will simply be fixed if we put their man Ron Paul in the White House. At the end of the day, it will turn out that the terrorists never REALLY hated or wanted to destroy us and the big, evil United States of America can go back to its pre-1941 slumber. They would have us believe that we don’t really need to worry about terrorist leaders who have promoted their stated goal of creating a worldwide fundamentalist Muslim caliphate through control of most of the world’s oil. We can just put our heads under the sand as they do and everything will be fine.

Personally, I think that approach is both reckless and suicidal. We have a duty as the leading nation of the Free World to prevent such an awful thing from ever occurring. It is for this reason that I believe we should actively oppose the conspiracy theorists before they go too far in contaminating the political dialog with their delusions.

9/11 was not a government conspiracy. 9/11 was an active declaration of war declared by avowed enemies of freedom and representative government. The Twin Towers were not destroyed by implosion via planted explosives, nor were they destroyed by space lasers or automated missile drones or any of that crap. Those towers collapsed because the impact of the planes compromised the structural integrity of the buildings which, when combined with the resulting fires, led to a pancaking effect that brought the buildings tumbling down. The buildings were designed to collapse like that, as stated by the designers themselves. There is not nearly as much to it as the conspiracy theorists would have you believe.

The sooner that Americans are willing to spend the time to actually research what is going on in the world around them rather than foolishly accept the newest conspiracy theory fad is the sooner that our country can actually begin to move forward in gathering up the pieces of our nation that were dislodged that fateful morning and move forward with our lives. We are engaged in a war against people who hate us and will not rest until we either adopt their extreme view of the world or are destroyed. America ignores this fact and pays heed to fanciful conspiracy theories at its own peril.