Check out this six-minute interview of Michael J. Hurd on NEWSMAX TV. He discusses the psychology of Trump Derangement Syndrome.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/tpen0dk6i9dc62p/DR%20MICHAEL%20HURD%20TC%20010221.mp4?dl=0
“A government is the most dangerous threat to man’s rights: it holds a legal monopoly on the use of physical force against legally disarmed victims.”
Well, here’s the thing: If we DON’T oppose the Electoral College, then 75 million Americans will now be disenfranchised forever with no possibility of putting dissenters in office. It’s over. We are under one-party rule, forever. And if Biden supporters and RINOs carry the day, they will have 75 million REALLY PISSED OFF AND PERMANENTLY NONCOMPLIANT subjects to contend with. Sorry lefties. But when you practice fraud and deceit, as we know you’re about to do in Georgia again, you create a lot of problems for yourself. This will be a war, and there’s no getting around it. Not with rigged elections. We will not roll over and accept a dictatorship.
It will take a lot more than turning the calendar page for 2021 to be better than 2020. In order for 2021 to be better, the vast majority of us will have to embrace rationality over feelings; common sense and reason over the herd; resistance over compliance; independent thought over the mindless ravings of celebrities; personal responsibility over victimhood; and unapologetic freedom over tyranny. In other words: THE EXACT OPPOSITE OF EVERYTHING MOST OF US DID IN 2020.
George Orwell wrote that abuse of language led to dictatorship. “War is peace, slavery is freedom”. Ayn Rand went deeper, and said that the obliteration of concepts–the uniquely human method of cognition–would bring us dictatorship. And what do we see today? Exaggerated hysteria — mass obsessive-compulsive disorder — falsely labeled “science”. Government propagandists falsely called “doctors”. The imposition of an open-ended totalitarian regime worse than what Orwell or Rand projected as a way to “be safe”. When you wipe out the capacity for rational thought, you create the basis for tyranny. Well done, tyrants. You have turned America into a dystopian mecca of mask-wearing morons. Good luck with the results.
Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason
In her 1957 masterpiece, Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand introduced us to a powerful concept which she called “the sanction of the victim.” This concept is defined as “the willingness of the good to suffer at the hands of the evil, to accept the role of sacrificial victim for the ‘sin‘ of creating values.” As Rand explains through the character of her hero, John Galt, “Evil is impotent and has no power but that which we let it extort from us,” and, “I saw that evil was impotent…and the only weapon of its triumph was the willingness of the good to serve it.” In Rand’s view, morality requires that we do not sanction our own victimhood. This concept may be original in the thinking of Ayn Rand and is foundational to her moral theory: she holds that evil is a parasite on the good and can only exist if the good tolerates it.
The sanction of the victim takes many forms, on the individual level in our personal relationships, and in the social or public realm in our relationship with the State. In Rand’s Atlas Shrugged it primarily takes the form of unearned guilt and the need to acknowledge and show kindness towards our tormentors and those who would exploit us. Ultimately, the sanction of the victim is used by our exploiters as the weapon of our own destruction. The victim becomes an accessory to the crime.
On the personal level, among countless situations, the sanction of the victim would apply to the beaten wife, the verbally abused husband, and the parents of mooching offspring that refuse to grow up and leave home (excluding the handicapped and emotionally disabled). An ever-growing percentage of our youth now choose to remain at home with their parents indefinitely. The parent-victims have been played like a violin by their offspring, conditioned to believe they are financially and emotionally helpless, incapable of surviving independently. The parents are terrified of the unbearable guilt they would carry if they were to send them packing. The parents’ acceptance and acquiescence constitute the sanction of the victim. Consequently, the parents become the victims of their own cowardice.
The sanction of the victim in the public or political realm expresses itself in two principal forms: participation in popular democratic processes, including elections, and acknowledging, approving, and extending respect and kindness toward our political exploiters (i.e. elected officials, their many toadies, and the supportive media).
Participating in the political process in all its forms constitutes the sanction of the victim. Again, you are an accessory to the crime, a victim of the crimes in which you are an active, but ignorant participant. You are in effect abating the crimes of the political elite. All of these things send the wrong message to the criminals and reprobates that comprise the political class. Voting, attending political rallies, and perhaps worst of all, sending them money, constitute the sanction of the victim. We are telling the political class, “We approve of your system. Even though you’re robbing us blind and crushing our Constitutional liberties, we still like you. Even though you’re corrupt beyond words, you are nevertheless lovable thugs, and we could not begin to fathom or contemplate life without you.
So how do we beat these people? Democracy and every form of representative government based on popular consent with constitutional constraints is the god that failed. We are told that political apathy and disengagement is to blame. I disagree. Disengagement is the solution, not the problem. The sanction of the victim only reinforces the problem, whether it’s a bad marriage or a corrupt, tyrannical government.
Here is the Three-Step Program for defanging the snake.
DON’T VOTE. As political satirist P.J. O’Rourke said, “Don’t vote, it only encourages them.” Elections change nothing systemically. They only decide who gets to pick your pocket and hold the boot over your neck. What difference would it have made if slaves had been allowed to elect their plantation overseers? When you vote you’re doing the same thing.
When has there ever been an election that gives you the choice of A, B, or none of the above? Hmmm? Never. Wouldn’t it be great to live in a voting district with no legislator, no congressman, no senator, no one to suck up to? Yes, but you don’t have that option. But you can refuse to be part of the whole scam by not voting. So don’t vote. Look, you’re being used like a cheap condom. Furthermore, the odds of you casting the deciding vote are far less than the odds of your winning the Big Lotto. In fact, the odds of your being involved in a fatal car accident en route to the polling place are far greater than the odds of casting the deciding vote. When you vote, you are sanctioning the system, its leaders and their crimes.
Voting is just a bad habit. Like all bad habits, it is self-defeating. Moreover, it serves to reinforce the bad habits of your tormentors. I gave up voting and smoking over 30 years ago. Both healthy choices, and among the most liberating and empowering I had ever made.
I remember a popular saying when I was young: Imagine if they held a war and nobody showed up. Well, imagine if they held an election and nobody showed up. Talking about sending the political class a message !
STOP TREATING POLITICIANS WITH KINDNESS. What do politicians crave more than power? Attention. Attention is their drug of choice. Indeed, politicians must seek the affirmation and approbation and applause of those whom they would never invite into their homes, have a beer with, or call their friends. In other words people like you and me. They have nothing but scorn and contempt for us. And besides, they’re corrupt beyond words. So what do we do? We cram into public auditoriums to catch a glimpse of their faces and suck up their lies like a cat does a saucer of warm milk. We reach out to grasp their hands as though they were the healing hands of a divine savior. If you came home from work to find a burglar carrying your possessions out of your house, would you shake his hands and wish him well? No, you’d call the cops, maybe even beat him up. Why do we treat politicians any differently when they steal our money every day? If we started denying politicians the attention and approval they so crave, maybe they’d consider getting an honest living.
A few years ago, on my way to work, our district congressman was shaking hands with us commoners at a Metro station in his district. Half asleep, I shook his hand and actually wished him well. Not five seconds later, I realized what a dumb-ass I was—shaking hands with a common criminal, a guttersnipe, a reprobate, a predator, a public parasite. There I was, extending my best wishes to high-ranking political leader who bore direct responsibility for the mess we found ourselves in. Would you shake hands with a cat-burglar, a serial rapist, a pedophile? No, of course not, so why would you shake hands with a politician?
So, take the pledge. When a politician reaches to shake your hand, act like the person has a communicable disease (what we used to call the “cooties”). Take your hand back as quickly as possible, and say something pithy like, “No, thank you. When you sleep with dogs, you get fleas. Don’t ever try to shake my hand again.” If more of us started treating politicians with the disdain and contempt they deserve, they might begin to consider a more respectable line of work.
3-REFUSE TO PARTICIPATE IN THE PROCESS AT ANY LEVEL. A good friend of mine is constantly urging me and everyone else he knows to “get involved. It’s the only way we can fix things.”
As Sherman Potter would say, “Horsehockey !” What sort of track record does popular participation have compared to apathy and disengagement? None. Politicians have always used elections and every form of democratic process to sanction and justify the criminal enterprise we call government. It just gives them cover. Government is, and has always been, nothing more than an organized crime syndicate, a protection racket sanctioned by the many forms of popular approval—which Ayn Rand called the sanction of the victim.
So, stay home, focus on your beautiful family, your kids’ Little League and soccer games. Spend quality time with your friends. Work at your hobbies, do crossword puzzles, listen to a symphony, read a good book, take your spouse and kids to the movies. Watch Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune. Return the ladder you borrowed from your neighbor seven years ago. Clean out your fridge, there’s probably stuff in there since you were in grammar school. Take your grandkids to the playground. Have a glass of champagne with your breakfast cornflakes. Tell your kid to rake the leaves while you nap in a hammock. Go to church, bake brownies, take your dog for a walk; mow the lawn; clean out your gutters; weed the garden, shovel the snow in your driveway. Be at peace with your Maker, whatever you imagine him to be. But whatever you do, avoid politicians like stray dogs.
The Artful Dilettante
“People think that a liar gains a victory over his victim. What I’ve learned is that a lie is an act of self-abdication, because one surrenders one’s reality to the person to whom one lies, making that person one’s master, condemning oneself from then on to faking the sort of reality that person’s view requires to be faked…The man who lies to the world, is the world’s slave from then on…There are no white lies, there is only the blackest of destruction, and a white lie is the blackest of all.”
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged
“Joy is the goal of existence, and joy is not to be stumbled upon, but to be achieved, and the act of treason is to let its vision drown in the swamp of the moment’s torture.”
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged
Productiveness is your acceptance of morality, your recognition of the fact that you choose to live–that productive work is the process by which man’s consciousness controls his existence, a constant process of acquiring knowledge and shaping matter to fit one’s purpose, of translating an idea into physical form, of remaking the earth in the image of one’s values–that all work is creative work if done by a thinking mind, and no work is creative if done by a blank who repeats in uncritical stupor a routine he has learned from others–that your work is yours to choose, and the choice is as wide as your mind, that nothing more is possible to you and nothing less is human–that to cheat your way into a job bigger than your mind can handle is to become a fear-corroded ape on borrowed motions and borrowed time, and to settle down into a job that requires less than your mind’s full capacity is to cut your motor and sentence yourself to another kind of motion: decay–that your work is the process of achieving your values, and to lose your ambition for values is to lose your ambition to live–that your body is a machine, but your mind is its driver, and you must drive as far as your mind will take you, with achievement as the goal of your road–that the man who has no purpose is a machine that coasts downhill at the mercy of any boulder to crash in the first chance ditch, that the man who stifles his mind is a stalled machine slowly going to rust, that the man who lets a leader prescribe his course is a wreck being towed to the scrap heap, and the man who makes another man his goal is a hitchhiker no driver should ever pick up–that your work is the purpose of your life, and you must speed past any killer who assumes the right to stop you, that any value you might find outside your work, any other loyalty or love, can be only travelers you choose to share your journey and must be travelers going on their own power in the same direction.”
― Ayn Rand
Just as religion has pre-empted the field of ethics, turning morality against man, so it has usurped the highest moral concepts of our language, placing them outside this earth and beyond man’s reach. “Exaltation” is usually taken to mean an emotional state evoked by contemplating the supernatural. “Worship” means the emotional experience of loyalty and dedication to something higher than man. “Reverence” means the emotion of a sacred respect, to be experienced on one’s knees. “Sacred” means superior to and not-to-be-touched-by any concerns of man or of this earth. Etc.
But such concepts do name actual emotions, even though no supernatural dimension exists; and these emotions are experienced as uplifting or ennobling, without the self-abasement required by religious definitions. What, then, is their source or referent in reality? It is the entire emotional realm of man’s dedication to a moral ideal. Yet apart from the man-degrading aspects introduced by religion, that emotional realm is left unidentified, without concepts, words or recognition.
It is this highest level of man’s emotions that has to be redeemed from the murk of mysticism and redirected at its proper object: man.
It is in this sense, with this meaning and intention, that I would identify the sense of life dramatized in The Fountainhead as man worship.
It is an emotion that a few—a very few—men experience consistently; some men experience it in rare, single sparks that flash and die without consequences; some do not know what I am talking about; some do and spend their lives as frantically virulent spark-extinguishers.
Do not confuse “man worship” with the many attempts, not to emancipate morality from religion and bring it into the realm of reason, but to substitute a secular meaning for the worst, the most profoundly irrational elements of religion. For instance, there are all the variants of modern collectivism (communist, fascist, Nazi, etc.), which preserve the religious-altruist ethics in full and merely substitute “society” for God as the beneficiary of man’s self-immolation. There are the various schools of modern philosophy which, rejecting the law of identity, proclaim that reality is an indeterminate flux ruled by miracles and shaped by whims—not God’s whims, but man’s or “society’s.” These neomystics are not man-worshipers; they are merely the secularizers of as profound a hatred for man as that of their avowedly mystic predecessors.
A cruder variant of the same hatred is represented by those concrete-bound, “statistical” mentalities who—unable to grasp the meaning of man’s volition—declare that man cannot be an object of worship, since they have never encountered any specimens of humanity who deserved it.
The man-worshipers, in my sense of the term, are those who see man’s highest potential and strive to actualize it. . . . [Man-worshipers are] those dedicated to the exaltation of man’s self-esteem and the sacredness of his happiness on earth.
This view of man has rarely been expressed in human history. Today, it is virtually non-existent. Yet this is the view with which—in various degrees of longing, wistfulness, passion and agonized confusion—the best of mankind’s youth start out in life. It is not even a view, for most of them, but a foggy, groping, undefined sense made of raw pain and incommunicable happiness. It is a sense of enormous expectation, the sense that one’s life is important, that great achievements are within one’s capacity, and that great things lie ahead.
It is not in the nature of man—nor of any living entity—to start out by giving up, by spitting in one’s own face and damning existence; that requires a process of corruption, whose rapidity differs from man to man. Some give up at the first touch of pressure; some sell out; some run down by imperceptible degrees and lose their fire, never knowing when or how they lost it. Then all of these vanish in the vast swamp of their elders who tell them persistently that maturity consists of abandoning one’s mind; security, of abandoning one’s values; practicality, of losing self-esteem. Yet a few hold on and move on, knowing that that fire is not to be betrayed, learning how to give it shape, purpose and reality. But whatever their future, at the dawn of their lives, men seek a noble vision of man’s nature and of life’s potential.
Run for your life from any man who tells you that money is evil. That sentence is the leper’s bell of an approaching looter.
The government is the most dangerous threat to man’s rights: it holds a legal monopoly on the use of physical force against legally disarmed victims.
When I disagree with a rational man, I let reality be our final arbiter; if I am right, he will learn; if I am wrong, I will; one of us will win, but both will profit.
Run for your life from any man who tells you that money is evil. That sentence is the leper’s bell of an approaching looter.
There is no such thing as a lousy job – only lousy men who don’t care to do it.
The task of evaluating the processes of man’s subconscious is the province of psychology. Psychology does not regard its subject morally, but medically—i.e., from the aspect of health or malfunction (with cognitive competence as the proper standard of health).
As a science, psychology is barely making its first steps. It is still in the anteroom of science, in the stage of observing and gathering material from which a future science will come. This stage may be compared to the pre-Socratic period in philosophy; psychology has not yet found a Plato, let alone an Aristotle, to organize its material, systematize its problems and define its fundamental principles.
In psychology, one school holds that man, by nature, is a helpless, guilt-ridden, instinct-driven automaton—while another school objects that this is not true, because there is no scientific evidence to prove that man is conscious.
Psychology departments have a sprinkling of Freudians, but are dominated by Behaviorism, whose leader is B. F. Skinner. (Here the controversy is between the claim that man is moved by innate ideas, and the claim that he has no ideas at all.)
THE ARTFUL DILETTANTE 