Fragments

Selflessness is an unnatural human trait. For some reason, people believe than being selfless (or altruism) is the ultimate ideal. Selflessness entails sacrifice on an individual’s part in order to help the maximum number of people, going as far as giving up one’s life or happiness. However, I agree with Ayn Rand when she says that a truly selfless person is the worst kind of person—in giving it all just to make other people’s lives better, the selfless person gives up his identity. And an identity is the only thing one ever truly owns in a lifetime.

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Having an identity is not automatic, neither is it involuntary. I think that it is a constant battle against forces trying to make an individual conform to the social norms.

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We exist for ourselves. You can say that you live for the people you love, but you can’t say "I Love You" without the "I"—well technically you can, but could you ever mean it if you don’t know who "I" is?

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Consciously or unaware, everything we do is something that we believe will lead us to Happiness, whatever that is. In the human being’s most natural state, all he or she ever thinks about is having the best possible life there is. Selfishness is natural. Without it, we wouldn’t evolve. (Ad hoc, ergo propter hoc. Must develop this more.)

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I offend Reighben quite often. In a little talk we had today about the prospects of socialism/communism in the future (I think we need a technological breakthrough that is enough to disrupt the capitalist system. This way, a new economic system will be created. Might be better, might be worse. But I am not satisfied with the socialist/communist systems since these do not encourage individualism and reaching one’s highest potential. Reighben thinks we need an ideological revolution to make socialism/communism truly viable) I mentioned that I think that there is no such thing as equality among all human beings. He took it as a personal affront. I didn’t back down of course as I really believe it.

"All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others." Some animals know how to walk on two feet and some animals don’t. Some humans know how to think, and some simply don’t—might be the lack of educational opportunities, might be an environment not conducive to academics, or it might be genes—but the point is, a high IQ is obviously not something  everyone has. Reighben believes that this can be remedied by a TRULY socialist/communist government (this can be possible only if the whole world is communist or socialist) which can provide educational opportunities or maybe create an environment where all people are expected (coerced?) to study. The former is highly possible, the latter is only probable, but what about the genetic disposition of the individual? Some people are born stupid. Right now, it is still not possible to change that.

Reighben got madder. He said that my thinking justified castes, sexual and racial discrimination. I said no, it doesn’t. Everyone is not equal but everyone still deserves equal rights, if only to live peacefully with one another. Besides, discrimination is subjective. A group of people think that they are better than this group of other people because of a reason they probably made up (white skin is better than black skin because god says so)—it doesn’t mean it’s justified. However, some people being less or better than other people given a particular attribute (intelligence, musical aptitude etc) might be innate.

Well, I hope he’s not mad at me anymore. I like Reighben. He’s a great friend. I like talking to him.

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Random musings alert. Probably a lot of grammatical and conceptual errors. But what the heck, I just need a foundation for future posts and you might as well know what they are, albeit underdeveloped.