“I’d rather die a broken piece of jade, than live a life of clay.” —Bruce Lee
My blessing and my torture is that I’ve never been able to kid myself about anything. All of my life from one relationship to the next, romantic or otherwise, I’ve suffered the same ultimate rejection: rejection of my purity, of my depth and of my strength. The best of us love living so much that we cannot fake anything. Everything we are and everything we have must be earned, deserved and wholesome. We don’t seek to protect social appearances for our self-worth, for our love interest, for our health or for our philosophy. We care only about getting it right, and we stop at nothing to discover it. Those who take the greatest chances and advanced their fields exponentially, names the whole world knows—men like Aristotle, Copernicus, Edison and Ford—men who clear the highest barriers in their time, have also suffered the worst denunciations and the cruelest punishments in return.
We watch cable specials about Napoleon, Gangues Khan and Pope John Paul, but centuries later, do we benefit from their existence? On the other hand, we move through rooms turning lights on and off, we drive our cars to work daily, we wear nice clothes and we take planes to vacation and business destinations. These are all products of another type of man; Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, Eli Whitney and the Wright Brothers. Isn’t there an essential difference in the quality of their contribution?
They say but for a handful of men over the course of human existence, none of civilization would have been possible. Men to whom we owe so much—the mountain peaks—would give their lives and sometimes do, in their pursuit of truth. I’m exasperated at the world for resenting their quest to discover the next steps for mankind. Shouldn’t the world hold sacred it’s highest and best? Shouldn’t it—if it values its own life, yet cannot equal their achievements—shouldn’t it stand on the sidelines and cheer them on? Shouldn’t the world just naturally want to follow them? Why try to suppress their importance? Why rob them of their glory? Likewise, Moral Armoris an answer and counterblow to all those who have called me cruel over the years, who have attempted to induce shame as reward for my virtues, to covet my achievements and to expropriate the value of my effort while attempting to conceal their evasions. The pattern is the same; it is to avenge those historically tortured and protect their spiritual descendents into the future that demanded such a statement and ultimatum.
Very early on, I felt the need to make a declaration of the terms on which I am willing to live and work in our world, but there was no guideline to be found. How was human effort to be expended on a mature, explicitly moral basis? I had to gather the fragments from history; from the wealth of human experience as well as my own, and integrate it all into a logical whole. Men may choose to disobey rationality and often do. But ultimately, they can’t hide or deny who is wrong and who is right, who is depraved and who is honest, who has earned and who has loafed, who is brave and who is a coward. We cannot work with the physical reward of our effort stolen or confiscated; that would make us slaves. We cannot enjoy our work with the intellectual/emotional reward stolen; that is worse. That steals the value of life: spirit. History has shown that self-absorbed, self-guided Man brings life to others. Flowers bloom and life expands; hope, belief and happiness are made possible by his presence. Nothing justifies his martyrdom.
We as the self-motivated of mankind have developed an awesome personal power, and often take on burdens that are unjustified simply because we can handle so much. We watch the rest struggle to live, and floundering badly. We put up with a horrible level of insincerity, listen to intolerable shallowness for unbearable durations and pacify by letting them have their way, confident we can take the wheel if things get out of hand. Exuberant in our capacity to overcome any obstacle, we approach it believing that anything is possible to us. While in the moral mind of a producer this is a positively reinforcing affirmation, it is subject to an axiomatic caveat which, when unheeded will lead to the destruction of all that we hold sacred. The term “anything” includes all things evil; and often our own foolish generosity foils our plans and tarnishes our expectations.
We are all paying a price in stress, in frustration and in exasperating futility. Our chosen patterns of action arewhat bring about success, and if success is the result we desire, we cannot deviate from what we know to be true. We cannot let go of the wheel. They immorally consider our crucial actions to be optional, and we knowthat they’re not. It is the source of all values that they reject on a private level, and at some point it gets political. All private evils have political manifestations. We have earnedour prosperity, and the last thing I want to see happen is for us to lose control to the same demons as we have in our past. The heroes of mankind have always seen their ultimate goals frustrated by their inability to understand or express the moral foundation of their actions.The rug gets pulled primarily by the inversion of moral principles within their ownminds. Secondarily by the moral subversion of others, and third by the simple absence of knowledge on critical social issues affecting every one of us. The unfortunate truth is that the tools of mass prosperity can be turned against mankind with the power of moral uncertainty and used for mass murder. They can and they have, repeatedly, throughout history.
Look at what had to be accepted in order for Germany to take the course it did in Nazi times. Conversely, look at what had to be accepted in order for America to be born. These great surges were driven by the philosophy accepted en masse. When the prominent in society build on Aristotle and Thomas Paine, the result is America. When they build on Kant and Nietzsche, the results are the horrors of The Third Reich. When they build on Hegel and Marx, the result is a very bloody Soviet Russia. Everything we do, everything we endorse and everything we allow to be done to us affects our quality of living, and the quality of living for the rest. We cannot make “anything” possible for others and we shouldn’t try. They need to be held to life-furthering standards at whatever level their minds can handle. We should never be subject to the discovery that we unwittingly provided the means for neurotic aggression to succeed. Living Generators must be psychologically strong enough not to subordinate their premises to premises less developed.
Over the centuries, many evils experienced on a personal level have gained great social and political inertia. While our political system rests on sound moral footing, our explicit mass understanding of why, lags by over three hundred years. It is a great concern to the future of the world what is taught and passed down, but most importantly, just what is accepted on a grand scale. Moral philosophy is the fundamental driver of mankind, and has been throughout all of history. It determines just about every action we take and gets more sensitive as men make decisions together. We need to understand why men have chosen in aggregate the methods they practice, as there are always serious consequences. Once we know what drives any issue, we can be sure to side with life; which is to side with civility, sound purpose and competence. After all, whom do we want to see running the world: those who can, or those who claim it doesn’t exist? Out of the two, who belongs here? Who loves it, and to whom have we always sacrificed explicit moral control?
The problem is so ancient and so vast that most philosophers will tell you that short of annihilation, no reform is possible. Should we nuke the human race and start over? No. For one, it isn’t necessary, and two, the currently accepted view of morality, which drives the actions of “the moral majority,” would result in a society suffering from the same errors. No such issue can be approached and solved as a group, primarily. As in ballet, the performers must be in shape and know the dance beforeany choreography can be attempted. Moral restructuring is the same; it must be addressed by every individual man in his own time and at his own pace. Your own moral clarity is the place to begin in any attempt to change society for the better. It all starts with one. If you were purely civil and morally empowered, then multiplied yourself by millions, you could predict how such a society would function. If you followed Mein Kampfthen multiplied such an abomination by millions, you could easily predict destruction and bloody murder. If sacrifice is accepted as our standard, what Hitler did becomes excusable. Millions have been destroyed with the ethical perversion of our mass relations to one another. But jumping from the reform of oneself into reform of a society is not the next step either; a relationship with oneother person is. When you’ve mastered a relationship with one other person, thenyou are ready to move on to moral contemplation for a society of men.