“Is there any knowledge in the world which is so certain that no reasonable man could doubt it? This question, which at first sight might not seem difficult, is really one of the most difficult that can be asked. When we have realized the obstacles in the way of a straightforward and confident answer, we shall be well launched on the study of philosophy – for philosophy is merely the attempt to answer such ultimate questions, not carelessly and dogmatically, as we do in ordinary life and even in the sciences, but critically, after exploring all that makes such questions puzzling, and after realizing all the vagueness and confusion that underlie our ordinary ideas.”

— Bertrand Russell The Problems of Philosophy (1912), Ch. I: Appearance and Reality

“The endeavor to understand is the first and only basis of virtue.”

— Spinoza

Your basic choice as a human being is whether or not to choose to “make sense” of your experience. What does it mean, to “make sense”? The clue is given out of the mouths of babes, in their question: “Why?” Once they learn that things have explanations, their desire to know is so strong that the constant questioning they produce can overwhelm adults. This natural yearning is at the foundation of philosophy, or as Aristotle wrote in Metaphysics (which in his understanding of the term meant “first philosophy”): “All men by nature desire to know.”

Plato held that knowledge is “justified true belief.” To believe is trivial; to know requires an often very difficult process: thinking. Thinking is not always productive, but always has the same aim: to know. What thinking produces is a link between a belief in question, and a chain of reasoning that supports it. This is the belief’s justification.

The choice to think or not is a gift that no other creature on earth but human beings have. Authentic philosophy is rooted in the choice to think – to produce reasons why. Pseudo-philosophy is rooted in the opposite choice: to believe without reasons.

To “justify” an idea is to present a reason why the idea is true, a means by which, if we follow a rational process, we can in some sense rightfully proceed from one idea to another. Since reasons are themselves ideas, we can apply this concept to the proffered reason why as well. This leads to the idea of “infinite regress” – an unending series of “whys”. But if there is an infinite regress, then because we are finite beings, there can never be a rational explanation for any idea, and the idea that there could be knowledge would fall. Even the idea that there is no justified knowledge would itself be unjustified. Therefore, if there is knowledge, there must be a justified end to the series – these terminals in the series are “axioms.” But by definition, axioms can’t be justified in the sense of providing reasons why. Can they be otherwise justified or are they merely arbitrary postulates?

A person who rejects axioms as justifiable, per se rejects knowledge. His rejection of axioms constitutes a belief that they are unjustifiable, and while he may offer “reasons” for this belief, ultimately, these are, by his own stipulations, necessarily without foundation. Usually, he admits as much. For him, philosophy is an idle entertainment or a game, but it has nothing to do with truth, and he will often cynically (and usually with an air of self-righteous superiority) view those who think otherwise as deluded. But why indeed is he justified in making all of these assessments? In the end, he must admit that everything he believes or assesses is merely accident or whimsical preference, for on his view, there really is no such thing as philosophy qua “love of wisdom.”

Just as one can choose to live or die, one can choose to accept the preconditions of knowledge or not. And one of those preconditions is: there must be justified axioms. How are they justified? In fact, we just justified one, the “Axiom axiom”: Knowledge is rooted in axioms. We determined that rejecting this axiom repudiates all knowledge, including the “knowledge” that knowledge has been repudiated. This is the hallmark of a justified axiom – that rejecting it is self-defeating. You may indeed decide that you don’t care if you have defeated yourself, but this decision evicts you from the realm of authentic philosophy.

Axioms are interrelated and interdependent; for example, the foregoing axiom presupposes that we can know and mean (these axioms will be elaborated on later). We depend on axioms at every step, and thus while we can analyze them separately, they are simultaneously and at least tacitly assumed at every point in the analysis.

People who claim to know anything whatsoever believe in axioms regardless of whether they admit them or not; the question is whether those axioms are justifiable (i.e. rejecting them constitutes a self-defeating position) or not: If you ask the reason why they believe anything, and then ask why they believe that, and so on, you will find that they either land at a proposition they have not yet explained, meaning they believe in at least this one axiom, or they will go in a circle, which means they believe in many. The choice then is not whether we shall have axioms or not, but in what our choice of axioms is.[1]

In rational philosophy we seek axioms that are as simple and irreducible as possible, and that are implied in all discourse whatsoever. Axioms aren’t arbitrary, nor are they “self-evident” in the sense of being obvious, but they are self-evident in the sense that you must become aware of them through your own first-handed appraisal. They are not empirical in the sense of being externally measurable, but they are empirical in the sense that to notice them is to observe, and the unit of observing is an observation, a moment in time in which you are paying attention to something. What is the object of observation? Your own thought.

The alternative to explicitly recognizing axioms is not that they aren’t there, but that one takes an unanalyzed complexity of judgment calls about what is and isn’t true as axiomatically reliable and valid. Thus, a denial of axioms constitutes the implicit and extraordinarily arrogant subjectivism of asserting that one’s own judgment is the ultimate axiom (this move is not substantially altered when one alludes to external authority, since implicitly, the ultimate authority is the one who decrees who the authorities are).

Each axiom represents a different facet of the whole intellectual capacity that must be in order to make meaningful propositions about anything. Axioms are peer, we don’t derive one from another, except in such manner that we can in principle do it in the reverse derivation as well. Imagine it were otherwise: if an axiom were really a mere corollary of another axiom, then qua corollary it would be provable in terms of the axiom it derives from; but as such, it would not be properly classified as an “axiom” – we would only need the root axiom as an axiom; the corollary would follow from it.

“[A] Philosopher who affects to doubt of the Maxims of common Reason, and even of his Senses, declares sufficiently that he is not in earnest, and that he intends not to advance an Opinion which he would recommend as Standards of Judgment and Action.”

— David Hume

In the foregoing is a recurring theme in rational philosophy: there are beliefs that when analyzed, permit one to remain in the realm of rational philosophy, and beliefs which if decisively accepted, mean that one has evicted oneself. Most of the unnecessary tragedy in our past was caused by heeding the words of charlatans, and could have been avoided if society had accepted this principle. If we wish to avoid needless tragedy in the future, we must choose to accept it.

A common philosophic question is: What is the meaning of life? Scrutinizing this question yields an even more fundamental question: What is the meaning of meaning?

All thought presupposes meaning. Statements mean something to the person uttering the statement; the terms statements are composed of mean something to the person using them. The question naturally arises: What is the source of meaning?

What does “meaning” mean? As I use the term, meaning is an aspect of consciousness. It may or may not be associated with a word; someone can soundlessly point at an object, and know, for example, whether they mean to refer to the object itself or only to some aspect of it, and what the significance of pointing to it is. Meaning is axiomatic: it can’t be explained or defined except in terms that mean something. So you begin to understand meaning by observing what you mean by various things, and all anyone else can do is direct your attention to this. If you lack the capacity to reflect on your experience in this way, then communication with you regarding the nature of meaning is hopeless. Such is the nature of philosophic axioms.

Just as you can choose to point to this object or that one, you know what you mean, and you can change your mind about whether you should mean this, or that. Such choices are indeed at the very foundation of your ethical character. Meaning is the function and prerogative of the individual. To speak of a purely collective meaning is meaningless, for there is no meaning without an individual mind that means something. If the human population were to suddenly disappear, then all meaning would be lost, the only thing remaining would be arrangements of atoms in various objects formerly considered by humans to have meaning and significance; if even one individual remains, then so too does meaning. (None of this is to deny that people can and do mutually consent to a broad array of meanings; of course they can, and this is critical to civilization.)

That meaning is individual is presupposed by all philosophic discourse: either the capacity of meaning is in each of us as individuals, or not, and if not, meaningful discourse is impossible. We cannot have a rational discussion without recognizing the prerogative of all parties to decide on what they mean, we cannot have a mutual understanding without individual assent to common meanings.

To recognize that individuals choose their own meaning is not to approve of their meaning. They might be choosing cumbersome or misleading or delusional meanings, and we can and should argue against their errors, and we should be open to revising our own meanings when we have erred.

Although we often forget specifically where we initially derived any particular meaning from, it is readily observed that we derive new meanings from experience, and therefore we can infer that experience is the source of meaning. Experience comes from many sources, not the least of which is introspective experience, i.e. reflecting on prior experiences, thoughts, thought processes, emotions, etc.

The idea that meaning is definite, that you mean what you mean, is confusing or even alarming to some people, but this stems more from a confusion about what meaning is, or from fear of being wrong, or from holding conflicting meanings one refuses to reconcile, than from a violation of the law of identity concerning one’s own thoughts. If meaning were not definite, then it would be impossible to make the case that it weren’t, since the veracity of any argument depends on a definite meaning. A person who insists that meaning is indefinite is insisting that he himself makes no sense, which is to say, it is as if he’s said nothing at all.

It is self-evident that we are sometimes confused, that one of our meanings can contradict another one, and that we can be slow to recognize it, or worse, can refuse to recognize it. We have now entered the domain of logic, which is the art of reconciling contradictions in meaning. I say that this is “self-evident”, not because it is obvious, but because you must make yourself aware of the fact that to be aware of a subject is to have an integrated awareness, which is to have beliefs about a given subject that follow from various experiences and that do not contradict one another. It’s up to you to decide to be coherent, and if you decide to be incoherent, no amount of explanation of logic will help; the problem is in your decision to be irrational, not in your understanding.

All formal fallacies are violations of the axiom of definite meaning – deductive logic is no more and no less than intellectual continence, i.e., meaning what you mean. (The law of identity as it pertains to logic is a different expression of the same axiom.)

The foregoing can be summarized as: “I can mean.” A closely related and implied axiom is: “I can know”, since to meaningfully say “I can mean” is to imply that one knows one can mean.

To doubt this is meaningless: if you can’t know anything, then even the notion “I can’t know anything” is beyond your grasp. To declare that the only thing you know is that you cannot know anything is philosophical trash: there would be no way to justify that premise, without knowing that the method of justification is valid; the latter knowledge would contradict the trash answer.

Not everyone can meaningfully join a philosophical discussion. In particular, to one who does not know in a substantial sense what “know” means, the preceding reasoning is gibberish. Suffice it to say that a capacity to know is required in order to know that you have an answer to the question “What is knowledge?” That is, the idea that “one can know” is axiomatic in the same sense that “one can mean” is.

Meaning and knowledge share the same root: awareness. It is you, qua conscious being, that knows and means. Meaning and knowledge are intimately related: to explicitly know is to mean, since a statement of knowledge means something; to mean is to know what one means; if one does not know what one means, then there is at best only the illusion of meaning.

(We have just touched upon a large subject. Knowledge is usually expressed as propositions, which are comprised of words denoting concepts, which embody meaning. Theories of concepts and propositions have a long and rich history. Some theorists say that propositions and concepts reflect two distinct functions of awareness; some say they are really the same function. It is beyond the scope of this essay to explore these matters: it is not necessary to know everything in order to know something, and you can know that you know and mean, without knowing every implication and relation of these ideas.)

The premise that we can mean and know is the premise that we are aware, which presupposes that there is something to be aware of and which we refer to by the term existence. In Ayn Rand’s formulation of this axiom: Existence exists.

For most people, it is easy to establish the axiom “I can know” or “Existence exists”. And many if not most people, due to their natural inclination to give proper respect to their experience, easily progress from “I can know” to the conclusion “We can know.” But there is a certain very stubborn class of skeptic that doubts the existence of others, or at least, believes there is no reason to believe there are others besides himself, as he is skeptical of the existence of the “external world” generally. I will pause here briefly for his benefit, but I do not wish to clutter the discourse by dealing with a barrage of deranged objections.

This breed of skeptic claims certainty of his own self-awareness while casting doubt on every other kind of awareness, and not just his own awareness of things other than himself, but of others’ awareness as well. He claims he has no reason to believe that anything outside himself exists; to him, there is only his mind and “phenomenon,” which, as far as he claims to be able to discern, inflicts itself upon him without rationally discernible cause. Therefore, any arguments or claims he makes about these things, are, by his own words, rationally unfounded, they are utterly baseless. And this definitely includes any arguments he might be making about you and your beliefs, since these exist outside of the realm the skeptic knows anything about. Thus, if we are to take the skeptic’s position seriously, we must remove the skeptic from any discussion of nature of things outside the realm of his own consciousness (which is to say, we should remove him from virtually all discussion) – we can only hope that this will motivate him to make better use of the faculties that Nature has so generously endowed him with.

The ultimate root of philosophy is trust in one’s own faculty of awareness. If one cannot trust, then one can neither testify to meaning nor to knowledge. This trust is not a “blind faith”, but a simple recognition that one in fact sees, hears, smells, values, intends, decides, acts. Those who cannot decide to trust in their basic faculty of awareness are shut out of philosophic discourse, whether by foolish choice, or by tragic constitution.

Now, let us continue.

The premise “We can know” entails: 1) We each can, as individuals, know (established in the foregoing); 2) Implied in “We can know” is “We can know”, i.e. there is a “how” to knowing; 3) We can communicate our knowledge, which means both that we can express our knowledge and that we can comprehend such expressions, i.e. we can know what these expressions mean.

Just as we can look at a horizon and know that there must be something specific beyond it (in spite of the fact that we do not know precisely what is there) we can also know that there must be some specific how to knowledge, even if we are not acquainted with all or even any of its specific qualities. And just as we can name and refer to what lies beyond the horizon, we can name and refer to the how of knowledge. The name usually chosen is: reason. Regardless of whether you are just barely acquainted with the how of knowledge such that the term is not much more than a mere placeholder for what you may learn in the future, or have explored its meaning for a lifetime, the term still designates the same thing.

Reason is universal: it must be a how that we can all employ. To claim otherwise is to claim that we cannot communicate our knowledge, which would mean that you could not coherently advocate “reason is not universal” to anyone, which thereby excludes it from rational discourse (skeptical positions are productive in the sense that they exclude those without good sense from the discussion). If we can communicate knowledge to one another, then we must have a common means of transmitting knowledge, i.e. a way of recreating how we know and in common terms, which is to say: reason is universal.

Reason is something general and shared in common, but any instance of communication is real, it exists. To communicate is to express one’s knowledge, to cast it into a specific form, i.e., to give it a real existence outside the realm of consciousness.

To say “existence is complex” is a gross understatement. At every instant in time, the state of things in any given part of the universe is different from what it was before, and from what it will ever be again. As Heraclitus writes: “You could not step twice into the same river.” Not only do we have no hope of knowing everything, we also have no hope of understanding any thing (i.e., any real existent) completely, since to know everything about any particular is to know all of its effects on and relations to other things, which is to know everything. Even considering a single type of effect, there is no hope of complete understanding. Consider the gravitational pull a given speck of dust has on all of existence. What changes would be produced by moving this speck from one part of existence to another? Considering chaos theory, we know that in the long run the changes would be dramatic, thoroughly unpredictable, and will manifest even in distant solar systems.

On the other hand, your consciousness, which makes up but a tiny portion of the universe, is relatively simple. How is it that a relatively simple consciousness can in any terms have knowledge about an unfathomably complex existence? The answer is evident: there is a “principle of uniformity” to Nature, and this permits us meaningful knowledge. There is no way to explain this principle without using it, since all explanation utterly depends on it. It is an axiom.

To recognize that we can communicate is to recognize that we can know what this manifested communication is, i.e. that we can unambiguously and properly discern truths about existence. To deny this is to deny that we communicate, and thereby to evict oneself from all rational discourse. Thus, one cannot remain coherent while also denying the principle of uniformity; i.e. there is no further justification of the principle of uniformity required than that you have chosen to be rational.

(In the foregoing argument I am deriving the principle of the uniformity from the axiom that reason is universal, however, I do not propose that this is the only way of deriving this axiom or that the former axiom depends on the latter; in fact I regard them as being two perspectives on the same truth. Furthermore, to “properly discern truths about existence” is otherwise known as induction, which is an axiom we will discuss later on.)

We have now made explicit some crucial assumptions implicit to philosophy:

• We can mean.
• Meaning is individual.
• Meaning is definite (the base of logic).
• We can know, from which it follows that we have a faculty of knowing, reason.
• Reason is universal, which implies that we each can comprehend existence (induction axiom), that there is a principle of uniformity of existence.

Meaning and knowledge are the products of reason and existence; to deny any of these is to deny all of them, and thus to evict oneself from the realm of philosophic discourse.

To deny that meaning is definite is to deny that reason is universal because if meaning were indefinite then communication would be meaningless, which would contradict the axiom that reason is universal. In other words, the law of identity applies just as much to thought as to anything else.

Any philosophy that denies these axioms is one that may well be something we can appreciate in a limited sense, but it is a false philosophy.

“It is therefore important to discover whether there is any answer to Hume [on the problem of induction] within the framework of a philosophy that is wholly or mainly empirical. If not, there is no intellectual difference between sanity and insanity. The lunatic who believes that he is a poached egg is to be condemned solely on the ground that he is in a minority, or rather – since we must not assume democracy – on the ground that the government does not agree with him. This is a desperate point of view, and it must be hoped that there is some way of escaping from it. … What [Hume’s] arguments prove – and I do not think the proof can be controverted – is that induction is an independent logical principle, incapable of being inferred either from experience or from other logical principles, and that without this principle science is impossible.”

— Bertrand Russell

We have an integrated awareness, founded upon fragmentary experience. This fact is what makes error possible, but it is also what makes knowledge possible.

Any being in this universe necessarily possesses a fragmentary experience: the senses must necessarily gather information across time and space through some physical means, and any physical means necessarily takes time and space to gather and process this information, in order to create the possibility of an integrated awareness of the world. A notion of “direct” access to knowledge is absurd: it would be knowledge acquisition, but not by any means. When there is no means of knowledge, there can be no knowledge.

This is not a mere technical detail; it is a founding principle of knowledge: we experience fragments of information (David Hume refers to these as “impressions”), which we integrate in some manner in order to produce truthful awareness – knowledge.

On a rudimentary level, Nature does this for us (and other higher animals) automatically: we see one side of a rock, but automatically experience it as an object (sense perception) and not as a mere patch of color. We reach for our coffee cup, automatically supposing that because it was an object filled with pleasant substance a few moments ago, then it will be now. The only guarantee of the correctness of our assumption is the nature of Nature. This is, of course, the epitome of a guarantee; nothing could be more guaranteed than the nature of Nature. The point is that our ability to know is conditioned on there being a uniformity or stability regarding what we know, that Nature supplies this and has a primacy or supremacy relative to us, we are utterly dependent and subordinate, and must obey in some sense if we want a chance at possessing reliable knowledge.

Reliable conceptual knowledge does not simply drop from the trees as if it were like apples in the Garden of Eden. We must put the fragments together, we must do it properly, or our “awareness” will be mere illusion. And indeed, the way many people fall into delusion is by attending to too few facets of information: they integrate the fragments they wish to integrate, and ignore those that, if integrated, would bother them. Their resulting “awareness” is therefore a fiction. If you inquire as to why they have integrated this information but not that, they will often become angry, treating you and the information you are bringing as if it were a threat. But when you regard reality as the enemy, you have become your own insidious enemy – they are attacking the wrong person.

Knowledge exists only when there is a proper link between belief and existence; this link is provided by the faculty of reason and in particular by 1) drawing beliefs from experience and 2) reconciling contradictions in meaning. The measure of reliability of our knowledge is dependent upon the degree to which we follow reason; there are no guarantees of certainty that come from any higher plane than this – any certainty we can hope to attain is a function of our own integrity. The claim that certainty is impossible is beside the point: what is possible is for us to embrace intellectual integrity as our standard. To the extent that we fail to have integrity, we will through natural consequence, be uncertain to that extent.

“But we have now posited that it is impossible for anything at the same time to be and not to be, and by this means have shown that this is the most indisputable of all principles. Some indeed demand that even this shall be demonstrated, but this they do through want of education, for not to know of what things one should demand demonstration, and of what one should not, argues want of education. For it is impossible that there should be demonstration of absolutely everything (there would be an infinite regress, so that there would still be no demonstration); but if there are things of which one should not demand demonstration, these persons could not say what principle they maintain to be more self-evident than the present one.”

— Aristotle

The process of drawing knowledge from experience is called induction.

It is commonly alleged that either induction is per se a logical fallacy (which of course directly implies that one can never know anything about reality), or that there is a so-called “problem of induction”, which claims that we need to identify not only how we use experience to arrive at knowledge, but that something other than induction is needed, in order to provide the ultimate justification of induction.

This “problem” tacitly assumes (without justification) that the problem of induction is itself a legitimate and worthy problem. But it is fallacious, since it inexorably implies infinite regress (a logical fallacy), since any justification given for induction would, given the premise of the “problem”, itself be open to the same question of how to justify this justification. For example, if one claims that “faith” justifies induction, then the next natural question is: “What justifies faith?” This infinite regress problem with the “problem” of induction is obvious, but usually not noticed, probably because one’s attention is more directed to the “problem” than to the problem that would result from having “solved” it. I.e., “the problem of induction” is based in the same thing any magic trick or con is: distraction.

So the “problem of induction” is not a profound philosophic question; it is merely a logical fallacy. We directly experience the fact that knowledge derives from logic and experience, and that’s that. The validity of induction is axiomatic. We can and should ask “How do you know?” for most things, but to ask how your basic means of knowledge is “justified” is to invalidate the questioner’s own question.

The “problem of induction” tells you, in effect, that it is not good enough that you experience and reason, that you’re in need of some additional justification outside of your own mind and your own experience. But to require some extra justification beyond logic and experience is to seek for permission and authority outside of your own organic faculties – you are not allowed to know, unless you can know by unknowable means. So the “problem of induction” is not only a fallacy, it is the most deep-rooted and pernicious form of authoritarianism possible.

It is evident that we can believe that which is not true, and that providing a means to distinguishing true from false belief is a fundamental task of philosophy. But philosophy cannot guarantee that one will find truth, it can only identify beliefs and behaviors which either further or undermine truth.

Intellectual integrity does not come naturally: barbarism is the default, natural state; it takes effort and discipline to become civilized. This a congenital condition for human beings: we can only explicitly hold in our conscious awareness a few ideas at a time, whereas contradictions in meaning are often outside this narrow range of immediate awareness. It requires a force of will to reveal these tacit contradictions. The twin tools of reason, presupposition and implication, are indispensable to reconciling these contradictions and therefore to honing our intellectual integrity.

Presupposition and implication start with a given idea, and work in opposite directions from each other: with presupposition, we discover ideas a given idea logically depends on; with implication, we find the ideas that logically follow from (i.e. depend) on it. Through the use of these tools, we can bring hidden, implicit assumptions into the light of day, and by ruthlessly applying the law of non-contradiction, cleanse our minds of contradiction. Perfect consistency is impossible, but it is possible to be perfectly committed to the practice of reconciling contradiction.

Perceptiveness, which is a honed skill, consists in the capacity for the first-handed discernment of relatively distant presuppositions or implications.

Whether one is committed to intellectual integrity is the most fundamental difference between people. The civilized man, while being imperfect, has embraced the ideal of perfect consistency and consciously strives for it. The barbarian has no clear conception of the virtue in reconciling contradiction. The evil man understands and yet explicitly rejects the practice of reconciling contradictions.

“But God has not been so sparing to men to make them barely two-legged creatures, and left it to Aristotle to make them rational, i.e. those few of them that he could get so to examine the grounds of syllogisms, as to see that, in above three score ways that three propositions may be laid together, there are but about fourteen wherein one may be sure that the conclusion is right; and upon what grounds it is, that, in these few, the conclusion is certain, and in the other not. God has been more bountiful to mankind than so. He has given them a mind that can reason, without being instructed in methods of syllogizing: the understanding is not taught to reason by these rules; it has a native faculty to perceive the coherence or incoherence of its ideas, and can range them right, without any such perplexing repetitions.”

— John Locke

Being logical is a precondition of finding truth, but it cannot be the case that an explicit knowledge of the laws of logic are required in order to identify whether something is true, since these laws are themselves a species of truth. It is of course true that one must follow the laws of logic in order to find truth, regardless of whether one explicitly knows them, but what causes a person to do this?

A liar is purposefully illogical: he means one thing to himself and feigns another meaning to you; he acts one way in one context, and his actions hypocritically contradict these actions in another context. He is insincere. Indeed, we naturally wonder whether a person who constantly contradicts themselves is incontinent, or insincere, or, since insincerity breeds incontinence, both.

An insidious form of insincerity is in those who put on an appearance of basing beliefs on experience and logic, but who really “cherry pick” what experience they will take account of. They recognize experience that leads to beliefs they prefer, and ignore experience that leads to beliefs they don’t prefer. But personal preferences are not universal, therefore this behavior flouts the axiom that “reason is universal.” Even more insidious is when they shape and appeal to tribal preferences, since having a large number of people possessed with similar preferences gives the false impression of universality and is thereby an even higher quality counterfeit of the truth.

We are logical primarily because we intend to be so. This is the essence of sincerity. It is the essence and function of a healthy mind: a properly functioning awareness depends on a meaning that corresponds to the truth, and no contradictory meaning can be true. The cause and essence of intellectual integrity qua virtue is sincerity practiced over the long-term; it is a skill earned by sincerity. Since finding truth depends on sincerity, it is an ethical axiom of philosophy that one must strive to be sincere.

The point here is not to moralize. For a marathon runner, the faster overall time, the better. In life, the more integrity you have, the better. If a professional marathon runner is slower than he might otherwise be, the remedy is to train better, not to feel guilty. On the other hand, if the marathon runner denies that it is better to run faster, then he should feel guilty – he is not really a marathon runner, he is a fraud. Likewise, if your integrity needs work then the thing to do is work on it; we should reserve moralizing for those whose lack of integrity stems from a conscious defiance of rational standards.

Why does a person choose to be insincere? An innocent reason for being “insincere” is that one is acting to protect a value from unearned appropriation by evildoers, as when a Nazi asks “Do you have Jews in your basement?” But this is not the type of insincerity I am referring to here. I am referring to a person who commits treason to the truth and to others who are themselves committed to the truth. One who “lies” to the Nazi is acting for truth, not against it. But because lying is a valid form of self-defense, and because “We are what we repeatedly do” (Aristotle), someone in abusive circumstances, especially an intellectually weak person, such as a child, might easily come to habituate lying, doing it not only when appropriate but when inappropriate. In any case, while this offers a partial explanation and may well be helpful for habitual liars to be aware of, they should not use it as an excuse, lest the maladaptive behavior continue.

Suffice it to say that a person with a normal and organically healthy mind is sincere because he chooses to be, and ultimately, there is no deeper cause than his own choice. A person who denies that he can choose to be logical is a person who denies that he himself makes sense and is therefore not a party to philosophic discourse. We can only hope that he has the good sense to return once he has corrected his illogical nature.

There is no guarantee that one will reliably find truth, but truth-seeking is guaranteed to be unreliable when one does not wish to find it. It is evident then, that sincerity is as fundamental a requirement as logic is when seeking the truth, and that a sign of its lack is when one is persistently illogical.

The soul of sincerity is the soul of logic, which is saying what you mean and meaning what you say.

The ideal of civilization is a harmony of actions of its constituent individuals.

A harmony of actions does not mean that everyone acts in the way others want them to; it means that individual action is not actively blocked by another, i.e. that human interaction is governed by consent instead of coercion. The former is an impossibility: even just two people never act in complete harmony with one another’s desires. The latter is nothing more nor less than the ideal of eliminating criminal action.

Put differently, the ideal of a proper civilization is to be free from the criminal interference of others, which is to say that those actions of others which interact with your actions must not violate your consent. Assuming we define “criminal” correctly, this is the heart and soul of liberty. To strive for an ideal civilization is to strive for a harmony of action, which is to strive for the obliteration of criminal action, which is to strive for liberty. These all denote the same thing.

Liberty cannot exist where universal reason is not recognized, for without reason there is no agreement, and without agreement there is no consent, and where there is no consent there is tyranny. Those who defy reason, and yet engage politically, necessarily attempt to assert their personal preferences as a substitute for reason, and such a methodology can only lead to the tyranny of being subjugated to arbitrary preferences.

From the foregoing follows the maxim: The linchpin of liberty is the universality of reason.

Natural rights philosophy is a science. And every science must start with some basic and incontrovertible empirical observations. What are these basic observations?

“Life is a process of self-sustaining and self-generated action.”

— Ayn Rand

The empirical substance of life is action – to live is to act. This is our incontrovertible starting point.

The term “action” has a broad range of specificity – we can talk about human action, thereby referring to all human action that has, does, or will ever exist; we can talk about your action, referring to the actions of your own life; we can talk about building a house, painting a room, hammering a nail. We can talk about your arms moving, your heart beating, your cells metabolizing, and so on. The concept “action” telescopes from the very broad to the very specific.

Two broad types of action are of importance here: interfering action and non-interfering action. By “interference”, I mean a scientific, biological, objective sense: either an action prevents or blocks another action or it does not.

There is a difference between an action and a wish: if someone refuses to marry you, that does not mean they interfered with any actual action of yours, even though in some vague sense of the word, they “interfered” with a wish, hope, or desire. On the other hand, interference in my sense here is objective: We don’t think that when a cat eats a mouse, that the mouse interfered with the cat. It is either-or: either an action is biologically, objectively interference with another action or it isn’t.

I name the distinction between non-interfering action and interfering action natural right vs. natural crime, or simply, right vs. crime. This is the first principle of natural rights: Every human action is either a right or it is a crime.

There are two paths a person can take upon understanding this principle: 1) They can consider it as a fundamental principle to be applied consistently to the human actions they consider. For many this will lead to a radical shift in perspective over time. Whether, in the final analysis, they agree or not with the perspective not is not the issue; the issue is whether they have actually authentically entertained the idea or not, and that means holding in mind as if it were true in order to reflect on how it would modify their other conceptions and principles. 2) They can nihilistically fabricate exceptions and alleged gray areas, arbitrarily incorporating definitions that come from a different theoretical framework into this one.

Whether the principle is a crystal-clear identification of how human beings can interact or whether it’s a self-contradictory delusion is entirely up to how a person chooses to interpret it. The second response is an entirely wrong approach for judging the logical coherence of the principle. This principle is a standard by which one can tell whether a definition has been formed properly or not, according to the theory. If you think that the principle is breaking down, then really what is happening is that you should change a definition, only then can you be said to have truly understood the actual theory and not a straw man version of it. In other words, part of what my theory calls for is revising definitions and interpretations such that they are consistent with the principle “every human action is either a right or it is a crime”.

Note that a major objection to natural rights – that they’re not “real”, that they are a myth – has been eradicated by creating this principle. Natural rights exist because non-interfering human action exists. Natural rights are as real as the beating of your heart.

“Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add ‘within the limits of the law’ because law is often but the tyrant’s will, and always so when it violates the rights of the individual.”

— Thomas Jefferson

Your rights are nothing more nor less than your life, if you are peaceful. Your life is nothing more nor less than the actions that make it up, and if you are peaceful then these actions are nothing less nor more than your rights. Liberty is the state where rights – which is nothing more nor less than your life as you choose to live it – are not infringed by crimes.

Some people claim that interference is relative. E.g., if you are fired from your job, in some sense that interferes with your life, but the fact is that no one physically accosted you, they just told you to get off of their property and they stopped purchasing your productivity. The fallacy here is called “equivocation”, and in this case there’s a confusion of different senses of words, between what someone merely hopes, wishes, and desires, and what their actual non-interfering actions are. But mere desire is just in one’s own head; it can’t be interfered with by others. In general we need a method for figuring out whether the interference is really the objective kind I’m talking about instead of a whimsical kind.

If we want to prove that something is or is not interference, we must start with things as they first appear to be. This concept of “at first appearance” is called “prima facie” by lawyers. For example, all appearances tell us that the cat interfered with the mouse when he ate the mouse. If someone wants to argue otherwise, it’s they who must provide the proof. Critical to this proof is identifying the locus of interference. You’ve got to specifically pin down where the interference actually happened.

While the principle of natural rights is clear, the application to the vast range of human action is not trivial. For a great many things, it is not obvious which human actions are rights and which are crimes, consider: abortion, the Lockean Proviso, patents, contracts, legitimate land ownership and abandonment.

On the other hand, it is obvious that if someone claims that something is a right and someone else is claiming it’s a crime, at least one of these are advocating crime. So it’s very important to carefully scrutinize things – a sloppy analysis leads inexorably to advocating or committing crime. Confusion about rights breeds crime. So this is serious.

Furthermore, if you are brought before trial and are innocent, you want to be judged objectively. You want a judge to use a scientific method for determining whether you committed a crime. You don’t want him using a woozy “intuitive” methodology.

So we need a careful analysis, not just a principle. How should we begin?

Human action has a vast range and complexity. To understand it, we need to group it into categories, we need a “taxonomy of rights”, just as biology has its taxonomy of life.

John Locke created the categories: life, liberty, and property. Why not use these?

We should not sunder life from liberty. To violate your right to life in any degree is to deprive you of liberty to that degree, and vice versa. Consider a man who through great effort becomes a surgeon, and consider this man’s ambition cut short through 30 years of false imprisonment. After 30 years of imprisonment, he is certainly not the same man he would have been; to a very great extent his life is not his, it’s become what someone else had chosen for him. To fully and completely deprive someone of their liberty is to deprive them of every living action whatsoever, which is to deprive them of life. So, “life” and “liberty” denote the same thing. Thus, this distinction is fine poetry, but isn’t very useful in deriving a taxonomy of rights.

Finally, the concept “property” is too narrow; there are some things we have a right to do that don’t fit under the idea of property (see below).

Consider four key methodological standards: 1) Basic categories should be fundamental, each encompassing a wide range of human action. 2) The full set of categories should be comprehensive of rightful human action. 3) Each category should distinguish actions that are significantly different from those in other categories. 4) Since this theory of rights is built upon the concept of human action, it is crucial to keep that human action focus. Either something one does is or is not a right. For example, property rights cannot be viewed merely as an object sitting out there with your name tag on it; rather, property rights concern actions one takes with respect to owned objects, such as exclusive use.

The set of rights which I claim meet the foregoing methodological standards are the rights of Self, Property, Medium, Land, Consent, and Justice. I will address each in turn. (What appears here is a cursory analysis; for a more in-depth analysis see For Individual Rights.)

“And who can doubt that it will lead to the worst disorders when minds created free by God are compelled to submit slavishly to an outside will?”

— Galileo

“Only the disciplined ones in life are free. If you are undisciplined, you are a slave to your moods and your passions.”

— Eliud Kipchoge

What the foregoing demonstrates is that human action can be divided into two categories, natural rights and natural crimes. Understood in this way, natural rights exist, they are objective, biological and scientific facts. But what I haven’t done so far in this chapter is argue that it is right to respect natural rights.

Knowing clearly why natural rights should be respected is self-evidently a good thing, and this is reason enough alone to offer an argument in defense of natural rights. But even more important is the fact that unanswered corrupt philosophy can create doubt and destroy moral courage and action in reality. A confused and morally uncertain person is a passive, apathetic, and compliant person and tends to put up with a lot of abuse, thereby inviting even more abuse.

Again, my definition of natural rights is descriptive. It just says what natural rights are. So long as a person is reasonable, they can’t really disagree that natural rights exist. But that doesn’t mean that they agree that natural rights should be respected. A person can agree that rights as I have defined them are objective, but still think that whether he respects natural rights is just a subjective personal preference.

The key proposition I still need to validate then is that one ought to respect natural rights. There are two steps in my argument: 1) the argument that one ought to follow reason – see Metaethics; 2) the argument that reason necessarily endorses natural rights and necessarily condemns natural crimes (I gave a brief argument for this in Metaethics, but I will give another, complimentary argument here).

To summarize my argument: The fact that you have the capacity for freedom of thought means that you must endorse freedom of action.

Why?

Freedom of thought is following the evidence where it leads you, instead of being bound to the dictates of emotion or tradition or arbitrary authority. It is the freedom of looking at things from all perspectives, instead of being constrained by limited perspectives.

Someone who believes something because they feel like believing it is not free in their thought. Emotions are not freely chosen by us; they bubble up automatically based on circumstances and prior assumptions. They are not a valid source of truth, so a person who believes something because they want to believe it is a prisoner to their own past. They are not free.

A rational mind freely follows the evidence where it leads. It is not bound by any outside influences or internal biases. A rational mind refuses to subordinate itself to any person, whether directly through obedience or indirectly through vague emotions, but will only follow the evidence where it leads.

A rational mind recognizes that one must be free to conclude for oneself. It claims the prerogative of authority, for itself, and in total. A rational mind accepts no arbitrary limits or constraints, but only allows constraints that are dictated by reason.

The foregoing truth endorses a radical anti-authoritarianism of mind, claiming the total prerogative to think and conclude for oneself. But this means that one is free to conclude about what one ought to be free to do. One cannot rationally conclude both that one should be free to do something, and that one ought to be blocked from doing that same thing.

A truly rational person believes that reason should be given the widest possible berth, that it should be restricted by nothing but its own refusal to be absurd and illogical, and as a natural consequence of this, that human action must also be given the widest possible berth, since human action flows from human conclusions about how to act.

What is this widest possible berth in the realm of human action? Precisely the limit drawn by natural rights. Natural rights specify that you should be free to take any action whatsoever, so long as that action does not, by interfering with others, undercut the original premise that one should be free from interference. Your rights end where another person’s rights begin. This is the idea named by Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) as The Law of Equal Liberty. One who rejects natural rights cannot be rational, because to reject natural rights is to advocate that reason be arbitrarily constrained.

In the history of debates about natural rights, the placement of burden of proof has been perverse. Concerning the proper limits of human action, a rational person is not going to conclude that he shouldn’t be free to do something unless he can prove he should. He will conclude just the opposite: that absolutely everything should be permitted but that which can be conclusively proven to be logically disallowed. There is simply no evidence for any contrary conclusion. All of the evidence points toward liberty, and there is no evidence whatsoever that points away from it. The burden of proof lies squarely on the person who wishes to violate natural rights, not on the person who would respect them.

The roots of liberty consist in a proper conception of both reason and natural rights. As I pointed out in Induction, to cleave induction from reason is to destroy a proper concept of reason and create a counterfeit. Likewise, to cleave reason from liberty is destroy the concept of liberty.

It is no coincidence that our modern notions of liberty emerged from the Enlightenment, otherwise known as the Age of Reason. This was a time when freedom of thought flourished, and it is no coincidence that this freedom of thought led to the idea of freedom of action. It is no coincidence that the work of Issac Newton was followed by the work of John Locke leading to the creation of the best (but far from perfect) lasting government we’ve known.

It should now be clear to the reader why tyranny is the natural consequence of irrationality, and why a rising respect for reason leads to a rising respect for individual liberty.

“There have been four sorts of ages in the world’s history. There have been ages when everybody thought they knew everything, ages when nobody thought they knew anything, ages when clever people thought they knew much and stupid people thought they knew little, and ages when stupid people thought they knew much and clever people thought they knew little. The first sort of age is one of stability, the second of slow decay, the third of progress, and the fourth of disaster.”

— Bertrand Russell “On modern uncertainty” (20 July 1932), p. 103-104

In every successful myth is an element of truth. It is, of course, evil to physically attack (including through force of law) others for a mere difference of opinion; we must support freedom of expression, and especially for ideas with which we disagree. It is, also, foolish to be so socially rigid and petty that we stifle and discourage the free expression of sincere philosophers and artists. A civilized society needs a broad-minded liberality, not just to maximize individual happiness, but to find the best solutions to the problems of how to evolve in the future. And, of course, individuals need room to think and grow on their own terms, without a tyrannical culture of paranoia breathing down their necks. Indeed, everyone deserves equal rights and protections under the law, without regard to race, creed, gender, or sexual preference.

But rational toleration has its limits. Our society doesn’t tolerate rapists or murderers. But that is no major achievement; few ignorant and backward societies today fail to understand they shouldn’t tolerate such. Again, society ought to respect everyone’s freedom of speech, but that doesn’t not mean society should grant someone who purveys abysmally false doctrines a professorship. So yes, we should be tolerant of (say) Marxism – in the sense of not attacking or jailing Marxists for voicing their opinions. But as a condition of being granted a professorship, we should verify that the professor is actually committed to rational ideas. There is no right of cowards, idiots, and lunatics to, at our expense, brainwash the next generation with nonsense.

But, as those brainwashed would reflexively and rhetorically ask: Who determines what constitutes a “rational” idea?

The very point of University is that we can, through a rational process, eventually find the truth. Those who don’t buy into this idea should leave University and go join or found a religion. Or, if they insist on staying, let their presence serve as evidence for the case that the University system has in fact devolved into a religion, a devolution to the barbaric Scholasticism of the past.

What this religion preaches, so very conveniently, is precisely that which permits religion to flourish while retaining its veneer of respectability: that no system of morals is better or worse than any other, that everyone has a right to opine whatever they feel like without being criticized or judged incompetent, that “moral truth” is a contradiction in terms. Just like any common criminal, the status-quo does not want the light of reason to pass judgment upon it.

Who indeed should judge what constitutes a “rational idea”? This question goes to the very beginnings of philosophy (Plato’s Republic) and to the heart of institutional legitimacy. In our era we’ve been told that peer review by unaccountable and opaque government-funded institutions (often using “proprietary data” the public cannot view) virtually guarantees scientific integrity and legitimacy. But we should reflect on who it was that told us this.

The disdain of Wisdom in our era has serious destructive consequences to society – observe the moral and political chaos of our day – all rooted in not knowing basic (and what should be obvious) differences between right and wrong. Is it right (to pick one of countless examples) to break into someone’s house in the middle of the night, shoot their dogs, and sometimes accidentally their children, all because they allegedly smoke pot? What is the University system’s position on this glaring instance of state-sponsored terrorism? It is true that many university professors oppose the War on Drugs, but then they endorse our might-makes-right legal system (legal positivism) or similar nonsense, which leaves them no real grounds for their opposition. But anyone with a proper education should have left University with a basic understanding of civics, which would include knowing that this act was a heinous political wrong with no sound legal basis whatsoever. A legitimate University system would have wiped out the War on Drugs – a crime against humanity – long ago.

The hallmark of our era, and the clue to what the next one must be, is that it’s the one where Bacon’s original vision is only half achieved. Just as we now know (in contrast to our slightly more dogmatic Dark Ages ancestors) that following reason leads to scientific truth, following reason also leads us to moral truth.

“If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they’ll kill you.”

— Oscar Wilde

“In [corporate] religions as in others, the heretic must be cast out not because of the probability that he is wrong but because of the possibility that he is right.”

— Antony Jay

The System is terrifying;
I don’t want it to be terrifying;
Therefore, it is not terrifying.

Everyone likes being coddled by their mother as a child and by their social institutions as an adult (yes, even including rugged individualists). To an extent this is all fine, but we also tend to become blind to our benefactor’s defects; we don’t want to “bite the hand that feeds us.” In this way, institutional impunity is enforced – institutions become immune to reform, because their many blind supporters viciously attack all critics.

This tribalism manifests throughout society, whether it be concerning criticism of government, police, doctors, authors, cell phone brands[3], political philosophies, music bands, parents, trucks, sports teams, religions, podcast hosts, cultures, and so on. Human beings in their natural unrefined state are just really really weird.

Thus, if we criticize police brutality, we expect someone to angrily shout back “You must hate all cops!” If we criticize educational institutions, then we expect to be branded “Anti-intellectual!” or “Show me your credentials!” And so on.

When an institution becomes non-optional in society, then it is virtually inevitable that it will consist of both “good guys” and “bad guys” doing good and evil things. Consider the police. None of us has the choice to opt-out of their services. Our only choice at present is to impact the trend of the institution, to make it worse or better, according to some standard of “good.” There are various ways of doing this, but the most direct and immediately impactful way is to become a cop. But any good cop who refused to uphold bad laws would not be one for long – he’d be fired. This helps no one (except, perhaps, the fired good cop). What helps is when the good cop learns the art of exercising his discretion to its furthest extent, pulling back from the enforcement of bad laws where possible, and vigorously enforcing good laws where possible (i.e., being humane and decent). In this manner, the policing institution is improved, and the more good cops we have, the better it gets. Indeed, if all the cops were good, then their example would start impacting related institutions, such as the legislative and judicial systems. The War on Drugs – a heinous evil that should be completely abolished immediately – is only possible because bad cops support it.

And this is how my criticisms here should generally be taken. If I criticize Universities, I’m not intending to indict all professors (on the contrary – I know of many great ones); nor if I criticize the judicial system am I intending to indict all judges and lawyers; etc. The point of this essay is to judge the standards put forth, not people; everyone is individual and unique and has to do the best they can in our very imperfect society. But if some individual does violate such standards, then the proverb “if the shoe fits, wear it” applies.

“The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly, is to fill the world with fools.”

— Herbert Spencer

Why do people so readily yield their rights to corrupt authority? Because corrupt authority didn’t teach them not to.

It is interesting how little human societies have changed in this respect. Recorded history begins roughly 5000 years ago, with Ancient Egypt and Ancient India being prime examples[4]. What we find socioeconomically is the caste system – a socioeconomic regime where a group of government-approved and regulated experts is permitted to monopolize in a given area of the economy, and where the “lower classes” may not participate, on pain of fine, imprisonment, or death.

Now, a “caste” is typically defined as hereditary: you could only be a medical doctor if your father was too. But from a human rights standpoint, it doesn’t matter whether you’re blocked from practicing medicine because your father wasn’t a doctor or if you are blocked for other reasons. The fact remains: your natural rights are being infringed. Now obviously, to the modern caste-infected mind, what I’ve just stated contains at least a few heretical premises, that, curiously enough, contradict the ones they learned from the educational caste. (A roughly equivalent term for the sense of “caste” I’m using here would be “cartel.”)

There is of course nothing whatsoever wrong with the idea of institutionally-licensed practitioners and institutionally-approved products and services. We all need to know that the products and services we receive are from trustworthy sources – our health and safety depends on this. However, when these institutions attack our health and safety by seeking to criminalize freely-chosen alternative institutions and sources, this is a confession: the ringing message they send is that we shouldn’t trust them, and that much of what they do we could do for ourselves, more efficiently and inexpensively[5][6][7]. The fact that most of us have been brainwashed to think that the government gun to our heads is “for our own good” doesn’t change a thing; the message is clear enough to clear heads.

We do need medical institutions to exist. We need to know that our doctor has a license from one. We need to prosecute doctors who fraudulently claim to have institutional approval but do not. We do not, however, need to be blocked from accessing medical care via other routes. For example, thyroid patients know how to read their blood labs, they know how to adjust their dose, and so on. They don’t need to pay a fortune to doctors so they can only do the obvious. Contacting the professional for the actually difficult problems and doing the easy things for yourself is not only good for you it’s good for the economy: why waste a highly-educated professional’s time for something trivial, which can only artificially drive up prices? Leave him be so he can do the difficult work, if indeed he’s truly fit for it.

Gullible ignoramuses claim “But some people are stupid, if they are allowed to exercise their natural right to treat themselves, then they will only hurt themselves.” This is obviously grossly illogical and authoritarian reasoning: 1) just because someone else might hurt himself, that doesn’t mean that my rights should be infringed; 2) if someone else really wants to do something you deem risky, that’s his own business, whether you believe the risk is “stupid” or not.

Of course the cartels are going to preach to us that the violence they sanction against us is “for our own good.” It is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to control a society through pure violence. Myth makes the bitter pill of exploitation go down much easier, for both sides. What doctor wants to believe that he is, at least in some part or respect exploiting his patients? (And sometimes against his own will – there are indeed plenty of licensed medical doctors who agree with everything I’m saying here.) What patient wants his exploiter cutting him open? The whole process is less psychologically painful if we just decide to believe that unjustifiable and heinous violence is completely justified; or on another level, that a fervent faith in myths wasn’t the reflection of gross intellectual incompetence and moral depravity that it is.

This clinical insanity of society is a hallmark of our era, and is the natural consequence of trying to sunder The True from The Good. Indeed, what else could result from the systematic dissection of Wisdom into two halves, arbitrarily labeling one as “rational” (science) and the other as “whimsical” (morality), than schizophrenia? As this sort of insanity is a hallmark of this era, a hallmark of the next era will be its opposite, namely that it will be seen as obscene and unprofessional for professionals to use violence against the population by forcing us to use their services and attacking alternative producers.

I am focusing on the medical profession here but we can multiply the examples to include all the castes-cartels, i.e. any profession where newcomers are forcibly blocked unless they get government approval first (in our insane era this even means hairdressers[8][9][10]).

And again, there’s nothing wrong with professional licensing systems that do not block the non-licensed, or that prosecute them for fraudulently claiming to be licensed. Indeed, it is incredibly valuable to create institutions that can certify a given level of skill. But it not only undermines the institution’s credibility when it resorts to threats and violence – making it appear not to be made of professionals but of paranoid, jealous, authoritarian control-freaks – it’s plainly evil.

“The defense of the state in all civilized countries is quite as much in the hands of teachers as it is in those of the armed forces.”

— Bertrand Russell

“Men are born ignorant, not stupid. They are made stupid by education.”

— Bertrand Russell

“The function of education in the eyes of a dominant class is to make men able to do skilled work but unable to do original thinking (for all original thinking begins with destruction); the function of education in the eyes of a government is to teach men that eleventh commandment which God forgot to give to Moses: thou shalt love thy country right or wrong. All this, of course, requires some marvelous prestidigitation of the truth, as school text-books of national history show. The ignorant, it seems, are the necessary ballast in the ship of state.”

— Will Durant

“An education that is purely scientific makes a mere tool of its product; it leaves him a stranger to beauty, and gives him powers that are divorced from wisdom.”

— Will Durant

In the ideal, Academy forms the core of civilization as its conscience and guardian angel of the integrity of the various disciplines that permit our society to function. Consequently, educational institutions, as living branches of Academy, serve as a microcosm and leading example of how society should function generally. So when University insanity ratchets up, expect general social insanity to ratchet up in the coming decades.

Our education system reflects the era of which it is a part. Let’s be generous and say that it does a fair job at educating people interested in science and technology (leaving aside various and sundry bizarreries in the more abstract areas of these disciplines). There’s plenty to criticize regarding how we educate in science and technology, but at least the general thrust of it is in the right direction.

But it does a horrific job educating people in the ends to which technology ought to be put. The humanities[11] preach precisely the opposite of the truth for many important things, such as that: war and hurricanes improve the economy, morality is arbitrary, genius is insanity, liberty is racist tyranny, all cultures are morally equal (except Western culture, which is the lowest type), rationality is a myth, degeneracy is art, racism is evil except when it is anti-white, sexism is evil except when it is anti-male, logic is white male supremacy[12], speech is violence, philosophy is delusion, law is social whim, what’s legal is moral, etc. etc. ad nauseam.

What’s to be done with this mess? The fact is that the humanities have mostly devolved into what can accurately be called both a state-sponsored religion and a colossal never-ending bullshitting session. By their very own sermons we know that they aren’t teaching that which follows from logic and evidence (the proper foundation of Academy), so why do we as a society fund them? Just like any other religion, they ought to be free to preach their dogmas, but to fund them using tax dollars is to violate the religious freedoms of the rest of society. Furthermore, by pretending to be professors when they really are only preachers is to perpetrate a massive fraud upon society and one that only brings the University system into disgrace.

“Academies that are founded at the public expense are instituted not so much as to cultivate men’s natural abilities as to restrain them. But in a free commonwealth arts and sciences will be better cultivated to the full if every one that asks leave is allowed to teach publicly, at his own cost and risk.”

— Spinoza

“… if there is to be a philosophy at all, that is to say, if it is to be granted to the human mind to devote its loftiest and noblest powers to incomparably the weightiest of all problems, then this can successfully happen only when philosophy is withdrawn from all State influence.”

— Schopenhauer

Preachers pretending to be professors have been using “Academic Freedom” to run amok and it’s past time we put an end to it. Nothing entitles them to hardworking citizens’ tax dollars and given the poor results they as an institution have achieved, it is better to cut the “professors” loose and see if they can fend for themselves through teaching, or whether they are perhaps better suited to flipping hamburgers or cleaning toilets.

There comes a time when the established authority has made itself so ridiculous that chaos is better than conformity to it. It is true that closing down our state-funded religion departments will create a vacuum, but this is an opportunity for those worthy of the “Humanities Professor” designation. Society desperately needs authentic, rational professors of the humanities, and it needs them to create a better system of institutional self-policing this time around. The foundation of any worthy humanities institution can only be: logic and evidence as the only acceptable currency of discourse.

People will pay for an education that gets them a better job, but not for one that gets them a better society. But this was not always so. In Ancient Greece, independent philosophers earned a living through teaching. Nowadays the humanities departments have managed to achieve in the population an incredible cynicism regarding the value of the humanities. But by dismantling them on humanitarian grounds, we can have a rebirth of the field, and hopefully a rekindling of appreciation of the populace for it. Combined with technological innovation, we may find that genuine humanities professors have even brighter job prospects than before and can rebuild their institutions to be better than before, especially since they won’t have to bite their tongues for the sake of those parasitical frauds they are forced to regard as peers.

“We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.”

— Thomas Jefferson

Speaking of state-funded religion, we now come to the topic of patents, where the childish whine “But I thought of it first!” becomes the law of the land. More often, at best some employee thought of it first but the corporation he was working for at the time gets to own it; at worst, a patent troll company buys patents cheaply and in bulk and specializes in extracting money from the economy in a purely parasitical way[13].

But aren’t patents for the sake of the inventor? Isn’t “his idea” the “fruit of his labor”, and isn’t he therefore entitled to “keep” it? Or perhaps you prefer the utilitarian take: Aren’t patents for the good of society, where patents give the inventor a motivation to invent, and give society a means to reap these rewards and also the reward of his public disclosure?

These so-called “arguments” are what you might call “good intentions.” They present a superficial veneer of a plausible basis for patents, that when scratched yields nothing but rotted wood. But if you never intended to seriously investigate whether your intentions are actually good, then they aren’t actually good intentions. Or, if you prefer, “the road to hell is paved with good intentions”, not because God likes to punish those who “didn’t mean to cause evil”, but rather because advocating for things you do not really understand is sheer negligence – a species of evil. Better to keep your mouth shut and be thought innocent, than to open it and indict yourself as “negligent fool” or “state-sponsored charlatan.”

“Metaphors in law are to be narrowly watched, for starting as devices to liberate thought, they end often by enslaving it.”

— Supreme Court Justice Cardozo (1926)

Yes, if something you create is actually the result of the “fruits of your labor”, then you deserve to keep it. However, patents are about taking things that aren’t actually the “fruits of your labor” on the grounds that, in the best case, they resemble something that was; or in the worst case, that they resemble something you imagined. In plain terms, patents embody legalized theft from those who actually made something to those who merely thought about making that thing. The gimmick of the argument for patents as “intellectual property” is sheer sophistry: it wants you to think that because we can create a metaphor – the comparison of abstract ideas to physical property – then that clinches the argument that ideas are property. But a metaphor isn’t an argument – it’s merely a comparison.

(I’ve never seen a pro-patent argument that wasn’t more flimsy than wet toilet paper, but I’ve met a lot of pro-patent people who were incapable of perceiving how awful their arguments are. But if you think you found an actually good pro-patent argument, please send it my way.)

Imagine yourself an Apple employee. You come to believe that iTunes is actually a horrible tyranny locking the user into Apple-anointed platforms and not providing obviously useful and necessary features. You notice that, instead of Apple engineering their music player to be the best possible system for the user, they are corrupting its utility by taking the advice of scheming MBA’s trying to extract the most money possible from the consumers. So you think to yourself “I can create something better.”

Not so fast. Without the backing of billions of dollars of venture capital and a massive patent portfolio to defend yourself using the tactic of mutually assured destruction, you’re a sitting duck – there are in fact thousands of software patents aimed right at your head[13]. Now, you could go ahead and build your idea and take your chances, but this is really risky. Do you really want to spend your energy on a risky venture when any patent-holder who wants to can steal everything you made in the blink of an eye? Maybe you should just keep your head down at Apple and work there until retirement and leave the big ideas to the big boys. “Patents reward innovation” – Right.

Multiply this horror story across all sectors of our economy and millions of otherwise creative employees and you can start to grasp the enormity of the problem – patents are a mostly unseen crime against humanity.

Earlier in history we chained families to plots of land divvied up by a King (formerly known as “land patents”). If questioned about such land “ownership”, surely some knuckle-dragging right-winger at the time would have whined “It’s mine! It was granted to me by the King!” And probably no one at the time questioned how it was that the King came to own the land and whether he had a legitimate right to divvy it out in the first place.

In modern times, we chain employees to companies that own huge patent portfolios. These employees possess all the skills needed to create competing companies, which if not for the existence of patents, would constitute a huge bargaining chip in their favor and open up a plethora of alternatives for the rest of us.

“The proposal of any new law or regulation which comes from [businessmen], ought always to be listened to with great precaution, and ought never to be adopted till after having been long and carefully examined, not only with the most scrupulous, but with the most suspicious attention. It comes from an order of men, whose interest is never exactly the same with that of the public, who have generally an interest to deceive and even to oppress the public, and who accordingly have, upon many occasions, both deceived and oppressed it.”

— Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Cause of the Wealth of Nations, vol. 1, pt. xi, p.10 (1776)

“If exclusive privileges were not granted, and if the financial system would not tend to concentrate wealth, there would be few great fortunes and no quick wealth. When the means of growing rich is divided between a greater number of citizens, wealth will also be more evenly distributed; extreme poverty and extreme wealth would be also rare.”

— Diderot, Wealth

Over the span from 1982-2017, the richest 400 people in the United States increased their wealth by 2,400%, whereas the median wealth only increased by 180%[14][15]. Now, there is no problem per se with wealth gaps – you do want the most competent to have the most access to capital, in order to have those best at producing wealth to be making the key economic investment determinations. But are these 400 really that much more competent relative to the general population than their predecessors were in 1982?

If we actually had a property-rights respecting political system, we’d not ask such a question. But in the current one we need to wonder how much of this wealth is really based on unjust exploitation – if we abolished patents (and other regulatory corporate handouts), how much of this gap would, over the next few decades, disappear? No simple study could determine the full scale of the answer, for there are many would-be wealth creators who did not bother putting in the effort, given that they could easily be squashed by illegitimate corporate privilege. The Left feeds from the Right’s impunity.

Massive factory automation is part of of our destiny as a species and the next era will be luxuriously overflowing with it, but given the threat of patents, this potential boon to humanity represents a dire threat in our era. (Note that this threat is also constrained by patents: the person automating is constantly under the threat of being sued for infringement by a parasitical troll, particularly when they don’t have VC backing.)

In a proper economic context, everyone who can build the relevant automation would be free to do so, and this puts a sane upper limit on how much profit the original automation builder can extract from the economy. But if we wind up with automation cartels (like we do in so many other hyper-regulated fields), then because of the patent system these cartels will be able to block all newcomers and raise its prices with near impunity.

I don’t say total impunity, because as history has shown, there is usually a political limit to economic tyranny (North Korea may be an exception, and a future dystopian era[16] filled with highly efficient killing machines might be another). At some point, the population becomes so angry at the wealth gap, correctly sensing on some level that something is unfair even while not knowing precisely what, that they either tax the rich or lop off their heads. These are both extremely crude and destructive measures, for it is not (necessarily) the rich’s fault that the whole population is blind to the real causative evils. Like everyone else, the rich work within the system as it is, doing their best with the framework laid down for them by society, and indeed many of these rich (but not the patent trolls) are among the best at wealth creation and it only harms society when they are oppressed. The cure for oppression is ending the oppression, not reversing the role of oppressor and oppressed.

In spite of the foregoing indictment of patents, we do need a means of protecting investors and creators from those who would simply copy their work. But such protections must be moral, which means, they must be quite modest in comparison to the current patent racket. One such candidate is copyrights. Just as a copyright can protect a book from mindless expropriation, so too a “design copyright” could protect a wide variety of presently patented creations. Any creation that can clearly be proven to have its source in a particular creator (and not in an act of independently coming across the same idea) would be able to use the design copyright. (Copyrights as they are currently implemented come with their own set of insane tyrannies that flout legitimate property rights and right of individual consent, so these would have to be remedied.)

Jurisprudence is the field that seeks a full and rational justification for the edicts issued by the reigning authority; where those edicts have no rational justification, it offers a ringing indictment of them. In our era the practice of law offers some beacons of light and hope, usually rooted in some wise tradition, such as the recent Supreme Court ruling upholding the First Amendment (Matal v. Tam, 2017); and it also offers ocean of criminal insanity, which is sometimes the legislator’s fault, and sometimes the judge’s fault

But the theory of law (jurisprudence per se) is, in our times, a complete fraud. No one in any position of authority on this subject takes seriously the idea that they should be offering rational justifications; on the contrary, what they offer is excuses for why, they believe, there can never be any such things as rational justifications. This was not always the case – Enlightenment philosophers did attempt to give rational justifications for political power, and due to their sincerity, they substantially advanced the side of truth and justice, leading humanity to ultimate political culmination in men like Thomas Jefferson and in the United States Bill of Rights.

Enlightenment philosophers failed, but they did at least try. In our era they don’t even bother trying anymore. Such is the nature of our educational institutions, that they do not permit the existence of that kind of moral leadership. Handmaidens of state impunity thrive, while staunch advocates of rational universal justice are (almost?) nowhere to be found (there are of course the counterfeits who pretend to stand for such – for a quick litmus test, ascertain their opinion on, say, patents). The case should of course be the reverse: handmaidens of tyranny should be disqualified; everyone in the Academy should be staunch advocates of Truth and Justice.

“The more laws, the less justice.”

— Cicero

In this era of elephantine, byzantine, arbitrary legal codes (due precisely to the fact that jurisprudence nowadays is a fraud), ignorantia juris non excusat (“ignorance of the law is no excuse”) is a monstrously grotesque joke. If the law were actually based on justice, then there would be much to this saying, since everyone can know by reasoning from first principles whether what they are doing is or is not violation of another person’s rights, without having to be explicitly told. But as it is, of course ignorance of the law is, most of the time, a very good excuse.

For every law, we should in principle be able to trace its rationale to the very foundation of the rules of reasoning[17]; otherwise the law is an exercise of arbitrary authority, and therefore, illegitimate. Granted, nihilists can pretend to have dissolved every valid argument in the acid of their own unreflective skepticism, but there is a vast difference between the good faith attempt to provide a rationale and the authoritarian impunity we see in our systems of law today.

“If you’re not the customer, then you’re the product.”

“Collaborate on standards. Compete on quality.”

The centralization of major parts of The Internet is a huge risk[18][19][20][21][22][23][24].

This is only partly the fault of technologists: The most perfect technology for creating the most perfect Internet could be publicly available right now, and yet if nobody chose to use or support it the Internet would in every practical sense still be broken. Ultimately then, it is our own preferences, multiplied a billionfold, pandered to by morally-neutered technology nerds, that are responsible for this major problem.

It is our roughly averaged expectations of how the Internet should work that determines how it does work. But certainly, not everyone’s expectations have the same sway. Those who form active coalitions influence it more than those who merely stand on the sidelines and complain. The sad truth is that those who wish to use the Internet as a means of exploitation and manipulation have, if not a moral purpose, a clear one. And they are active. They organize, they legislate, they create. So they win.

Sincere expression of ideas, however irreverent or unpopular or mistaken, is the proper moral backbone of the Internet. While the many mainstream sites that wish to collect and herd people (and often, profit thereby) should be free to exist, they’re backward and barbaric and would over time become relics, but for skulduggery and government malfeasance. At present, and after the same historical pattern of established castes-cartels stifling newcomers described earlier in this essay, they are trying to pass legislation to hamstring anyone who doesn’t have massive VC backing[25].

Bulk censorship or privacy-violating bulk data-gathering is morally obscene. If the government has a case against us, then it should make one; if it wants our data it should bring a warrant. A company that is essentially just a convenient “dashboard” for bulk governance (whether by government or corporations or advertisers) has no place in a civilized world.

Is “cloud computing” an inside job? In any case, it needs to be ruthlessly neutered. What you create, you should own and control. This includes your data and your relationships. Technically speaking, there is no reason why these “cloud services” should be anything but dumb plumbing and data warehousing that moves and backs up your optionally encrypted data. Granted, it is not easy to solve this problem, but neither is it easy to build “one neck ready for one leash”[26] cloud applications that scale to billions of users and give the government free access to the ill-gathered information. It comes down to what enough people are motivated to build. Do they want tyrannical systems made for control-freaks and their mindless data serfs? Or would they prefer facilitating individual privacy and liberty and voluntary exchange of ideas? Generally speaking, we got what people of this era wanted.

Among those who didn’t want this, too many want a free lunch[27]. It’s our choice: do we want to be held hostage by advertisers, or would we prefer to be free, and pay for what we use?

What we most need to resolve this problem is a rallying point of sanity: a vision of how the Internet should work, and a band of professionals who will forge ahead, doing the intellectual, moral, legal, technical, and educational work necessary to get this done. But here again, we see the state-sponsored charlatan class not doing their jobs. This negligence by our Universities is – again – mostly the fault of the humanities disciplines, who should be giving us the overarching ideals that determine the ultimate technical solutions and thereby shape our future for the better.

Those doing the heavy lifting here are a ragtag band of social misfits-heroes whose livelihoods are constantly being threatened by the very status quo that is responsible for the problems. If we close the humanities departments (as recommended earlier), that would stimulate a plethora of new and actually decent humanities activities, give this ragtag band a stimulus to better organization, including rallying around the problem of securing a better Internet for the future.

“Well, when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.”

— President Richard Nixon

“Before the Freedom of Information Act, I used to say at meetings, “The illegal we do immediately; the unconstitutional takes a little longer.” But since the Freedom of Information Act, I’m afraid to say things like that.”

— Henry Kissinger, secret meeting on March 10, 1975

Consider the refrain “It’s my property, I can do what I want with it!” Or “They’re my children, I can raise them how I want to!” Or “It’s my business and my ‘skin in the game’, I can run it how I want!” I want, I want, I want. From the infant’s scream to the barbarian adult’s measures just how little the mere passage of time results in intellectual maturation. But be careful: he might try to kill you if you point that out. There’s nothing per se wrong with “wants,” but a want that wants to shun all criticism is one that rational philosophy can only indict as impunity.

Impunity is a great national pastime, always lurking just beneath the surface. For some it is not disguised at all – even friendly criticism of their behavior results in a shrieking hysterical reaction. For other, more civilized types, the impunity lies hidden in corners of their mind, as bogus beliefs they refuse to question, but that ultimately result in serious national mayhem.

Flaunted impunity is the trophy of wealth, licensed professionals, and the nation-state. These believe they have earned the right to flamboyantly inflict their wills upon others without answering any probing philosophical questions. The rest of the citizens sometimes become outraged at this – and then tell their children “because I said so.” The allergic reaction to “reasons why” is a pandemic, leaving no one unscathed. It should be no wonder then that the problem of metaethics had been such an historic bother to philosophy in spite of its simplicity – philosophy had learned early on that those who run society don’t tolerate rational methodology, since ultimately, rational methodology can never sanction impunity. (Consider the case of Plato’s near-death attempt to teach a young dictator that the basis good governance can only be found by following reason[1].)

Hospital mistakes are a leading cause of death in America[28], yet when was the last time you heard of a doctor or nurse being prosecuted for negligent homicide? We certainly don’t want our doctors unfairly prosecuted, but can gross negligence possibly be that rare? The stories of policemen being held to a far lower standard in court than non-uniformed citizens, or being put on paid vacation for violating a citizen’s rights instead of being prosecuted is legion. We can multiply the examples ad nauseam.

We live in a world where most people seem to want to do at least one wrong and don’t want to be questioned about it or held to account. “Who are you to say what’s wrong!” they say. So, they look the other way when other people are doing something wrong, on the premise that “Maybe if I look past his evils against others, then I can get away with mine.” The dictum “judge not lest ye be judged” has put people’s minds in the gutter, lowering their standards to the minimum possible, making them turn the other cheek and look the other way, desecrating civilization.

Scientific prowess gave to humanity the atomic bomb, who lack the moral prowess to safely handle it. Never in the history of mankind has the urgency of resolving the cleavage between The True and The Good been so clear and consequential. We’ve been living with the situation for so long that we tend to tune out the epic scale of the risks; however, it looks like something straight out of fiction, a setup to the ultimate Greek Tragedy: Mankind obtains the gift of fire from the gods, and then inadvertently uses it to burn down civilization.

The irony is that the key to moral prowess is contained in scientific prowess. The only way we could build an atomic bomb was that many scientists had practiced the virtue of rationality in at least a limited sphere. To use the key is to remove the arbitrary limitation. Unqualified rationality is the antithesis of and ultimate antidote for impunity.

“Close every door of escape, and the prisoners will forget they are in jail.”

— Will Durant

Was it really necessary to Western civilization, and in every instance, to give the American Indian the choice between either joining it, or extermination? Did they really have no right of self-determination at all? Do we really want a world so uniform that it can’t possibly allow this ancient and radically different society to exist along with ours? Isn’t it tragic that we can never know what it is like to experience and learn from that different native culture, and that we spent more energy destroying them than gathering information about their history?

How on Earth can we justify our actions? Could we not have made a treaty with them, that in effect, required them as a society to learn how to respect our rights, while at the same time we respected theirs? Did we really need all the land for ourselves and for National parks?

Many would agree with my lament about the American Indian’s demise (something they can do nothing about), but then hypocritically deny the self-determination of their own contemporaries (something they can do something about).

At the root of this historic and unnecessary tragedy, one that has viciously subdued more than just the American Indian, is the megalomaniacal drive of Empire. Indeed, much of this essay is about the mental disease of megalomania – megalomania of too many priests, politicians, doctors, professors, lawyers, MBA’s, and on and on and down to the “good-intentions” of sundry useful idiots. But in Empire, we find a “mother-of-all megalomania”, for it is through this megalomania that all the rest of the megalomania is made possible.

I have already demonstrated why federations of City-States are the only rationally justifiable form of governance[17][29]. To the extent that history can prove anything, it has proven that City-States create the best type of human beings – witness the produce of Ancient Athens. But history also proved that City-States are not enough – we need honorable City-States to band together in federations, to protect themselves from menacing Empires (a few in Ancient Greece knew this and warned their fellow-citizens; but tragically, they were too partisan to heed the call for federation[1]).

Many Founding Fathers of the United States of America knew this to a great degree, and attempted to create a system whereby locales had the right of self-determination and where the federation had the prerogative to protect everyone’s rights. The problem was that the self-determining locales were not local enough. But they didn’t need to abolish the States, they just needed to add the City-States. Individual rights are universal and should be enforced by all three levels (Federal/State/City-State), but only the City-State should make determinations concerning the specific character of their society.

But the arc of our country is from the virtuous federation to the vicious nation-state, where everyone is expected to conform not to the idea of respecting everyone’s individual rights, but to the arbitrary and multitudinous social constraints of the nationalist. Note that many of these social constraints would be fine to have in a given City-State (where if you didn’t like them, you can always leave), but constitute tyranny when at the national scale (where you cannot leave). This arc needs to be incrementally reversed, retaining the basic structure and function of federation, and permitting City-State locales to determine their own cultures and characters, and then either flourish or shrink, depending on how good these really are.

Thousands of experiments on how to best govern a locale, subject only to respecting the rights of others, would bring about a fantastic and ever-improving variety of social structures, catering to the individual tendencies and preferences of all of us. At this point, Western Civilization would have come full-circle, recapitulating the best that Ancient Greece had to offer, while having created the political structures that make it possible to sustain it.

“medeis ageometretos eisito.” (Let no one without geometry enter here.)

— inscription on portal of Plato’s Academy

“He who dares not offend cannot be honest.”

— Thomas Paine

Our Creator has endowed us with rationality, which is the capacity to discern and decide what constitutes universal truth. Such capacity belongs to all human beings, regardless of religion or belief system, creed, race, or gender. Only this common capacity, exercised as rational persuasion, underwrites the potential for any virtuous alliance. The only alternative to the rational mode of human interaction is authoritarianism and tyranny.

Authentic rational persuasion takes place on a field of total intellectual liberty, transparency, and intellectual equality. It is absolutely free from all coercion, intimidation, deception, duplicity, manipulation, concealment, insincerity, authoritarianism, or censorship. The true is the non-contradictory, the complete and boldly stated whole truth, whose pursuit demands an eternal openness to sincere questioning and the possibility of being proven wrong. A civilization which is operating on the principle of rational persuasion is a healthy civilization and on the road to progress and achievement; one that is not is barbarous and on the path to destruction.

The process of rational persuasion is complex, subtle, and delicate; it is therefore easily subverted by bad faith actors, who usually don the guise of anointed authority. Such subversion must therefore be anticipated and precluded in any organization that sincerely aims at integrity; such bad actors must be identified and then excluded from positions of authority and influence.

To be human is indeed to make mistakes. But bad faith actors are readily identified as those who constantly violate the principles of rational persuasion: they make contradictory statements and refuse to explain, they tell partial truths and when caught do not explain their omissions, when sincerely questioned they attack the questioner, they argue from authority, they ignore critics, they censor.

A system of bad rules but good people is far superior to a system of good rules but bad people. Ultimately, no system of rules can make up for the failure to put actually sincere people in proper positions of authority and influence. A society that lacks the moral backbone to identify and condemn malicious irrationality, that withholds due criticism for fear of being impolite or failing in imagined duties of camaraderie, is a society of slaves.

“Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add ‘within the limits of the law’ because law is often but the tyrant’s will.”

— Thomas Jefferson

“The fact therefore must be that the individuals themselves, each in his own personal and sovereign right, entered into a contract with each other to produce a government: and this is the only mode in which governments have a right to arise, and the only principle on which they have a right to exist.”

— Thomas Paine, Rights of Man

To revere the value of rational persuasion is to revere the sanctity of individual consent, for to be rationally persuaded is to consent to a particular conception of the truth. And as voluntary human action is the consequence of individual conceptions of how to act, such reverence necessitates fidelity to the principle of inalienable natural rights. In a state of sound and evolved civilization, the natural liberty a person would possess in a state of nature – that which is our birthright – should never be infringed, except when they themselves have infringed the natural liberty of another; such ideal is the venerable “Law of Equal Liberty.” Included in that natural liberty is the option and potential to make a common pact with society, to provisionally yield certain specific rights to the community in exchange for taking part in that community.

The proper purpose of a government is to secure the individual’s natural liberty, not to thwart it; or in John Locke’s words “The end of the law is, not to abolish or restrain, but to preserve and enlarge freedom.” We delegate certain rights to governments for the purposes of a more reliable implementation of such rights, not in order to strip away the birthright and enslave ourselves and our descendants.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…”

— The United States Declaration of Independence

The right of consent is sacred and spiritual and real, transcending the authority and domain of any government. Whereas governments are artificial creations of Mankind, consent is an organic and self-evident first principle of human life, arising from a place we describe as “consciousness”, which is presently and perhaps even permanently inscrutable to our methods of science. No one may legitimately override the moral authority of another human being’s individual consent, except and only to the extent that such human has initially infringed another person’s consent.

The systematic violation of consent by governments is the root of all of their atrocities. These traitors to our species believe that they possess a higher authority than the rational faculty of their brethren, utterly lacking in understanding or explanation of how it could be so that all men are not actually created equal in this critical regard.

A government is a human invention, and since all human beings have equal rights, then all legitimate governments are made by rational agreement; in other words, by consent. No fabrication or counterfeit of true consent is an acceptable substitute, whether that be by majority rule, bogus philosophical arguments (such as utilitarianism), historical precedent, real or alleged states of emergency, failure to comprehend how a consensual government can work, or a frank defiance of the principle of consent.

Only a proper science of natural rights can articulate and defend to what precisely this term refers, to distinguish between real rights and their counterfeit; such science is at the foundation of any legitimate theory of law. And it is precisely due to a neglect of this all-important field of study that such discord in the field of economics plagues the human race, as for example in the battles between socialism, communism, and capitalism. Ergo we have a capitalism which proffers a mixture of both legitimate and counterfeit property rights, and a communism which reacts to this like a juvenile delinquent, throwing all subtlety aside and indicting property rights per se. There is no way through these colossal battles of stupidity vs. stupidity except through the meticulous first-principles study of natural rights.

“To determine whether or not something is ethical, it requires a contest of ideas.”

— Senior Sergeant Krystle Mitchell, Victoria Police

“This sacred Privilege is so essential to free Governments, that the Security of Property, and the Freedom of Speech always go together; and in those wretched Countries where a Man cannot call his Tongue his own, he can scarce call any Thing else his own. Whoever would overthrow the Liberty of a Nation, must begin by subduing the Freeness of Speech; a Thing terrible to Publick Traytors.”

— Benjamin Franklin

“It is error only, and not truth, that shrinks from inquiry.”

— Thomas Paine

Since circa 2016, we have been living in a world of drastically increasing censorship. Americans have generally always known that “the good guys don’t censor,” but this simple truth is being rapidly forgotten or swept aside. The chief motivation for the censorship is transparent: across our economy, those experts who have not kept up with the times have had their credibility consistently chipped away by a new and organically emerging class of energetic, independent-minded, self-taught experts. The present situation is very precisely summed up by a line from Mel Brooks’ “Blazing Saddles”: “We’ve got to protect our phony baloney jobs gentlemen!”. Life is imitating art.

Mainly because these corrupt experts and the stodgy barnacled institutions they infest do not want to learn and grow as decent human beings and figure out how they can still feed themselves given that they only know how to profit by outdated and harmful ideas, they have set on the warpath against true and accurate information, branding it “dangerous misinformation.” These dangerous fools, who occupy the heights of institutional privilege and power, are now in the process of burning down the long-cherished American principles and precedents that underwrite our civic health and spirit. How can so many Americans not instantly recognize this evil for what it is? Precisely because they have been educated by this corrupt class of experts for decades.

No legitimate institution can exist where those who dissent in good faith are intimidated, threatened, punished, demoted, harassed, ostracized, and excluded, for human beings are not omniscient, they need a Socratic governance of their constant propensity for errors. This is particularly true for human beings who have yearned for positions of power and authority over others, ergo the venerable rule of journalism that it hold power to account, that it should be “watching over the powerful few in society on behalf of the many to guard against tyranny”[1].

True journalism is independent journalism; there can be no real journalism where individual journalists are kept on a corporate leash. Such people are abject propaganda artists not real journalists. The basis for journalism as a legitimate profession is the right of every citizen to also be a journalist.

“It has been the one song of those who thirst after absolute power that the interest of the state requires that its affairs should be conducted in secret. But the more such arguments disguise themselves under the mask of public welfare, the more oppressive is the slavery to which they will lead. Better that right counsels be known to enemies than that the evil secrets of tyrants should be concealed from the citizens. They who can treat secretly the affairs of a nation have it absolutely under their authority; and as they plot against the enemy in time of war, so do they against the citizens in time of peace.”

— Spinoza

Government, properly formed and functioning, serves solely the universal interests of “We the People,” not the special interests of elites. That means it serves the principles of truth, objectivity, rule of law, and equality before the law, and therefore owes its sole client, the public, a duty of accountability and transparency.

A legitimate Federal government is nothing more than the individual’s right of self-defense, delegated for the sake of accuracy, efficiency, and objectivity. Therefore, the Federal government has the same duties and obligations that the individual has when exercising such right (see the next section, JUSTICE). Specifically, if an individual should threaten or implement force against another, then he has the burden of proving to his countrymen that such action is justified. Legitimate governments explain any and all well-grounded allegations that government agents have deviated from rational principle. They do not ignore these questions; they clearly and directly explain the perceived discrepancy, or they make the appropriate remedies.

Furthermore, whereas some short-term secrecy by government is required in executing certain actions against criminals, this need for secrecy evaporates after such action has taken place. A government that can hide its schemes from the public indefinitely at least resembles a criminal conspiracy, and if it is not one then it is immediate danger of becoming one. Therefore, no legitimate government keeps secrets, except those that are both carefully circumscribed in extent, specifically articulating and proving that certain narrowly-defined things should be kept secret and why, and limited in time and scope and in accordance to a clear, well-defined, and ethically proper purpose.

“No man has a natural right to commit aggression on the equal rights of another, and this is all from which the laws ought to restrain him.”

— Thomas Jefferson to Francis Gilmer, 1816

“When law and morality contradict each other, the citizen has the cruel alternative of either losing his moral sense or losing his respect for the law.”

— Frederic Bastiat

“It will be of little avail to the people that the laws are made by men of their own choice if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood.”

— James Madison

“Men do not make laws. They do but discover them. Laws must be justified by something more than the will of the majority. They must rest on the eternal foundation of righteousness.”

— Calvin Coolidge, 30th President of the United States

“Bad laws are the worst sort of tyranny.”

— Edmund Burke

Justice is the right to set things right. The pursuit of justice presupposes both a moral standard of what constitutes justice and the knowledge of how such justice is rightfully achieved, that is, how it is achieved without creating yet more injustice.

As with all civilized endeavors, the administration of justice is a deeply rational enterprise. It is concerned with facts, logic, “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth,” and a written formality that is diligently checked for both contradiction and baseless statements. Such values apply not merely to the facts of a particular case, but also govern the creation of the law itself. Wherever such law has manifestly not been based in an actually rational process, when the legislator has been negligent in his duty to prescribe a just and properly substantiated law, then those parties involved in the law’s administration have the right to demand that the legislator square his ideas with natural law, and if he does not, then their duty is to nullify such law. No one is above the law, which means that the legislator has the obligation to justify the laws, for to legislate is to accuse, and all accusations bear the burden of proof.

The root of a system of justice is natural justice, which is the individual right to set things right for himself, using an informal process. If another human being has infringed upon an individual’s rights – for example, if his person has been physically molested, his property stolen or trespassed upon – then such individual has the right to seek and apply remedy for himself, namely he has the right of “self-defense”, up to such extent as is warranted by the circumstance. He may go so far, but no further.

But the risk of such informality is the same as throughout all risky human endeavor: catastrophic error. A formal written process, checked by one’s rational peers, greatly reduces the risk of mistakes. When acting in self-defense, an individual can easily err: for example, he may think someone is breaking into his house, and in a state of fear, shoot another individual, but later find it was only a family member. We can reduce the risk of such tragedy in emergencies through careful training, but we cannot eliminate it entirely. But when the defense of our natural rights is not urgent, we wisely appeal to other members of society to help us adjudicate, and so avoid a miscarriage of justice arising from our own mistakes. Such is the origin of a formal system of justice and is the reason why “vigilante justice” is a misguided enterprise. But when the law has become perverse and irrational, when it is not aimed at protecting natural rights, then it has become the perpetrator of crime not the humble formal adjudicator that it ought to be.

There is no such real crime as a crime against “the state”; all crime is either a crime against individual persons’ natural rights, or it is no crime at all. Where there is no individual victim there can be no crime; the fabrication of “victimless crimes” is itself a crime against humanity.

“New legislation may be proposed only at the first session of each month, and the member who offers it is held responsible for the result of its adoption; if these are seriously evil another member may within a year of the vote invoke upon him the graphe paranomon, or writ of illegality, and have him fined, disenfranchised, or put to death; this is Athens’ way of discouraging hasty legislation.”

— Will Durant, on Ancient Greece legislation

Only a country’s wisest and best people should go anywhere near the fields of the legislation and administration of the law; if someone does not know what “justice” is, then they should neither be involved in its legislation nor with its administration. In ancient times, the law was that a legislator who created a manifestly bad law could be punished for its bad consequences; that practice should be brought back. Furthermore, a courtroom should neither be a fiefdom of impunity nor be slavishly obedient to corrupt legislation; a judge’s principal job is not to “rule,” but to formally explain decisions by reference to universal principles of natural justice.

“Our legislators are not sufficiently apprised of the rightful limits of their powers: that their true office is to declare and enforce only our natural rights and duties, and to take none of them from us. … The idea is quite unfounded, that on entering into society we give up any natural right.”

— Thomas Jefferson, to Francis W. Gilmer, 1816

“MEN being, as has been said, by nature, all free, equal, and independent, no one can be put out of this estate, and subjected to the political power of another, without his own consent. The only way whereby any one divests himself of his natural liberty, and puts on the bonds of civil society, is by agreeing with other men to join and unite into a community for their comfortable, safe, and peaceable living one amongst another, in a secure enjoyment of their properties, and a greater security against any, that are not of it. This any number of men may do, because it injures not the freedom of the rest; they are left as they were in the liberty of the state of nature. When any number of men have so consented to make one community or government, they are thereby presently incorporated, and make one body politic, wherein the majority have a right to act and conclude the rest.”

— John Locke

“All men have a right to remain in a state of nature as long as they please; and in case of intolerable oppression, civil or religious, to leave the society they belong to, and enter into another.

When men enter into society, it is by voluntary consent; and they have a right to demand and insist upon the performance of such conditions and previous limitations as form an equitable original compact.

Every natural right not expressly given up, or, from the nature of a social compact, necessarily ceded, remains.

All positive and civil laws should conform, as far as possible, to the law of natural reason and equity.

…

In short, it is the greatest absurdity to suppose it in the power of one, or any number of men, at the entering into society, to renounce their essential natural rights, or the means of preserving those rights; when the grand end of civil government, from the very nature of its institution, is for the support, protection, and defence of those very rights; the principal of which, as is before observed, are Life, Liberty, and Property. If men, through fear, fraud, or mistake, should in terms renounce or give up any essential natural right, the eternal law of reason and the grand end of society would absolutely vacate such renunciation. The right to freedom being the gift of God Almighty, it is not in the power of man to alienate this gift and voluntarily become a slave.”

— Samuel Adams, The Rights of the Colonists, 1772

A proper Federal jurisdiction is nothing more nor less than the formal administration of natural law, namely that law which articulates and applies natural rights, within a given geographic region. Americans increasingly do not really have a “Federal” government; what they have is a national government. The difference between these two forms is the same as the difference between real money and counterfeit money, or to be exact, between natural rights and entitlements stolen and then divvied out by a dictatorship.

The principle of Federalism runs through the writings of the Founders and is the true spirit and foundation of America, heralded and enshrined by our Declaration of Independence. The constant degeneration of the principle of Federalism over the past few hundred years is the precise reason for our ever-increasing political frustration and discord. Increasing numbers of people call for a “national divorce”, a secession. But what we in fact need is a Federal government stripped clean of arbitrary powers, and reinstilled with the spirit of Federalism – namely, a national jurisdiction where natural rights, and only natural rights, are defended – for only such a system can peacefully unify a diverse set of people.

The principle of Federalism is the principle of localism: among our natural rights are the rights of property and of contract, which permit us to join with others to create towns and cities with “house rules”-type legislation, where “if you don’t like the rules, then you can leave,” and where a variety of different cultures and styles can emerge and peacefully co-exist in a harmonious federation. One doesn’t coerce one’s friends into a regime of one’s own arbitrary personal preferences; neither should one coerce one’s neighbors nor nation, and indeed, such coercion is a hallmark of morally-backward barbarism and recipe for civil war. Such “house-rules” legislation we designate as man-made law, a law which is imagined and subjectively preferred, in contrast to natural law which is rationally discovered and proven.

America in its best sense emerged from such ideal, where localities joined forces in order to secure their rights from foreign aggressors, to resolve disputes among themselves, to quash local tyrannies, and in general to uphold natural rights throughout the country. The individual American States should be reformed as federal (natural-rights upholding) jurisdictions, since they claim jurisdiction over wide swaths of unowned (or improperly acquired) lands (California is a leading example of a rogue totalitarian state in dire need of such reform). Only individual cities, towns, or other contiguously and legitimately-owned properties may properly institute man-made laws. Indeed, the precise recipe for a perversion of a Federal government into a national government is for it to dispense with natural law and start instituting man-made law across the entire country. Such is a perfect recipe for discord and eventual dissolution, for no one wishes to be subjugated to the arbitrary rules of another.

The genocide of the Native Americans and other indigenous peoples was and is wrong, and so too is it wrong to infringe the right of any person to secede from his present society and claim a bit of the wilderness for themselves, and to organically create new and independent forms of governance. It is both moral and indispensable to humanity that it be permitted to experiment in forms of government, to “let a thousand city-states bloom.” The Federal government has a critical role to play in such experiments: to prevent inalienable natural rights from being infringed. But such is its only role. An integral aspect of this is to guarantee citizens the right to secede from localities.

The great sin of national governments (and many states) is flouting the right of secession; they compound their sin by hypocritically mouthing the words they have systematically rendered meaningless over roughly the past hundred years: “If you don’t like it here, then leave.” The actual liberty to individually secede is the ultimate guard against tyranny and must perpetually exist. Claiming vast swaths of natural wilderness and blocking novel rights-respecting governments from independently forming is a crime against humanity.

“Until philosophers are kings, or the kings and princes of this world have the spirit and power of philosophy… cities will never cease from ill, nor the human race.”

— Plato

“There is nothing so delightful as the hearing or the speaking of truth. For this reason, there is no conversation so agreeable as that of a man of integrity, who hears without any intention to betray, and speaks without any intention to deceive.”

— Plato

“Academies that are founded at the public expense are instituted not so much as to cultivate men’s natural abilities as to restrain them. But in a free commonwealth arts and sciences will be better cultivated to the full if every one that asks leave is allowed to teach publicly, at his own cost and risk.”

— Spinoza

More and more people are noticing something peculiar about our society: it’s making less and less “sense.” It is obvious that this is a problem with the expert class, since the way a complex society makes sense of the world is and can only be through expertise. But why is our expert class so markedly degenerating?

Since at least 375BC[2], wise men have known that a healthy Republic requires wise leadership. Among the ultimate social problems is to devise a system whereby those of such merit rise to the top and whereby those unfit to lead do not. Clearly, whatever systems our society has for selecting its experts have utterly failed. If we do not correctly diagnose and restore such meritocratic system, then nothing will save us, for even the most ideal political framework cannot function if manned by foolish and amoral incompetents.

The chief reason for why our system of experts is failing now is precisely the same reason why it failed in Plato’s time: a King had commissioned Plato to teach him how to excel in his station, and Plato attempted to teach him that in order to master politics, he’d have to master ethics, and in order to master ethics, he’d have to master rationality. Evidently the King was a poor geometer, which landed Plato in the King’s prison.

It’s easy to directly observe the King’s psychology at work throughout all levels of our present society, whereby truth-tellers are gaslit, bullied, condemned, censored, ostracized, sometimes even imprisoned and tortured, and perhaps in select cases, assassinated. The assault on truth-tellers happens at all scales of our society, whether within individual relationships, families, corporations, or government institutions. It is a cultural phenomenon and ethos; a lot of people simply hate those who possess both an acute perception and the audacity to articulate it. Illegitimate authority hates rational criticism, therefore it systematically trains the population to attack those who give it.

Such barbaric ethos that hates truth-tellers is of course not limited to our own time, it spans all of recorded human history. Socrates was forced to drink poison; Aristotle was forced to flee for his life; Galileo was put under house arrest for life; David Hume was refused academic posts he very much deserved; Schopenhauer was ostracized; Thomas Paine was imprisoned; Semmelweis was ridiculed and then imprisoned and tortured his own profession; Bertrand Russell was fired and imprisoned; contemporary whistle-blowers are maligned, fired, and imprisoned.

One might conclude from this dark history that an evil hatred of truth and merit is intrinsic to humanity. Regardless of the cause, a central purpose of a true and proper liberalism (as opposed to the zealotry contemporary liberalism has devolved into, namely “progressivism”) is to guard such truth-tellers from these vile assaults. Through such guarding in America’s past (flawed as it often was), innovators have been substantially free to create great works and thereby advance civilization beyond our ancestors’ wildest dreams. And yet these liberal guards are rapidly dissolving, and unless this trend is reversed, it will inexorably lead to civilizational collapse.

Philosophically, the root of this apocalyptic cultural ethos is the so-called “is-ought” dichotomy, wherein we are supposed to believe that whereas reason can bring us “factual” truths, it cannot find any moral truths, and therefore, logically-speaking, “anything goes.” Economically, the root is the “too big to fail” ethos, which means that incompetent business leaders are no longer required to hand the reins of corporate power to more competent leadership, so long as those leaders have close ties with powerful government bureaucrats. Legally, the root is the imposition of dictatorship, which in the United States is called a “state of emergency”, a condition whereby those responsible for the emergency get to stay in power, which means no due process and therefore no accountability. On the individual level, various mind-viruses weaken the psychology of the public, such that they keep truth-tellers in check on every level of society: politeness-mongering, credential-wagging, moral relativism, cynicism, greed.

To restore sanity we must restore meritocracy, and to restore meritocracy we must applaud the truth-teller, not punish him.

Our society is too complex to function at our current population levels without the guidance of wise experts. If we fail to restore rational standards, then what probably lies in the not too distant future is not merely the vast harms we’ve seen caused by past and present leadership, but an epochal massive loss of human life, and without even the ability to understand what is truly causing such loss.

A critical question is: how do we distinguish the truth-teller from the charlatan? The central answer is that the truth-teller can rationally respond to every kind of criticism; the charlatan artfully devises misdirections or just outright ignores the criticism. The hallmark of a charlatan is that when truly cornered he flounces out of the critical discourse at a key logical juncture, usually while accusing the critic of “trolling,” or “spreading misinformation,” or being “uncivil.”

“It does not require a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority keen to set brush fires in the minds of men.”

— Diane Ackerman paraphrasing Samuel Adams

“UNIVERSAL empire is the prerogative of a writer. His concerns are with all mankind, and though he cannot command their obedience, he can assign them their duty. The Republic of Letters is more ancient than monarchy, and of far higher character in the world than the vassal court of Britain; he that rebels against reason is a real rebel, but he that in defence of reason rebels against tyranny has a better title to ‘Defender of the Faith,’ than George the Third.”

— Thomas Paine

All I can do as a writer is to indicate the logic of our situation. Such logic is that our societies are becoming ever-more unhinged: they flout natural experience, logic, and human rights, and their reaction to being criticized is to punish. They are becoming the worst sort of bullies and are far along the path of ever-escalating tyranny. The reason why this is happening is that (1) the average person has little understanding of their own birthright, namely their own sovereign reason and consent, and (2) those who do understand are passive on fundamentals, they make no attempt to rally around these fundamental ideals, to collectively insist that these are the fundamentals and that governments must respect them.

Thus far, where alliance has been made, it has typically been on passive-aggressive and unprincipled grounds, namely where discourse about specific philosophical fundamentals is discouraged and banned. This is because “leaders” aim for a “big tent;” they don’t want to alienate potential donors by making bold, universal, and fundamental claims, however true those claims may be. Such “big tent” is de facto prostitution; an open invitation to fools, charlatans, sophists to corrupt the alleged ideals of these organizations. Such manner of activism hasn’t worked in the past, isn’t working now, and won’t work in the future.

America was founded with a firm philosophical backbone; it’s past time that we renew and enhance it. Virtually all of our institutions are opposed to this, and therefore so has been public opinion, which is how the Republic is lost. But we can see that in the ever more obvious failures of our institutions, that the public opinion has begun to shift toward finding new and better ways. This sort of trend seems destined to continue, and constitutes a large opportunity for proponents of principled reforms.

But a rebellion against one form of irrationality doesn’t per se constitute rationality, it may just be yet another form of irrationality. Only a mature, rational, philosophically-informed discipline can lead one to the truth. Can a disillusioned public opinion discover that truth? Until and unless it does, in the future lies only chaos and injustice.

It is an ironclad law of democracy, and perhaps even of the worst sorts of tyranny, that the government must sooner or later bend to public opinion. But what does public opinion bend to? There is a natural order of humanity wherein the opinions of few tend to influence or govern the opinions of many. In our society we call these thought-leaders “experts,” and of these there are the sincere kind and there are the charlatans. Until and unless the sincere experts rally behind this declaration or something like it in spirit, the chaos and injustice will continue. Herein lies our next problem.

With few exceptions (see below) REASON and LIBERTY and FOR INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS were conceived and written independently from the work of any other thinker. Most of the quotations used throughout my works were added retrospectively to the initial writing, and with an eye toward underscoring the beauty and power of two minds seeing the same things in two unique ways.

Ayn Rand was my first real philosophical influence. It was her vision of the possibility of a civilization governed by the right use of reason that had inspired my own thinking. In this respect she herself (as I later discovered) had been inspired by and was carrying forward the tradition of philosophers such as Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Hume, Aristotle, Plato, and Socrates. Where I agree with Rand’s epistemology, it is often the case that I am just agreeing with Aristotle – Rand had been the one that transmitted Aristotle to me. Where Rand has been philosophically original, I tend to disagree with her. Important areas of disagreement include her atavistic castigation of Hume’s epistemology, her unconsciously utilitarian metaethics, her particular theory of rights, and her incredibly negligent endorsement of patents. Generally I find that in the more abstract areas of her philosophy she is very careless, and unaware of critically relevant nuance.

As a young engineer in the mid-1990’s I had the desire to understand how great thinkers had originated their works and thus found myself reading portions of Issac Newton’s Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica. His Rules of Reasoning left deep impression on me and influences every part of my philosophy.

Newton also inspired David Hume (and many other rational humanists, including John Locke, who influenced the American Founders). I read Hume’s Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding near the start of my work on this book and, as indicated herein, it greatly influenced Induction in a synergistic way with Newton’s prior influence. Most of Hume’s interpreters have bungled their interpretations of his epistemology; if you think you know what Hume stood for but haven’t carefully read his Enquiry for yourself, then you probably don’t know the first thing about Hume[1].

After the 2nd edition of this book was published, I began reading Will Durant (leading to the two references to him in Metaphysics). Durant has influenced my general sense of history and institution as reflected in Obstructions, including introducing me to the value and relevance of Francis Bacon’s Novum Organum to our own era. Although I disagree with Durant’s belittling of epistemology, I am thoroughly impressed with Durant, both as a grand thinker and as a human being. It is an indictment of our public education system that most Americans do not know who he is. If you want to be greatly entertained, educated, and inspired, start with his The Story of Philosophy and Philosophy and the Social Problem.

• The first edition of this book was written 2012-2013 and published July 4th, 2013.
• The second edition was published August 2014, with a new first chapter, Metaphysics.
• The third edition was published November 2017, with a new last chapter, Obstructions. The first and second chapters were renamed, subtitles were added, and various other refinements were made throughout.
• The fourth edition was published October 2021, with a new last chapter, The Declaration of Moral Independence.