Imagine yourself a
lower-middle-class tradesman, married to a brutally
repressed catholic girl, living in a one-bedroom
apartment on the southwest side of chicago. Now,
imagine that you secretly hate your life, and that
your wife is teatering on the brink of a
psychological breakdown - but you are committed to
making your marriage work no matter what the cost,
because that's what good, hard-working people do,
and you are not a quitter. However, there's one
catch: you cannot ask for help. You MUST not ask
for help. For, to do so, would be to reveal
yourself as incompetent, ignorant - a failure....
That's where I come in.
I am the 40-year-old product of that
union, and the oldest of 5 sons altogether. I grew up in a
household where the solution to bed-wetting was a good,
hard ass-whooping, and the best way to deal with your
child's needs, was to teach him how to repress and deny
them, for your own convenience.
By the time I was 8, I had the
intellectual capacity to question my parents believe in the
insane doctrine of Catholicism, but as a result of the
brutality of my early childhood, I had the emotional life
of something less than even an infant. I was so dissociated
and so incapable of social connection by age 8, that the
public school system I had begun to attend had ruled me
intellectually retarded. Months of special testing proved
otherwise. But, predictably, and infuriatingly, no one
bothered to question the emotional state that had been the
source of the judgment in the first place.
Of course not. To do that, would have
been to question the very foundations of modern society. I
was pushing myself, unconsciously, to give the adults
around me exactly what I thought they wanted: my own
annihilation. I could not give them that in material fact,
so I gave it to them in psychological fact.
And, I continued to live in that
half-ghost, half-human state for the next 29 years; just
doing my "duty", and waiting for the day it would all end.
But, there was one thing that kept me from sinking
completely into the gray mass of rotting human psyches.
That something, was a single burning
ember in my heart. A faint glowing warmth. A weak and
waning, but unextinguishable flame of love for truth and
beauty. A belief in logic, and empiricism. A rabid
commitment to intellectual consistency. An unwillingness to
surrender my soul, in spite of having surrendered my
body.
Today, I am living proof that we can no
longer get away with the sin of obligating our children to
the task of redeeming us, before they even have a chance to
understand what it is they are being forced to do.
I don't have a wide array of impressive
credentials to offer, or much of a personal tale to tell.
I'm just an ordinary joe, from the ordinary masses of
ordinary people, who huddle their way to-and-from work
every day, suffering the same silent desperation my parents
suffered, fourty-plus years ago.
There is a difference between them and
I, however. I cannot - and will not - suffer in silence,
any longer. For once, and for all, I finally have a
consistent, rational, empirical philosophical framework
that I am confident justifies my commitment to absolute
freedom, absolute peace, and absolute justice.
No, I did not construct it myself. Parts
of it, yes. But significant portions of it, I have borrowed
wholesale from Stefan
Molyneux of Freedomain Radio. His
"Universally Preferable Behavior", in concert with modern
biological explanations of our moral sense (see Frans De
Waal's "Primates and Philosophers") have significantly
changed my view of ethics, psychology, family, and
society.
SO, here is an announcement.
August 27, 2008
August 26, 2008
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