August 31, 2002
Dear Reader,
The modern academic and cultural paradigm, primarily dominated by the political left, preaches a whole host of blathering rubbish about cultural “equality”. “No culture is superior to any other.” “No lifestyle is inherently better.” “The Westerners’ standard of quality is the result of their own arbitrary cultural premises.” The demagogues, dogmatists, indoctrinators, and simple humanitarians who have lost their way neglect to observe the evidence provided them by their eyes and their common sense.
What do we see all around us? Accomplishments of Western civilization, of the individual giants that had composed it during various periods. Realistic geometry, aesthetically exhilarating proportions, rhythmic and profound poetry, complex and absorbing prose, tomes of philosophy, economics, and political science have erected its foundation with a twofold purpose: to secure man’s life, and to enhance it. With their guidance, men of action, of innovation and creativity, have devised machinery from the textile mill to the refrigerator, from the automobile to the space shuttle, from the printing press to the internet, all lifting immense burdens from what would have been a sordid struggle for subsistence but now become an atmosphere of thriving, where every individual is able to adjust his actions to his peculiar capacities and attain rewards for success and punishment only for failure.
This is, alas, the world that the post-modernist paradigm, in control of the major institutions of “learning”, “media”, and “culture”, seeks to destroy. Why? Because the ideology at their base is a stagnant relic from eras Medieval and Primeval, when men fitting Ayn Rand’s model of an Attila held under a brutal leash their subordinates, expropriating them for a living, dwelling as parasites instead of producers. Such was the state that no portion of the world but the West had ever recovered from. By targeting the integrity of the one superior culture, they seek to equivocate it with the bloodbaths and quagmires of lifestyles that refuse to acknowledge the validity of its ideals. The parasite is merely the slothful man with a gun- or a club for that matter- in hand who refuses to work for a living but thrives on demolishing those who do and confiscating their goods. Whatever ideal it is in the name of which producers surrender the fruits of their labor, be it God, Society, or Nature, the genuine beneficiary is whoever can “represent” the “higher force”, a priest, a commissar, or a plain old witch doctor.
It is time that men of thought, true humanitarians due to their concern with the “human” element of the matter, embrace the values that Western Culture and the great men who had founded it have to offer, not for some “magnanimous” crusade which is above themselves in importance, but for themselves, for the self-evident benefits that the reinforcement of technology, rationality, and individual rights will have for every individual living on Earth. One of the key accomplishments of Western philosophy, attributable to a sage by the name of John Locke, was the conception that the interests of single persons and those of society are not mutually exclusive. Society as a concept denotes merely the individuals comprising it and the mechanisms utilized to preserve said individuals’ abilities to exist autonomously.
This, then, is the core purpose of “The Rational Argumentator”, a publication devoted to championing the values which made the West great, reason, rights, and progress. We are not bound by “politically correct” limitations and promise to reveal the truth whenever we can detect it and irrespective of whatever masks and veils have been accepted as “immutable principles of conduct” by the paradigm to conceal reality. Ayn Rand, one of the prime role models for the men of the Rational Argumentator and a philosopher whose works provide a valuable enhancement of our intellectual arsenal, had made it her explicit purpose to elucidate reality, to reveal to people the genuine conditions surrounding their lives as derived from her reasoning mind. This is the technique for altering people’s stereotypical conceptions and subconscious absorptions of devastating “norms” and “moral codes”. As we live in this world and no other, reality is the most powerful weapon a righteous man can have behind him if his goal is to flourish within it. To assist in that pursuit, we shall devote ourselves to defense of an objective metaphysics and the identification of its particular concepts. Although officially “The Rational Argumentator” is a non-profit organization, i.e. we do not expect monetary payment for our services, we are gaining ourselves (and you) the profit which makes all further profits possible, the mentality of Western civilization. Defeating the post-modernist paradigm and proliferating a firm moral base for logic and productivity is going to result in a golden age of human aspiration and accomplishment, which we all, interacting with the producers on their terms, will be able to reap the fruits of.
To comprehend reality man possesses the most potent tool in existence, a faculty which distinguishes him from the animals. According to Ayn Rand, this faculty is logic, the art of non-contradictory identification, the translation of which into reality-based action is dubbed reason. Reason applies the elements of this universe to man’s life within it, enabling such an alternation as to elevate his living standards to glorious peaks unimaginable to bloated, squalid, destitute primordial savages. Unlike the post-modernist vegetables, we do not consider man’s goal to be adaptation to his environment, but rather adaptation of his environment to his unique and absolutely valuable needs.
In the field of ethics, reality dictates the fundamental value to which each man should adhere, his own life and its betterment. The act of valuing in itself implies an entity that possesses free will and is able to consciously determine its purpose, i.e. it necessitates a living creature with a rational faculty, the only representative species of which is Homo sapiens. Thus, life is the standard of value, it is one’s ultimate means, and its betterment one’s ultimate goal. The good life is a life proper to a human being, not an animal form of subsistence and rote mechanical cycles of birth, breeding, and oblivion, but constant elevation, progress in the condition of the individual and opportunities available to him. It is this framework which permits the existence of individual rights, the most basic of which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and of which life is the primary for all the rest. A dead man cannot be free, and neither can he attempt to seek his satisfaction and pleasure (which are conditions existing to reinforce man’s aspirations for survival and prosperity and his enjoyment of this-worldly life). All science, art, philosophy, and literature must ultimately aim to better enhance man’s life here on Earth.
Translated to a political arena, these values imply our support for a system of laissez-faire capitalism, in which each man may produce what he deems fit for the amplification of his standing in reality and the accumulation of personal gain and profit, an ideal whose nobility cannot be challenged except in a decadent totalitarian inferno. Neither the government, nor the whims of the majority should be empowered to wantonly expropriate the producers and to abolish the vehicles which translate man’s knowledge of reality into the means of his sustenance, technology. Because man can only survive as man by adapting his environment to himself, he must reshape it using tools, and he must be permitted to create these tools in accordance with the prudent calculations performed by his independent mind. The primordial state of man is that of death at twenty, and a ruthless, inhospitable world to face beforehand. The evident divide between such wretchedness and the prosperity of today is attributable directly to the transformations brought about by ever-accumulating technology and indirectly by the philosophical discoveries which reinforced its value in people’s minds. Anything opposing the forward march of machinery is inherently immoral and suicidal.
“The Rational Argumentator” provides political and philosophical commentary to reinforce the above principles, as well as examples and studies of their historical manifestations. But we embrace miscellaneous means of expressing them as well, including poetry and short fiction. Frequently hypothetical situations and vivid, emotional terms are delightfully eloquent means of conveying a lesson to the reader. Ultimately, however, their applications must rest in this world and this life. Henceforth we reject the absurdity of “Art for Art’s Sake”, which had demolished Western humanitarian culture during the twentieth century and replaced it with a haphazard conglomeration of arbitrary hodge-podge.
We seek to revive the Western legacy in every aspect possibly applicable to an Internet publication, and we welcome contributions of articles and creative pieces from the outside by other industrious and profound thinkers. While we will not be able to pay you money, you will lose nothing by a mere submission, as you retain all rights to your work while receiving valuable intellectual feedback and a forum for logical expression that you deserve. Send your ideas to us at rationalargumentator@yahoo.com.
Let us collaborate to selfishly enhance our understanding of and capacity to defend the only lifestyle that empowers us as living beings! Let us prove once and for all to the post-modernist witch doctors just how un-arbitrary, absolute, and objectively superior our values are!
Sincerely,
G. Stolyarov II, Editor-in-Chief
Edmund Daleford, Vice-Editor-in-Chief
Post Scriptum, July 28, 2003:
It has been noted by a reader of The Rational Argumentator that Pi Sheng of China had invented the first printing press with movable type in 1040, an invention which Johannes Gutenberg, four centuries later in 1454, was oblivious to. The two printing presses developed independently of one another, but it was the Western variety that had influenced the world to a far ampler extent due to the burgeoning mentality of Renaissance individualism and its soon-to-follow corollary of capitalism, which had enabled a far wider variety of marketing and application opportunities via the presence of a crucial factor that Chinese inventors lacked, namely, freedom. Marketing was what the statist Chinese society had never performed well. Victor Hugo had described Chinese technology as a "fetus in a jar," not being able to develop commercially into a condition of mass use due to the bureacratic/literati elite's vehement prohibition and disdainful scorn of new "materialistic" inventions. This is a fruitful thought to ponder, as it demonstrates the essential link between the liberty of the producer, the openness of a society to innovation, and the rise in the standard of living of its denizens.