03/23/08

A little about who I am

     In the pages in this section you will read some rather interesting things about what kind of person I am.  If you use Internet message boards you might appreciate the various profiles I've created. On Yahoo!; ghintp, tao_of_force, sim_u_la_crum, study_teach_wait, the_hero_with_a_thousand_faces, a_most_unlikely_hero, prot_on_earth  and on MSN ghintp.  Here is a brief list of the full time job titles I've held over the past 10 years.

"What can private persons do meanwhile? They can agitate, by pointing out the effects of modern war and the danger of the extinction of Man. They can teach men not to hate peoples other than their own, or to cause themselves to be hated. They can value, and cause others to value, what Man has achieved in art and science. They can emphasize the superiority of co-operation to competition."
- Bertrand Russell , Last Essay: "1967"  (1967 was the year I was conceived and born)

phleg-mat-ic  adj.
1. not easily excited to action or display of emotion; having a calm or apathetic temperament.

ag-i-ta-tor   n.
1. a person who stirs up others in favor of a political, social, or other cause or urges them to militant action.

"The classic temperament of an INTP is Promethean, or Phlegmatic, for whom a basic driving force is the search for competence or excellence."
- INTP, (c) Copyright 2000 Team Technology

"PROMETHEUS was the TITAN-god of forethought. He was given the task of creating mankind by Zeus. He felt great compassion for his creations and stole fire from heaven and cheated the gods in the apportionments of the sacrifice to aide them."
- Prometheus - Greek Mythology, the Theoi Project

The Thinker
“Their natural drive to turn theories into concrete understanding may turn into a feeling of personal responsibility to solve theoretical problems, and help society move towards a higher understanding.”
- Portrait of an INTP - (Introverted Thinking with Extraverted Intuition)

Tao - Matrix - Self

"The Tao is everywhere, the Matrix is your mind.  To see the Tao you must decode the Matrix, to decode the Matrix you must know yourself."
- Glen Hendler

What is the Objectivist View of Reality (Metaphysics)?
“Reality exists as an objective absolute—facts are facts, independent of man's feelings, wishes, hopes or fears.”
- Ayn Rand, "Introducing Objectivism" The Objectivist Newsletter Vol. 1 No. 8 August, 1962 p. 35

“We don't see things as they are, we see things as we are.”
- Anais Nin

 

Do you want to know what ‘it’ is?

The Matrix is everywhere.
It is all around us.
Even now in this very room.

You can see it when you look out your window or when you turn on your television.
You can ‘feel’ it, when you go to work, when you go to church, when you pay your taxes.

It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth.

- What truth?

That you are a slave Neo.
Like everyone else you were born into bondage.
Born into a prison that you can not smell or taste or touch.
A prison for (and that is) your mind.
- Morpheus, The Matrix

"Secrecy is the keystone of all tyranny. Not force, but secrecy ... [sic] censorship. When any government, or any church for that matter, undertakes to say to its subjects, 'This you may not read, this you must not see, this you are forbidden to know,' the end result is tyranny and oppression, no matter how holy the motives. Mighty little force is needed to control a man whose mind has been hoodwinked; contrariwise, no amount of force can control a free man, a man whose mind is free. No, not the rack, not fission bombs, not anything —you can't conquer a free man; the most you can do is kill him." [53]
- Robert Heinlein

propaganda: The Britannica Concise
“Manipulation of information to influence public opinion. The term comes from Congregatio de propaganda fide ("Congregation for Propagation of the Faith"), a missionary organization established by the pope in 1622. Propagandists emphasize the elements of information that support their position and deemphasize or exclude those that do not. Misleading statements and even lies may be used to create the desired effect in the public audience.”

Fascism: From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
…The most common feature of fascism cited in contrast to socialism is the fact that neither Hitler nor Mussolini nationalized their nations' industries. Some contend that this difference is also more cosmetic than actual, since both leaders used extreme regulation to control industry, while leaving them in the hands of their owners. Hitler commented on this difference in a letter to Herman Rauschning, where he wrote:

"Of what importance is all that, if I range men firmly within a discipline they cannot escape? Let them own land or factories as much as they please. The decisive factor is that the State, through the Party, is supreme over them regardless of whether they are owners or workers. All that is unessential; our socialism goes far deeper. It establishes a relationship of the individual to the State, the national community. Why need we trouble to socialize banks and factories? We socialize human beings."

It is also possible, since Fascism incorporates corporatism, that a Fascist regime may de-facto nationalize certain key industries, simply by maintaining close personal and/or business relationships with the corporations' owners.

“The Matrix is a system, Neo, and that system is our enemy. But when you are inside and look around, what do you see; businessmen, lawyers, teachers, carpenters. The minds of the very people we are trying to save. ...You have to understand, most of these people are not ready to be unplugged.  And many of them are so inured, so hopelessly dependent on the system that they will fight to protect it.”
- Morpheus, The Matrix

#TL12: HOW TO ACHIEVE EMOTIONAL CONTROL
By Mark Lindsay
“In The Dragons of Eden, after describing the characteristic behaviors of the reptile brain which I’ve just listed above, Carl Sagan says, "This seems to me to characterize a great deal of modern human bureaucratic and political behavior." Bureaucratic behavior is "controlled at its core" by the reptilian brain, hence we observe coercion and physical violence, territorial and jurisdictional claims, political rituals such as the presidential motorcade, and the social hierarchies for which bureaucratic organizations are notorious.”

“On corporations as "collectivist legal entities." - Noam Chomsky
“The term is not mine. It is taken from a standard work on legal history: Morton Horwitz, "Transformation of American Law" (2 volumes). Horwitz is a Harvard law professor, a (if not the) leading legal historian on these matters. He explains the reasons for the term, and also gives a detailed and interesting history of the relevant corporate law. That the intellectual backgrounds are neo-Hegelian (rather like those that underlie fascism and Bolshevism) is in my opinion quite true, one of the reasons why "progressives" tended to support the extraordinary legal decisions early in this century to grant corporations the rights of "immortal persons," and one of the reasons why genuine conservatives (classical liberals) -- a breed that has almost vanished -- were strongly opposed to this attack on natural rights principles and on markets (corporations are also a radical attack on markets). This is not a legacy of "individualism": it's a sharp attack against individualism, in particular, against the natural rights doctrine that rights inhere in persons -- by which classical liberals meant PERSONS, not collectivist legal entities."

TITLE 8 , CHAPTER 12 , SUBCHAPTER I , Sec_ 1101
(3) The term ''person'' means an individual or an organization.

This Act may be cited as the International Anti-Bribery Act of 1998.
(2) As used in this subsection, a "U.S. person" means a national of the United States (as defined in section 101 of the Immigration and Nationality Act (8 U.S.C. § 1101)) or any corporation, partnership, association, joint-stock company, business trust, unincorporated organization, or sole proprietorship organized under the laws of the United States or any State, territory, possession, or commonwealth of the United States, or any political subdivision thereof."

SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES
No. 91-594, [June 19, 1992]
The grant of corporate power to sue and be sued in no way implies a grant of federal court jurisdiction; it merely places the corporation on the same footing as a natural person, who must look elsewhere to establish grounds for getting his case into court.

"The economics that disregard moral and sentimental considerations are like wax works that being life-like still lack the life of the living flesh.  At every crucial moment these newfangled economic laws have broken down in practice.  And nations or individuals who accept them as guiding maxims must perish."
- Mohandas K. Ghandi

Corporation: From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
…Sometimes called a "fictional person" a corporation enjoys many of the rights and obligations of individual citizens such as the ability to own property, sign binding contracts , pay taxes, and otherwise participate in society. Typically a corporation is governed by a board of directors which has a fiduciary duty to look after the interests of the corporation.

Two of the most salient features of incorporation are (1)the reduction of the investors' personal liability for the corporation's actions, usually limited to the investment when the individual purchased the corporate stock and (2) the perpetuation of the assets and structure of the corporation beyond the lifetime of any of its shareholders, officers or directors.

"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free."
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“Political power means capacity to regulate national life thorough national representatives. If national life becomes so perfect as to become self-regulated, representation becomes unnecessary. There is then a state of enlightened anarchy. In such a state everyone is his own ruler. He rules himself in such a manner that he is never a hindrance to this neighbor. In the ideal state, therefore, there is no political power because there is no state. But the ideal is never fully realized in life. Hence the classical statement of Thoreau that the government is best which governs least.”
- Mohandas K. Ghandi

“The liberals and conservatives and Libertarians who lament totalitarianism are phonies and hypocrites. There is more freedom in any moderately deStalinized dictatorship than there is in the ordinary American workplace. You find the same sort of hierarchy and discipline in an office or factory as you do in a prison or a monastery. . .A worker is a part-time slave. The boss says when to show up, when to leave, and what to do in the meantime. He tells you how much work to do and how fast. He is free to carry his control to humiliating extremes, regulating, if he feels like it, the clothes you wear or how often you go to the bathroom. With a few exceptions he can fire you for any reason, or no reason. He has you spied on by snitches and supervisors, he amasses a dossier on every employee. Talking back is called 'insubordination,' just as if a worker is a naughty child, and it not only gets you fired, it disqualifies you for unemployment compensation. . .The demeaning system of domination I've described rules over half the waking hours of a majority of women and the vast majority of men for decades, for most of their lifespans. For certain purposes it's not too misleading to call our system democracy or capitalism or -- better still -- industrialism, but its real names are factory fascism and office oligarchy. Anybody who says these people are 'free' is lying or stupid.”
- Bob Black, The Abolition of Work

Why is Objectivism a System of Ideas?
“I am not primarily an advocate of capitalism, but of egoism; and I am not primarily an advocate of egoism, but of reason. If one recognizes the supremacy of reason and applies it consistently, all the rest follows.”
— Ayn Rand, "Introducing Objectivism" The Objectivist Newsletter Vol. 1 No. 8 August, 1962 p. 35

"The problem with Enron was not a lack of focus on shareholder value. The problem was a lack of real accountability to anything except share value. This contributed to a kind of mania, a detachment from reality. And it led to a culture of getting the numbers by any means necessary.

If maximum share price is an irresponsible management theory, and deregulation a flawed economic theory, there are better theories already at hand. It's intriguing that the movie "A Beautiful Mind" is up for Academy Awards during the Enron scandal -- because its protagonist, John Nash, won a Nobel Prize for proving Adam Smith's theory is incomplete. Self-interest alone can lead to disaster for all, Nash demonstrated mathematically. Self-interest coupled with concern for the good of the group is most likely to benefit everyone.

Nash's mathematics revolutionized "game theory" and is central to "evolutionary economics," which emphasizes that cooperation is as vital as competition. It's a more evolved theory than the invisible hand, more appropriate for an economy that has become more humane than that of Adam Smith's aristocratic world.

Viewed through the lens of Nash's theory, the Enron scandal should lead us to question our fundamental assumptions."
- Marjorie Kelly, February 24, 2002, Waving goodbye to the invisible hand: How the Enron mess grew and grew

What is Objectivism?
“My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.”
— Ayn Rand, Appendix to Atlas Shrugged

"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze new problems, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects."
- Excerpts from the Notebooks of Lazarus Long by Robert A. Heinlein in Time Enough For Love

"It is beneath human dignity to lose one's individuality and become a mere cog in the machine."

"Interdependence is and ought to be as much the ideal of man as self-sufficiency.  Man is a social being.  Without interrelation with society he cannot realize its oneness with the universe or suppress his egotism."
- Mohandas K. Ghandi

I've received a few requests to more clearly identify myself for the purpose of attribution and feedback.  I previously chose not to for a variety of reasons but have discovered that by making such information difficult to find people are unfortunately wasting time looking for it.  That was never my intention, and I recognize  proper attribution is important and necessary.
My name is Glen Andrew Hendler who can be reached at glen@timeenoughforlove.org.  As for dates, most of the content of this site went up October 2001 particularly the pages found in the Enlightenment, Physiology and Expression sections.  The PMET itself is dated.