Do you like the world the way it is today?
Yes, without hesitation, without reservation, absolutely I can say that I love this earth and existence. I don’t have enough superlatives to describe it. Have you ever eaten a slice of apple pie or been present at the birth of your child. Have you ever climbed in the high mountains and seen a crystal clear lake and felt the cool wind on your face. Have you ever had sex with someone you love deeply? I love knowing that my mind is capable of understanding the world and there is so much to do and achieve and to see. There is such joy possible to us in this world that it is almost to much to take.
At the same time I do see the evil in the world and the utter depravity that man is capable of. I have known great joy and deep sadness. My wife and I lost our first child to a severe birth defect and I can say that that was the worst time in my life. But as Ayn Rand used to say the bad things only go down so deep. They don’t shake my view that this world is wonderful and life is so very, very precious. I don’t damn this Earth and existence as so many do. I do damn and despise the moral code that is responsible for all of the misery in the world and especially those who promote it and perpetuate it. If I could be granted the powers that are attributed to God for a day I would banish from this Earth and erase all memories of two ideas: unreason and the morality of sacrifice. I think I would give the rest of my life for a year in a world like that. Those two ideas are absolutely dominant in the world today and growing more so every day and we see the results. College kids come out of school with all these notions that they can’t really know anything and there is no black and white and who can really know what’s right and who am I to think and what’s true for one person is not true for another. I give you exhibit A: Occupy Wall street. We are all taught that to live for others is good and noble and to live for ourselves is evil. We learn from an early age that selfless sacrifice to others is our highest moral duty and that need gives a man a mortgage on the lives of others. We are taught that Human good requires someone to be sacrificed for the good of others and do you know that no one in the history of he world has ever justified these principles in reason.
I would live in a world where every man and woman was a sovereign individual with inalienable rights and no man practiced human sacrifice either of himself to others or of others to himself. I would like to live in a world where the initiation of force was absolutely abolished and men traded values instead of blows. I want a world where the government protects the individual rights of the people and does nothing more. I would have a complete separation of the state and economics. I worry about my children because I have seen the world slide so much toward barbed wire fences and guns that I don’t think we have much longer. There is still a chance to move in a different direction but it is closing up fast.