Universally Preferable Behavior

In many fairy tales, there lives a terrible beast of stupendous power, a dragon or a basilisk, which tyrannizes the surrounding lands.

The local villagers tremble before this monster; they sacrifice their animals, pay money and blood in the hopes of appeasing its murderous impulses.

Most people cower under the shadow of this beast, calling their fear “prudence,” but a few – drunk perhaps on courage or foolhardiness – decide to fight. Year after year, decade after decade, wave after wave of hopeful champions try to match their strength, virtue and cunning against this terrible tyrant.

Try – and fail.

The beast is always immortal, so the villagers cannot hope for time to rid them of their despot. The beast is never rational, and has no desire to trade, and so no negotiations are possible.
The desperate villagers’ only hope is for a man to appear who can defeat the beast.

Inevitably, a man steps forward who strikes everyone as utterly incongruous. He is a stable boy, a shoemaker’s son, a baker’s apprentice – or sometimes, just a vagabond.

This is the story of my personal assault on just such a beast.

This “beast” is the belief that it is impossible to define an objective, rational, secular and scientific ethical system. This “beast” is the illusion that morality must forever be lost in the irrational swamps of gods and governments, enforced for merely pragmatic reasons, but forever lacking logical justification and
clear definition. This “beast” is the fantasy that virtue, our greatest joy, our deepest happiness, must be cast aside by secular grown-ups, and left in the dust to be pawed at, paraded and exploited by politicians and priests – and parents. This “beast” is the superstition that, without the tirades of parents, the
bullying of gods or the guns of governments, we cannot be both rational and good.

This beast has brought down many great heroes, from Socrates to Plato to Augustine to Hume to Kant to Rand.

The cost to mankind has been enormous.

Since we have remained unable to define a rational system of universal morality, we have been forced to inflict religious horror stories on our children, or give guns, prisons and armies to a small monopoly of soulless controllers who call themselves “the state.”

Since what we call “ethics” remains subjective(so to speak) and merely cultural, we inevitably end up relying on bullying, fear and violence to enforce social rules. Since ethics lack the rational basis of the scientific method, “morality” remains mired in a tribal war of bloody mythologies, each gang fighting tooth and nail for control over people’s allegiance to “virtue.”

We cannot live without morality, but we cannot define morality objectively – thus we remain eternally condemned to empty lives of pompous hypocrisy, cynical dominance or pious slavery.

Intellectually, there are no higher stakes in the world. Our failure to define objective and rational moral rules has cost hundreds of millions of human lives, in the wars of religions and states.

In many ways, the stakes are getting even higher.

This “Beast” is an incorrigible hypocrite, eclectic and cynical, megalomaniacal and perpetually ‘immortal’.

This “Beast” controls the incomings and outgoings of each of our orifices, and would take in the delight of watching you grovel across the field like a fallen, pathetic pawn.

This “Beast” is exactly like the God of Abraham; who will undisputedly send his opposition into endless torment and suffering for all forsaken eternity, but!

--He loves you…

Surely, it is only from the minds of the primitive, and obscure minds of our ancestors to be able to have cooked such a story up such as religion, which is one of the main control devices of this “Beast”.

It is the ecumenical deform and de-humanization of the municipal bonding.

This realization has given birth to a new generation of nihilists, just as it did in 19th century Germany. These extreme relativists reserve their most vitriolic attacks for anyone who claims any form of certainty. This postmodern generation has outgrown the cultural bigotries of their collective histories, but now view all truth as mere prejudicial assertion. Like wide-eyed children who have been scarred
into cynical “wisdom,” they view all communication as advertising, all claims as propaganda, and all moral exhortations as hypocritical thievery. Since we have no agreement on a cohesive, objective and rational framework for evaluating moral propositions, “morality” remains mired in mysticism, and its inevitable corollary of violence. Just as, prior to the Enlightenment, religious sects warred endlessly for control over the blades of the aristocracy, so now do competing moral mythologies war for control over the state, and all its machinery of coercion.

Thus morality remains, relative to modern science, just as medieval “astronomy” did to modern astronomy – a realm of imaginary mythology, enforced through storytelling, threats, compulsion and exploitation – which actively bars any real progress towards the truth.

So certainty, people, is an illusion, definition, is an illusion, you, this “Beast” and I are purely worthless creatures eating our way into a general form of ‘greatness’ and ‘admiration’, and 'power’.